Presenting numbers

According to an article in Journal of Extension numbers are understood differently based on how they are presented. Apparently percentages or simple frequencies (1 out of 10) are more intuitively understood than a large absolute frequency (or number like 5 million each year) even though the information is the same. For indicating a small thing an absolute frequency will appear greater in magnitude. Hence an absolute frequency may appear more persuasive.

Personally i prefer using graphs which can convey both kind of information at the same time, as long as the graphs does not get too crowded or too simplistic.

Benefits from ignorance

There seems to be more to the saying "No news is good news" than one would first imagine. In a recent paper titled "Influence through ignorance" two researchers named Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo suggest that peoples decisions can be influenced simply by controlling the availability of further information. When no new information becomes available current views will hold, even though absence of recent information should signal caution. The decision maker wishing to influence (or sales man?) can then, when he has the suitable data to verify his view, simply stop investigations generating more data. If generating the data is expensive, complex or in some other way highly regulated, the chances are good that the decision maker/sales man will get away with it.

I guess this can also help explain some reasons why some poorly suitable IT systems are obtained by customers. Since NDA:s (non disclosure agreements) ensure that information is not freely passed on to the public only the message from the vendor is publicly available, and it is most certainly not in the vendors own interest to make negative information available for potential customers. On the buyer side all information can be argued to be valuable, since it gives the rational buyer more sound picture of the product to base the decision on. Some buyers will choose to disregard all information and just go for the decision, like a predator attacking a prey, but nothing can help them. We others can perhaps better try to estimate what the "silence" or "no news" being given us means with this model in mind.

Quantum computing

In the recent issue of Scientific American Scott Aaronson has an article presenting the features of quantum computers. It turns out that although there are certain things that such a computer would be able to do very efficiently it will not be able to solve all NP or NP Complete problems.

Factoring large numbers is however something a quantum computer could do efficiently. The author believes that this will be primarily application of quantum computers will be in physics for making more precise calculations of quantum states. Hope he is right, but i fear that the big monetary rewards for cracking cryptographic secrets used in e-commerce and banking may well be the target in the long run. Once a commercial quantum computer device would reach the market it could render current cryptographically secured data open.

I might be too pessimistic. I remember discussing this with a colleague involved with banking systems at a conference just after reading the paper by Peter Shor around year 2000. My colleague did not think that it posed any real threat although I'm not fully convinced that he ever understood the implications. I would however hope that my e-commerce transactions are kept safe in the future also no matter what devices become available.

Aquiring knowledge outside the box

For many people it seems to be difficult to pay attention to information that is not matching their existing beliefs. Even if you are able to search for anything and find an abundance of correct information on the internet you may simply choose to ignore what is not according to your view.

Researchers from University of New South Wales have found that providing people with the right information on its own does not seem to be enough. As one of the researchers, UNSW Professor Enrico Coiera states: “Even if people read the right material, they are stubborn to changing their views." The study was conducted in the area of health, but i would agree that this is true in most disciplines, especially in IT.

In order to avoid being stubborn we need to constantly question our beliefs, and keep an open mind towards new ideas, but evaluate them in a skeptic way. The real difficult part is however to be able to know what to look for if your beliefs and world view is biased. Only remedy i can think of is to obtain and interact with information from very many disciplines and views, even if the information is of no apparent use, and this way at least become biased in very many ways.

Lerning by imitation

Children seem to learn by imitation according to an article by Derek Lyons et al in PNAS. I would go further and say "So do I", a lot.

When imitating he argues that children cant tell which actions are necessary and which actions are irrelevant to achieving the goal, easily resulting in something he calls overimitation. Seems like there is no skeptic filter screening actions being imitated, although children would otherwise be able to identify irrelevant steps as silly.

I guess this occur a lot in IT (among other disciplines) as well. Part of what is done has no real relevance to the problem at hand. The procedures just happen that way as a result of accidents being replicated and accidentally frozen behavior, just because someone happened to originally do it that way. Somebody may finally realize that some parts of procedures are not bringing any value and improve, but that seems to take ages.

Working from home

According to an article in Journal of Applied Psychology it is beneficial both for individuals and companies to arrange for telecommuting.

As a occasional telecommuter i agree that being able to work from home once in a while has positive effects for my personal well being and probably also for my employer.

The authors conclude with the statement that:

there is a downside of higher intensity
telecommuting in that it does seem to send
coworker (but not supervisor) relationships
in a harmful direction. Some of the
complexities of these consequences have
yet to be explored, but the evidence and
theory reviewed here suggest that they can
be managed effectively through informed human
resources policies.

Certain software development methodologies (like XP) rely on close interaction with both colleagues and customers. If you are supposed to do pair programming it will not work if the other person is working from home. Perhaps in the future someone will figure out a tool with which pair programming will be possible over distance, who knows.

A practical way would be to ensure that people still meet often enough for the necessary exchange and feedback too occur and adopt for example some instant messaging tools, although a tool can not replace the real thing.

The study does not directly compare what type of work you do and what kind of feedback mechanisms there are in the workplace or what tools you have access to. I would however guess that as long as the feedback keeps coming it is possible to be as efficient from home as anyone in the office.

Useless policies

Some laws, regulations or policies can be very well motivated or self evident, but others are more difficult to motivate. The policy may for example be a legacy from an earlier era or issue that has ceased to exist. Other are just based on wrong assumptions from the start, perhaps invented to locally optimize some aspect in the organization at the cost of the whole. Bad policies can also be the result of corruption or ignorance.

But what happens to policies that is not current any more in your organization? Typically it seems like they at some point stop being enforced. A policy that is not being enforced is kind of useless. I would further more say that it is even more damaging to society or the organization at large, since it can undermine the trust between individuals in the organization. "If one person can break that policy why can't i, break some other policy?" seems to be the reasoning...

The efficient way of dealing with bad policies would be to just admit that the policy and the policy maker was wrong. In society bad laws are replaced by newer laws eventually, but within an organization it may not be possible to have that kind of overhead. Motivation for the policies should in stead be made clear so that spotting wrong assumptions is possible and enabling corruption to be ruled out as the primary reason for the policy. I wonder if this could actually happen in IT...