Fevers Are Magic

Posted on by David Wright

One aspect of fever I harp on year after year and where I am continually ignored is the importance of not treating a fever. It is estimated that the fever response is 400 million years old. How do they know that? Got me. Most molecular techniques are “sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable” from magic; all I know is that they were not measuring core body in T. rex. Every creature that can make a fever will make a fever when infected. All branches of the immune system function better at 102 than 98.2 (yes, 98.2), but in the calorie poor environment most creatures live in, if we maintained our core temp at 102 we would all starve to death. It is also quite remarkable how many potential pathogens cannot grow at 98.2, much less 102. Being above ambient temperature protects against thousands of molds and bacteria.

That’s SBM. The post is actually concerned with breathing, another automatic impulse, and one that has attracted crackpots looking to fail the tests of crackpot science.

Hearing Footsteps

Posted on by David Wright

The Economist pooh pooh’d Microsoft’s latest splash in tablet computing:

One reason why the iPad has been so successful is that it blends beautiful hardware with an amazing range of software. Microsoft has attractive assets, in particular Skype (an internet calling service), its alliance with Barnes & Noble (a big online bookseller) and its Xbox ecosystem. Yet other than the firm’s Office suite of productivity tools, none of these was shown at this week’s launch. “Microsoft has missed an opportunity to highlight things that can inspire people,” says Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, a research firm.

Ok, let’s dial down the ‘new and shiny’ fetish for a sec. Microsoft Office is THE reason the company remains relevant today. The fact that a tablet computer is coming out with the potential for seamless support of Excel and Word and Outlook is most definitely an iPad-maiming development.

People make money using “productivity software”. They don’t make money playing games and messing around on social networks. And the bottom line of business is you get rich by helping people get rich*. Those who wish to clone Apple and Facebook ignore this point.

If the MS tablet is 50% as good as the iPad at everything else, I’ll buy it. Hell, the blackberry is 10% as good as the iPhone at everything other than email (at which it is 100% better) and because I vote with my wallet, RIM can easily ignore my distant envious whine as they self-destruct.

*I feel like I should clarify that there’s absolutely no denying that dominance of the consumer segment is incredibly lucrative for Apple. So let’s either call that an exception to my little pet rule or admit that I simply don’t know what I’m talking about.

Suckered Again by Great Writing

Posted on by David Wright

I am a fan of neither the NBA nor of movies, really.

But when I read Roger Ebert I want to watch movies:

Tom Russell was a 10-year-old Adelaide schoolboy when he made “Last Ride,” his feature film debut. I have run out of words to account for young actors. Untrained, they seem able to reach an instinctive core of natural truth. Russell is in almost every scene, as authoritative as the adult actors. They say in a film or a story that you must focus on the characters who change, and in “Last Ride,” all of Kev’s changes are behind him, but Chook is arriving at his young life’s turning point.

For director Glendyn Ivin, this is also a debut feature, although he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for a short subject. Remarkable, how he begins with materials that could have given themselves so easily to a road movie formula, and finds such truth and beauty. He knows so surely where he’s going that he arrives at a perfect final shot, that tells us what we need to know about Chook.

And when I read Bill Simmons I want to watch basketball:

You know what saddens me? The funniest clip on YouTube is no longer funny. Yep, you can finally rest in peace, “The Heat Welcome Party” video. Thanks for giving us two sterling years atop the Internet comedy rankings. We’re replacing you with a bullpen by committee of old reliables like “I Like Turtles,” “Charlie Bit Me,” the “It’s Still Real to Me, Dammit” guy, Journey’s immortal “Separate Ways” video and even the “I Like Turtles” techno remix. You will be buried officially during Monday’s championship parade in Miami. We will bury you not once, not twice, not three times … just kidding, we’re only burying you once.

Let’s hope you don’t resurface as something else — something scarier, something more ominous, something on the level of Namath guaranteeing Super Bowl III or Ali promising to defeat Liston. See, the ceiling of “The Heat Welcome Party” slowly changed during the last two games of the 2012 Finals. It’s no longer about hubris or a suffocating lack of self-awareness. It might be more of an omen, a warning, a little like the Game of Thrones characters seeing a red comet streak across the sky and saying, Uh-oh, dragons are coming. I mention this only because, like every other non-Miami fan who attended the last two home games, I left that arena muttering to myself, “Shit … he finally figured it out.”

But whenever these great writers sucker me into their subjects, I am disappointed. I don’t have the patience to care about great movies and I don’t have whatever it takes to care about great basketball.

Luckily I don’t need to care for their subjects. Great writing stands on its own.

5-Hour Energy Debunked, Sorta

Posted on by David Wright

According to the label, its ingredients are:

  • Niacin 30 mg — 150% of the RDA
  • Vitamin B6 40 mg — 2000% of the RDA
  • Folic acid 400 mg — 100% of the RDA
  • Vitamin B12  500 mcg — 8333% of the RDA
  • Energy blend: taurine, glucuronic acid, malic acid, N-acetyl L tyrosine, L-phenylalanine, caffeine, and citicoline. Total amount of blend: 1870 mg. The caffeine content is not specified on the label, but it is supposedly comparable to a cup of the leading premium coffee.

It contains only 4 calories, with no sugar.

and later:

How Did They Choose This Mixture of Ingredients?

I asked the company that question and did not get a response. There doesn’t seem to be any rationale for anything but the caffeine, and certainly no rationale for the specific amounts of each ingredient.

More here. The conclusion? No better than a cup of coffee.

Now THAT’s Genius

Posted on by David Wright

In the five years since the iPhone launched, Apple created a total of 35,852 retail jobs.

Some of those jobs came from new store openings. The total store count went from 172 to 361, more than doubling. But the growth in employment was faster: from about 6400 to 42,200, more than quintupling. This is reflected in the total number of employees per store which increased from 37 in Q1 2007 to 117 in Q1 2012.

Apple has removed shelving, registers and almost all non-Apple merchandise. It has replaced the visible stock with tables on which rest products that can be used. If there weren’t any people in the store, the store would look almost completely empty, just an open space.

But that’s the whole point. The stores are designed to be filled with people. The stores have an open layout because it allows more people to be inside the store at the same time. And the more people the more employees.

Lots of good graphs at the link. The ability to drive foot traffic in Apple’s stores is no doubt related to their enormously popular products, but it is true that their stores always LOOK packed. Because they are. With customers and employees. Who are not on commission, by the way.

Indeed, the sheer number of employees in a store of modest size (117 employees on an average of about 8k sq. ft.) implies a brazen disregard for the economic orthodoxy of retail efficiency and incentives to sell.

Hype and branding. It’s a marvellously integrated offering, the Apple brand. THAT is evidence of the Steve Jobs genius.

Links

Posted on by David Wright

1. Reddit on money.

2. Big data in the NBA:

The technology was originally developed to track missiles. Now, SportVU systems hang from the catwalks of 10 NBA arenas, tiny webcams that silently track each player as they shoot, pass, and run across the court, recording each and every move 25 times a second. SportVU can tell you not just Kevin Durant’s shooting average, but his shooting average after dribbling one vs. two times, or his shooting average with a defender three feet away vs. five feet away. SportVU can actually consider both factors at once, plus take into account who passed him the ball, how many minutes he’d been on the court, and how many miles he’d run that game already.

A business-idea thought experiment I like to play is: in what ways could you generate an extraordinary amount of data from your daily life? Tracking your movements? Social interactions? Brain activity? Here’s a related earlier post.

3. The economy remains weak, but one millstone is lightening up:

In a reversal of fortune, the only recent good news has been from the housing sector. Housing starts were down slightly in May, but that was because of the volatile multi-family sector. The details were better: single family starts were up, revisions to previous reports were up, and permits were up sharply.

The headline number for existing home sales was a little weak, but the key number – inventory – was down in May, and down over 20% from May 2011. However away from housing, the economic data was very weak.

On the fork:

the time of Henry III, fork-owners would have been well-off, and most of them would have had one set of cutlery that traveled with them; there are numerous examples of forks and knives housed in carrying cases that could be slung over a shoulder or around a waist. It wasn’t until the late 1600s and early 1700s that people began to purchase multiple sets of silverware for their homes, which were just beginning to be equipped with rooms specifically set aside for dining. It was also around this time that forks with three and then four tines were made. Even as the fork gained ground, it was not universally accepted.

Expect Risk Management To Fail

Posted on by David Wright

Twitter went down today and here’s an insightful comment on HN:

I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly.
I’m fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren’t told “We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down.” Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn’t really understand the risk.

Just like the recent outages of Heroku and EC2, and just like the financial crisis of 2008 which was laughably called a “16-sigma event”, it seems pretty clear that the actual assessment of risk is pretty poor. The way that Heroku failed, where invalid data in a stream caused failure, and the way that EC2 failed, where a single misconfigured device caused widespread failure, just shows that the entire area of risk management is still in its infancy. My employer went down globally for an entire day because of an electrical grid problem, and the diesel generators didn’t failover properly, because of a misconfiguration.

You would think after decades that there would be a better analysis and higher-quality “best practices”, but it still appears to be rather immature at this stage. Is this because the assessment of risk at a company is left to people that don’t understand risk, and that there is an opportunity for “consultants” who understand this, kind of like security consultants?

The problem, of course, is that risk management will forever be in its infancy relative to risk-generating processes. That’s because the things that cause risk are where the money is made.

Arnold Kling has a nice way of summarizing a more enlightened approach to risk management: “make things easier to fix rather than harder to break”.  Nassim Taleb would phrase the downside to making things harder to break as ‘fragility’.

Consider nuclear technology: fantastic if the risks are managed properly. But the downside to a problem is just so immense it may be the case that there is NO SUCH THING as an adequate safety system.

Remember what happened at Chernobyl, where the big accident happened during a rather benign systems test.

To get accurate results from the test, the operators turned off several of the safety systems, which turned out to be a disastrous decision.

They deliberately turned the systems off. Model that!

Spammers Fish For Idiots

Posted on by David Wright

In Slate via MR:

Most of us know the signs: stilted English, “Dear Sir/Madam,” a particular fondness for exclamation points. The occasional spam email that does make it past inbox filters seems transparently fake. And new findings by a Microsoft researcher suggest that’s exactly the point.

The researcher, Cormac Herley, looked into so-called “Nigerian scams,” named for the African nation where the scammers often claim to reside. The emails typically seek a cash investment and promise a lofty payoff, often linking themselves to off-shore corporations or royalty. Herley’s math-rich analysis found that the obvious spam clichés are a deliberate attempt to weed out potential victims who are too savvy to fall for the scheme—and in turn make the most of the human capital required to secure funds from the people who are duped.

“Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is to get those who possess this quality to self-identify,” Herley writes, and the scheme ingeniously lines up the most gullible recipients in one swoop. Those who are left “represent a tiny subset of the overall population” but nevertheless a lucrative one for the spammers.

This also explains the apparent overabundance of the emails from Nigeria, since the country is so widely associated with Web scams. Though some of the first such schemes originated there in the 1980s during a period of high unemployment for well-educated young professionals, most launch elsewhere today, including the United States.

Far from the usual spam indictment, Herley’s study suggests applying the spammers’ logic in a larger context. Read it in full here.

Kids These Days (?)

Posted on by David Wright

Tyler Cowen sends us to this very interesting post by Steve Postrel on higher education:

My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education.

Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much.

Postrel offers up four links to support the decline in rigor at all levels of education. Given that the entire argument rests on this point, we should follow those links:

1. Dumbing Down High School English. Opens up with this quote:

A recent ALSCW ( Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers) study finds that

a fragmented English curriculum and a neglect of close reading may explain why the reading skills of American high school students have shown little or no improvement in several decades despite substantial increases in funds for elementary and secondary education by federal and state governments.

After that it’s all hand waving. Disappointing because Postrel is worried about the LEVEL of education and this link despairs over the rate of positive change. Not relevant.

2. Link to this book. I haven’t read it. In this review, they say the book refers to one study in particular (pdf here) with this abstract:

Using multiple datasets from four different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2004. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2004 they were investing about 26 to 28 hours per week.

Students spend less time studying. I believe that.

But one thing the study does not control for is major type. Are engineers less well educated than in the past? I sincerely doubt that. Cowen may not find answers to declines in productivity improvements in this line of inquiry.

3. The Math Wars. Short version: the quality of math instruction in high schools has declined. I suppose I buy that. But I don’t envy my grandparents’ math instruction. I am sympathetic to reformers here.

4. On MBAs. Here’s a relevant quote on the author’s memory of his MBA student days and what he thinks has happened:

So, we read 30-40 academic journal articles per class. We became capable of digesting their content and, thereby, able to access new ideas 10-20 years ahead of widespread practice. We traced the trajectories of core research streams and, thus, came to recognize that subtle thinking is required of complex issues. We jammed into Merton Miller’s class, not because he was entertaining or capable of summarizing complex ideas into exquisite 10-bullet lists, but because everyone knew he was a genius and felt damn lucky to sit in his presence and glimpse into his thinking about finance. Excerpts from books by Tom Peters and other management “gurus” were not viewed as examples of special wisdom but, more accurately, of sloppy, shallow, unsubstantiated pap. That was a bad-ass education — one that served us well throughout our careers, not just in our next jobs.

What happened? Well, Business Week rankings coupled with the “Northwestern Innovation.” BW rated schools on: (1) student satisfaction, (2) recruiter assessment, and (3) research ranking. Northwestern, which was not a contender back then, realized that moving (2) or (3) could only happen veeery slooowly. Item (1), on the other hand, well, that could be manipulated almost instantaneously. And thus began the race to the bottom of the toilet. As far as I can tell, anything approaching the education I got has long since been abandoned.

More hand-waving, mostly, but I accept his premise. I’d point out a few things:

  • Chicago is a special place. Not every school has super-duper-star instructors and highly motivated students.
  • MBA programs are a ridiculously easy target for this kind of argument. I happen to think quite a lot of management ‘theory’ is complete garbage. Economics can be nearly as bad. Rigor in these subjects can often obscure learning outcomes. Let stories be told where stories must be told.

I find the idea that bad high school quality drives the increase in the college premium persuasive. I’m more sympathetic in respect of math than other subjects, though we must remain ever vigilant against cognitive bias. Complaining about the “kids these days” is usually total crap.