Entries by Alan Patrick

....is that they do things like this - Grauniad:

Facebook has deleted a post by the Norwegian prime minister in an escalating row over the website’s decision to remove content featuring the Pulitzer-prize winning “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam war.

Erna Solberg, the Conservative prime minister, called on Facebook to “review its editing policy” after it deleted her post voicing support for a Norwegian newspaper that had fallen foul of the social media giant’s guidelines.

Solberg was one of a string of Norwegian politicians who shared the iconic image after Facebook deleted a post from Tom Egeland, a writer who had included the Nick Ut picture as one of seven photographs he said had “changed the history of warfare”.

They also banned the poster of the photo when he complained. The photograph was the one above. You may remember it as iconic of the Vietnam era, and it turned opinion against the war globally. Problem is the Facbook algorithms don't like it, nor did the algorithm's handlers as:

"it is difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others".

Anyway, after fairly worldwide complaint, criticism and derision, they have reinstated that single photograph because even though its usually considered nakedness and child porn etc, in this case "the value of the photograph outweighs the value of protecting the community".

There is a certain irony in that, probably completeley missed by the Facebook PR team. But it points to the underlying problem, I suspect, that due to a combination of age, education (all tech) and arrogance (who needs to know anything except tech) a large number of Facebook employees* didn't (still don't?) have a clue about why it is important.

The limitation of curation-by-algorithms has been cruelly exposed in all its over-simplicity.

The scary thing is that Facebook is now the world's largest de facto publisher, and the most profitable. If this (and their propensity for political censorship) is the future, it will truly Change the World - but probably not in a good way.

I feel it is almost the responsibilty of the Rest of Humanity to start bombarding Facebook with images and stories that upset their algorithms but are important. Starting with Renoir.....

* Evens money on "the intern is to blame" tomorrow, anyone?

From the Deflating Bubbletime Dept:

A few days ago I read the takedown of Gartner's view on Robotics in Horses for Sources, essentially it was a fisk of Gartner's current trendency to make fairly lurid predictions about our Digital Future - they have predicted that by 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by "robo-bosses" and that one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025, for example.

It's not just Robotics - reading their thoughts on the Top 10 Technologies Driving the Digital Workplace my initial thought was it was a well needed piss-take on the current Digital Everything trope (see the diagram above) but reading the article I realised they were deadly serious. I'm not going to summarise it here, the link above goes to the article if you are interested. Our view is that the actual technologies of the Digital Workplace will look like the diagram above, rather than their dreams of Office Automation 1.0, for quite some time.

No, the real question I'm asking is similar to the one the article on the robotic analysis asked:

So why, pray tell, is Gartner, a respected voice in IT research, continually pounding us with continual scaremongering that we're all doomed to the will of the robot

Similarly, why are there such clearly overblown claims for "Office Automation". What's going on here? These guys are supposed to be analysts, not boosters - Gartner invented the darn Hype Curve, but now they are seemingly invested in filling it up!

To an extent there is a geneal trend in "rspected" media these days to become more clickbaity - I've noted even such august organs such as the Graniad and Economist are much more prone to this these days, and the "Top 10" Listicle style here is another signal. Does this mean the assumption is no one reads real research unless it's lurid - as one of the comments in the Horses article suggested - imply that:

"...a good spew-filled headline gets more attention than would most good market research with a set of pragmatic findings"

Or is it something else...

"Perhaps they are spewing off someone else's agenda? #followthemoney"

This second point also links up with something else - from about thetime of the O'Reilly "NextEconomy" conference onwards, I do get the impression the "analyst" and other boosting media of the Tech World has been ordered to get out and push the product as the bubbletime starts to deflate.

The valuation of many Unicorns, current and desired, and all that ride on them may depend on it....

Yet another attempt at algorythmic curation of news has failed...Facebook's plans are going back to the drawing board after just a weekend:

Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian’s four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich.

That escalated quickly, as they say...not surprised, by the way - judging newsworthiness by what the hoi polloi read is a very risky path to go down. What Humanity is interested in vs what is "News" is a wide chasm.

The automation of curation has been an online dream for at least a decade (we were first asked to work on it in 2007), and has so far failed every time "industrial grade" output is required. But this makes it clear that AIs are still some way from having the smarts to deal with patterm sorting of memes, especially delibeately false and mischievous ones.

The holy grail is getting rid of all the human cost of curation and editing of content, and in other efforts, the human costs of writing it too (for when people stop creating content for no money, maybe?) so that these companies can "Scale" (ie everything is automatable). It's interesting that Facebook initially tried to pretend that it had an algorithm trend finder and was somewhat embarassed when it was revealed that they did in fact need human curation.

If they do get AI curation to "work", then the one prediction I would make is that if the majority of content is machine made from conception to curation, these creators may well find it is also only read by machines Or programmed people.

Apparently Tesla is ging to do Solar Roofs as well as Cars:

"Tesla has finalized a $2.6bn deal to buy solar power company SolarCity to produce solar “shingles” – photovoltaic material that would be fashioned into the shape of a house roof."

Elon Musk was quoted as saying:

“I think this is really a fundamental part of achieving differentiated product strategy, where you have a beautiful roof,” Musk said. “It’s not a thing on the roof. It is the roof.”

When I started my consulting career there was a very smart Partner I worked with, and he told me when we first went into a company he looked for 3 signs of about-to-fail businesses, and these were:

- Head Office interiors that had started to look like palaces, he thought it was a sign they were no longer "lean and hungry" and were starting to ossify*
- CEO is only partly invlved in the business (and more -ve points if CEO is a Media "personality")
- "Extreme" jumps in product mix, far away from "the knitting", as losing focus usually does not end well but it was also a sign that any or all of the following applied (i) they are desperate (ii) the CEO has lost control (pacifying powerful barons) or (iii) the CEO is not under control and is building follies - and none of these are not good news

By these measures, Tesla is hitting 2 out of 3 already (I have no idea of their head office palacification) so I know he would be going "Hmmmm...." on this news.

But, while I've always kept his rules in mind, I have found there are some stunning exceptions to these rules that have succeeded - (Apple, Virgin, Nokia for example) - and studying them in depth as to how they do it is fascinating. There seems to be an underlying logic stream to what these companies do and how they do it. Apple enters high potential market segments still saddled with badly integrated and poor UX products and uses its brand to find new customers. Virgin transfers a "cool" brand promise to a previously dowdy and boring consumer segments and makes services more customer friendly. Both have/had extraordinary leaders. Nokia went from tyres to mobile masts to mobiles, so anything is possible, but they have failed at the at the "incredible leader" game for the "next hop" (ditto Apple..?).

So, one possibility is this is F*cked Company time as the Leader jumps from one gambit to another. But arguably, Tesla has an "incredible leader", so what may be a possible underlying logic train here?

As best we can see, it could run something like this - electric cars need a ubiquitous charging infrastructure covering their routes, and that needs to be as cheap to roll out as possible. For people to buy lots of Tesla electric cars a fair portion of this infrastructure needs to exist before they buy them. So how to do that? How about ubiquitous solar roofs that can easily be integrated into a roof-to-charger system (think Fon for car-charging). It's the closest to physical-world game to the internet "increasing returns" one. Even better if its unique to that car company so others can't even use the river without your say so, so how about it being owned by the Car company. And borrowing large wads of money for infrastructure plays has never been cheaper. In essence its a logistics toll play, aka "Castles on the Rhine" - you build your castles first, you get to extract tolls on everyone else or prevent their passage, you win.

Supporting this argument, Tesla is also big time into batteries and has built/bought a factory for them - electric cars need better ones to replace IC cars in all but relativley slow, short duration and low weight tasks right now - but car charging infrastructures using renewable energy also need lots of better batteries so at a stroke there is another huge new market for your batteriees, and they will buy your batteries because you own the roof-to-charger Castle.

The ony problem with building Castles an the Rhine, and building the boats to go on them is that its a very costly thing to do one of these, never mind both, and lots of others will try and do it too. And despite a CEO-as-business-savant, the "F*cked Co" probability ticklist is mounting, so it's going to be an "interesting" one to watch.

In fact, given how hard this two-industry strategy would be to execute, and how costly cars are to make (and that all the major car makers will be in on this game soon), and that Rhine castle owners never really needed to build ships, you do wonder if Tesla should drop cars and do charging infrastructure....plus there is an added benefit - charging stations don't crash and kill people, avoids all that awful bad publicity....

(*Incidentally, one of the things that has interested me over the last 2 decades or so is how much more palatial so many companies' Head Offices have become so if my old Partner was right, there are a lot of ossified businesses out there)

Those who have been reading the articles here on the Internet of Things will know that, while we believe the potential is huge, the opportunity for snooping and surveillance is also huge, as is the risk of hacking owing to commercial pressures driving bypasses of good security implementation.

Now, we believe we have found the poster-boy (as it were) for this trend - a personal vibrator that phones home whenever it is used, and that has now been hacked - Grauniad:

Two years ago, someone had the good idea to put a bluetooth connection inside a vibrator, and the We-Vibe 4 Plus was born. The vibrator can connect with a smartphone app that its makers say “allows couples to keep their flame ignited – together or apart”: that is, it can be controlled remotely, while, say, making a video call.

But at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, two independent hackers from New Zealand, who go by the handles goldfisk and follower, revealed that the way the vibrator speaks with its controlling app isn’t really secure at all – making it possible to remotely seize control of the vibrator and activate it at will.

To no great surprise.....how was this not predictable? And surely it doesn't need to phone home either, but it does....

The app sends the temperature of the device back to Standard Innovation every minute, and every time the intensity of the vibration changes, that gets sent back too.

Between those two data points, it’s fairly easy to work out when and how often someone is using the vibrator. “What are the implications of who they’re going to give that data to,” asked goldfisk. “In their privacy policy, they say ‘we reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information if required to by law’, but what does that actually mean?”

Apparently this recording of your comings and goings* is only for "market research" purposes (One wonders if they researched the reaction of people to know that their most intimate experiences were being shared like this). Once upon a time, things like these were made by Spy skunk-works to spy on a few people, now they are made as part of a vast new commercial undertaking to spy on everybody that busy their kit.

Anyway, the hackers have decided to seize the initiative, and launched the “Private Play Accord”, an initiative to encourage sex toy manufacturers to sign up to basic standards of privacy and security. There is no reason why this should no be extended to every Consumer IoT device out there, of course.

We would however bet that the manufacturers will kick back, hard. Because the data they collect is vital for their overall business models, its not just for "market research". That's why just about no IoT consumer device gives you your data, and the option to not make it transferable any farther.

(*yes, it was hard to refrain from using all the puns and double entendre's one could have)

Gartner's Technology Trends for 2016 probably contain the most obvious rebottling and labelling of old wine for many a year, probably signalling that the "wave of innovation" of the last few years is coming to an end and its now about making stuff work (and renaming it again).

Here they are, with the Broadstuff summaries characteristically tongue in cheek:

- The Device Mesh - connect lots of different devices using y'know, the Internet - and make it Mobile. Ta-Dah...The Mesh. So long Grid and Cloud.......

- Ambient User Experience - the user has the same UI in their mesh, and because everything is connected its like, all ambient (and did we mention Mobile). Astounding stuff, never before thought of - oh, wait, its 10 years old.

- 3D Printing Materials - we have more 3D printers - next up, more 3D printer consumables. The world will be changed, forever - next year. Maybe.

- Information of Everything - IoT connects to The Rest Of The Internet shock.

- Advanced Machine Learning - replaces Ordinary Machine Learning and AI, those are so 2015 and haven't performed well as buzzwords

- Autonomous Agents and Things - In 2015 was Smart Machies. Now its Autonomous Agemts. We used to call them Robots. Plus added Softbots and IoTbots and Thingbots and Thisbots and Thatbots

- Adaptive Security Architecture - "IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks". That is totes amazeballs, IT leaders have probably never considered any of this stuff.

- Advanced System Architecture - Ordinary System Architecture with new, added Neuromorphs. The 80's called, they have a ew buzzword for us....

- Mesh App and Service Architecture - now that we have re-badged the Grid/Cloud/etc as the Mesh, the App and Service Arcitecture can no longer be for the Grid/Cloud.r experiences that span the digital mesh.

- Internet of Things Platforms - Last Year was the Internet of Things, it's so done - so this year we called it a Platform.

FYI, here is the 2015 Forecast, spot the New Lamps for Old:

- (Mobile) Computing Everywhere
- The Internet of Things
- 3D Printing
- Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics
- Context-Rich Systems (aka AI + Machine Learning with the analytics)
- Smart Machines (aka Robotics)
- Cloud/Client Computing
- Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure (ie move from hardware to software, atoms to bits etc etc)
- Web-Scale IT (People build stuff in the Cloud)
- Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

As you can see, by and large a smooth continuum except for the new words

Uber has exited China with a sale of all its Chinese operations to the Chinese market leader, for a 17.7% financial stake - Biz Insider:

Uber is selling its Uber China unit to Didi Chuxing.
Uber's app will continue to exist in China (for now), while the two teams are folded together.
The combined company will be worth $35 billion.
Per a press release, "Uber will receive 5.89% of the combined company with preferred equity interest which is equal to a 17.7% economic interest in Didi Chuxing."
Didi Chuxing will also invest $1 billion in Uber, at a $68 billion valuation.

Uber was burning c $1 billion a year in trying to enter China, a huge cash-hole even for a Megacorn so this helps shore up the cashflow. Downside is that it also closes off Uber's biggest future growth story (see above graph from Biz Insider). But given that market's interesting view of open-ness, its probably a not-bad outcome.

As Biz Insider points out, its a lesson that even infinite bucketloads of VC cash have a limit in what can be done. Still, it will be easier to IPO now, before the investment community works out that Taxis as a business have very low margins.

Also expect to see redoubled efforts in other large and fairly well wired countries where regulators are amenable to having their own domestic taxi industries done over.

Now that the emotion around the UK Referendum has (hopefully) died down a bit, its time to look at why the (apparently) surprising Brexit result occurred. Based on experience during the referendum campaigns and reading quite a lot afterwards, there were 3 major causes that stood out.

A Mismatch of Belief Systems

In essence, the Remain camp believed an argument based on the EU as a desirable, stable platform going forward, plus the moral and economic benefits of it's precepts, was persuasive. Added to that they clearly felt that Establishment voices of authority would persuade the undecided, and if that didn't work "project Fear" - promising Doom if the UK left the EU, would persuade the floating voters - as they believed it did in the Scottish Independence referendum. (By the way, I think this was false - my recollection was that, at the end, the "Remain in UK" camp in the Scottish referendum made a lot of concessions to the Scots in the last days as Fear wasn't really working out).

Also, if you are going to paint the EU as a stable, desirable organisation to rest your campaign on, don't allow it to show itself as sclerotic, near-bankrupt and prone to random acts of mass terror during the election campaign.

The Leave camp, on the other hand, believed that a lot of people in the UK were suspicious of the EU, thought it was in a lot of trouble, or at least didn't see any tangible benefit from it, and were very also hostile to the "open borders" migration into the UK for a wide variety of reasons, true and false. Also, the Establishment, via a plethora of scandals, post 2007 austerity, and cultural remoteness was not nearly as trusted as Remain believed. It's also hard to believe that Remain thought that hectoring the British would ever work, its not for nothing the nation is depicted as having a "Bulldog spirit" - maybe it is more obvious to a non-Brit like me, but in general the British are as stubborn as it gets, so episodes like President Obama telling them they will be "back of the queue" for trade deal for example was bound to backfire.

Attitude - Hubris and Nemesis, and polls

Before the campaign, Remain was supposed to win, very comfortably, according to the polls. Bookies were offering 1/5 odds on a Leave win. In my view that influenced the campaigns, in that Remain was initially overconfident whereas Leave knew they were in for a real scrap, and as it became clearer that Remain was not going to be a slam dunk then panic set in, whereas Leave grew in confidence. This was exacerbated by the much larger risks to the senior people involved in the incumbent Remain camp.

By the way - a quick word on the polls - we tracked the UK 2010 and 2015 elections using our social media analytics systems, and found in both cases a stronger bias to the liberal, metropolitan viewpoint than the actual election results displayed. This we believe is due to 3 main reasons:

- Conservatives by nature are more likely to be online technology laggards and/or talk less about things, (but they do vote)
- The Liberal Metropolitans have better access to the Media, in general (many work in it, or are connected to it) so their voice is amplified
- A significant number of people do not have the courage of their convictions when they feel they have socially "frowned on" views (like anti immigration for example), and this is a poll-altering feature

This means there is a tangible "hidden residuum" voting for the socially uncool side, whatever that is, and its probably higher if the uncool side is seen as personally beneficial.

The System Dynamics of a disaster

However, the biggest failure of the Remain campaign was to not address the situation dynamically as it progressed. The (simplified) System Dynamic diagram above tries to capture this. In essence, Remain's arguments, exaggerated by Project Fear logic, tended to over-egg the risks (or at least be perceived to do so) and that led to an increasing resistance to the message and it gave a foothold to pro Leave media to start to land some telling blows. The Remain response was to double down on Project Fear, with increasingly exaggerated claims of Doom which allowed Leave to both lampoon Remain's claims and headroom to make even more exaggerated claims of its own. Cycle this through a few times, increase the hectoring volume, and more and more people just switched off to the messages of Doom and the insults (calling c 50% of the population "racist" is clearly absurd). As it became clear Leave was gaining, they started to gain in confidence, getting that all important momentum - undecided people like winners. Then Remain visibly panicked, and output became more and more unbelievable (we eventually got to Brexit starting World War 3). By the time the Conservative government, who had largely run the Remain show, started to criticize Labour for not doing enough, it was clear Remain were mortally wounded.

What should Remain have done instead?

This is a simplified model - there are some sub-loops and unique events not shown, but in essence they fit in this overall model. Our experience of System Dynamic models is it is these high level models that often give the major insights, the detail is often bedevilled with layers of assumptions, where anything can happen with small changes. At any rate, the simple model would suggest 5 main actions:

(i) Make sure the ingoing assumptions are all valid, and defendable. GIGO, as they say.
(ii) Beware Hubris - assume the gap is less than you think, especially if you believe you have the "moral" advantage as quite a sizeable % - 5 to 10% in our view - are just keeping quiet as they dont want to be seen as "the Other"
(iii) Project Fear won't win it for you, and ramping it up certainly won't.
(iv) Break the circles if they are going against you. It was quite clear some time before the end that there was a vicious circle emerging for Remain, and they should have broken the circle and tried to understand the actual root causes of why people were not responding, and change their approach. In this case it was incorrect ingoing assumptions about the attarctiveness of their message. Ditto their opponents started to see a Virtuous circle emerge
(v) A corollary to (iv) - have other loops going, so if the main one doesn't work one can switch over. One of the major issues, left until far too late, was for Remain to actually deal with the concerns of the Leavers on a practical, policy basis.

Can we Trump this model?

The main point of making such a model is to see if it is predictive. So we plan to turn it onto the US election, where our hypothesis is that fairly similar dynamics are taking place. So, what we have been doing is following the US election with our systems for a few months to try and calibrate the US systemically, and now the Presidential candidates are anointed we have a simple 2 horse system - and a 2 horse dynamic model to test out on it.

There are differences which we will have to set up for, (for EU read USA, for example) but it should be an interesting experiment (and a decent test of our social analytics systems)

Succinctly put in The Atlantic - (and summarised here), when faced with saying "Yes" to something new, risky, etc, research shows:

“If you are a manager, if you commit a false positive, you are going to embarrass yourself, and potentially ruin your career.” Managers, he says, are terrified of committing false positives, meaning saying something will be a hit when in fact it will flop.

False negatives, by contrast, present little costs. “If you reject a great idea,” Grant said, “most of the time, no one will ever know.” (One exception to this: Pity the editors who rejected Harry Potter.) Managers like to make safe bets and don’t mind the invisible losses.

In other words, one is seldom tarred with the results of saying No, and the best way to proect yourself when saying Yes is to only say Yes to "defendable" ideas (worked before, never get fired for buying IBM etc etc)

So, how to avoid this and let innovation flow? The paper argue that peers in an area are the best at judging someone else's work in the space, not managers. (Possibly...but they also say Science advances one dead scientist at a time...)

Anyhow, in most companies, Managers have the Yes/No role and Peers are seldom on tap, so how to get them out of the game theory bind above? The best way is to let Managers act like peers, in an experiment, Justin Berg found that:

"...asked managers to spend five minutes brainstorming about their own ideas before they judged other people’s ideas.” [That] "was enough to open their minds. Because when they came in to select ideas, they were looking for reasons to say no. Get them into a brainstorming mindset first, and now they’re not thinking evaluatively, they’re thinking creatively.”

All very interesting, but if the organisation still kicks you for False Positives, not sure this gets us anywhere further

Pokemon Go has become quite the thing, but regular readers of this blog will know we are fascinated by one thing in the main - yes, where is all that user data going?

In less than a week Niantic (a Google spinout*) created one of the largest personal location databases in history, as well as other personal data, storage and camera co-ords. Here's what it does (thanks to USA today):

For Android users, the game can access both the precise and general locations of the device as well as its camera – permissions inherently necessary to play the game. The game can also access users’ USB storage, contacts, network connections and more.

For iPhone users, the game can access users’ location, camera and photos. Many iOS users log in through their Google account, which initially granted the app full access. This meant, per Google, that the app “can see and modify nearly all information in your Google Account” including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps and more. [This was fixed yesterday, but many hundreds of thousands people had already signed up]

Niantic can also share the data it collects with Pokémon Co., which is partially owned by longstanding videogame and console maker Nintendo Co. More interesting is, as the WSJ notes, the choice of what data to collect - they didn't need it all for the service to work, yet chose to collect it.

Here's what the Terms & Conditions say:

“We may disclose any information about you (or your authorized child) that is in our possession or control to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate,” the agreement states

Fairly standard deal for the Social Nets, but the amount of location data this system has is like no other, As USA Today points out, what is yet to become clear is the business model, so its hard to work out what they will do with the data. However, the company has said in the past that they will licence out the technology to other companies, which raises the prospect of the virtualspace being filled with virtual objects, and hordes of people chasing them.

There are already reports of 3rd parties using the data for their own ends (mugging, hassling people by making their homes in-game locations, etc) so this could get quite inconvenient..

Update - this last point has started to get serious, as the Grauniad notes, it's not clear who owns your space in cyberspace:

Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum has asked Pokémon Go players to stay away: the museum was designated a Pokéstop, where players can pick up items like Pokéballs and revives, forcing its communications director to point out that playing a game inside a memorial to victims of Nazism is “extremely inappropriate”.

This will probably become a major issue, as it looks like it will open all the same issues as owning the air above your property, or the oil underneath. In general, if history is any guide, there will be abuse of other people's space by overenthusiastic or unscrupulous operators, followed by a clear need for regulation.

* Both Nintendo and Google are investors in Niantic, which started within Google before spinning off into a stand-alone company last year.