Category: Aside

Not feelin' so Groovy any more

We used to rely on Groove for coordination of a lot of company projects. It was originally an “insanely great” product, with a lot of advantages over web-based alternatives like Central Desktop. Then Microsoft bought it. It’s been downhill since then. Here’s the MS evil plan for the destruction of Groove, as it has unfolded:

1. Make upgrades a hostile account takeover, with limited backwards compatibility.

2. Eliminate essential features, like export of message history to a discussion.

3. Make the product difficult to obtain, reducing its viral appeal, by eliminating trial accounts, hiding old versions, and providing bloated bundles.

4. License per PC rather than per user, to make use for sync uneconomic.

5. Change the name to maximize confusion with regular Sharepoint, which is fundamentally different (server-centric vs. P2P).

Update

6. Break folder sharing on 64bit OS flavors (it worked fine in Groove 3.1)

I have a hard time thinking of an objective function that makes this rational. My guess is that the existing Sharepoint group within MS felt threatened and had the political power to mess up Groove, but not quite enough to kill it outright. This reinforces my suspicion that companies are engines of capitalism on the outside, but inefficient centrally-planned economies on the inside, so we’d be better off if they weren’t so big.

Anyone know a good P2P alternative? Or at least a server-based tool that works well offline? All I really want is integrated  file sharing, instant messaging, and discussion, with good security and easy drag-&-drop to the desktop.

All metaphors are wrong – some are useful

I’m hanging out at the Systems Thinking in Action conference, which has been terrific so far.

The use of metaphors came up today. A good metaphor can be a powerful tool in group decision making. It can wrap a story about structure and behavior into a little icon that’s easy to share and relate to other concepts.

But with that power comes a bit of danger, because, like models, metaphors have limits, and those limits aren’t always explicit or shared. Even the humble bathtub can be misleading. We often use bathtubs as analogies for first-order exponential decay processes, but real bathtubs have a nonlinear outflow, so they actually decay linearly. (Update: that is, the water level as a function of time falls linearly, assuming the tub has straight sides, because the rate of outflow varies with the square root of the level.)

Apart from simple caution, I think the best solution to this problem when stakes are high is to formalize and simulate systems, because that process forces you to expose and challenge many assumptions that otherwise remain hidden.

The envelope please…

The 2011 Ig Nobel in Mathematics is for modeling … it goes to predictors of the end of the world:

Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Notice that the authors of Limits to Growth aren’t here, not because they were snubbed, but because Limits didn’t actually predict the end of the world. Update: perhaps the Onion should be added to the list though.

The Medicine prize goes to a pair of behavior & decision making studies:

Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate. REFERENCE: “Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,” Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-633.

REFERENCE: “The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,” Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Mirjam Tuk, Luk Warlop, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, David Darb

Perhaps we need more (or is it less?) restrooms in the financial sector and Washington DC these days.

Kill your iPad?

Are iPads the successor to the dark side of TV?

I love the iPad, but it seems rather limited as a content creation device. It’s good at some things (GarageBand), but even with a good app, I can’t imagine serious model building on it. Even some social media activities, like twitter, seem a bit awkward, because it’s hard to multitask effectively to share web links and other nontrivial content.

It seems that there’s some danger of it becoming a channel for content consumption, insulating users in their filter bubbles and  leaving aspiring content creators disempowered. The monolithic gatekeeper model for apps seems potentially problematic in the long term as well, as a distortion to the evolutionary landscape for software.

It would be a bit ironic if cars someday bore bumper stickers protesting a new vehicle for mindless media delivery:

“You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”

— Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004

“You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”
— Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004

Energy unprincipled

I’ve been browsing the ALEC model legislation on ALECexposed, some of which infiltrated the Montana legislature. It’s discouragingly predictable stuff, but not without a bit of amusement. Take the ALEC Energy Principles:

Mission: To define a comprehensive strategy for energy security, production, and distribution in the states consistent with the Jeffersonian principles of free markets and federalism.

Except when authoritarian government is needed to stuff big infrastructure projects down the throats of unwilling private property owners:

Reliable electricity supply depends upon significant improvement of the transmission grid. Interstate and intrastate transmission siting authority and procedures must be addressed to facilitate the construction of needed new infrastructure.

Like free markets, federalism apparently has its limits:

Such plan shall only be approved by the commission if the expense of implementing such a plan is borne by the federal government.