Author: JP

Some time ago, while mulling over my thoughts about Facebook and privacy (soon to be the tenth and last post in the Facebook and the Enterprise series) I’d been re-reading danah boyd‘s writings on the subject nearly a year ago. She starts a section called Exposure by saying:

Have you ever been screaming to be heard in a loud environment when suddenly the music stops and everyone hears the end of your sentence? And then they turn to stare? I’m guessing you turned beet red. (And if you didn’t, exposure is not one of your problems.

“She’s talking about lulworths”, I said to myself. And then proceeded to feel quite frustrated, because for the life of me I could not remember why I thought that danah was referring to “lulworths”. Until this morning, when light dawned en route Lord’s and the cricket.

[An aside. Had a great day at Lord’s. Great atmosphere, great company, some excellent cricket, particularly by England. Even if Tendulkar was stopped dead in his tracks, and Dravid wasn’t even allowed to start….. by some truly diabolical umpiring. It was, nevertheless, England’s day, and England deserved to win.]

While writing about going to Lord’s I’d mentioned the word “didcot” from The Meaning of Liff. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, the authors of The Meaning of Liff, describe the book as follows:

In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist. On the other hand, the world is littererd with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.

*And, indeed, in Liff

While thinking about didcots I remembered where I’d seen lulworths. Adams and Lloyd define “lulworth” thus:

LULWORTH (n.)
Measure of conversation. A lulworth defines the amount of the length, loudness and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same time.

Pretty much what danah was describing. Try and read The Meaning Of Liff if you get a chance, it may be dated but it’s fun. Here are a few excerpts:

ABERBEEG (vb.)
Of amateur actors, to adopt a Mexican accent when called upon to play any variety of foreigner (except Pakistanis – for whom a Welsh accent is considered sufficient).

HATHERSAGE (n.)
The tiny snippets of beard which coat the inside of a washbasin after shaving in it.

MINCHINHAMPTON (n.)
The expression on a man’s face when he has just zipped up his trousers without due care and attention.

Incidentally, talking about Minchinhampton, I once had the pleasure of playing the Minchinhampton Old Course many years ago. If I remember correctly, it was the only course I’ve played on whose local rules offered me a free drop if my ball nestled in a cowpat! I managed to eschew that particular experience. They also had some very unusual flags, or what passed for them on the greens. White tubes maybe three foot long, and that’s all. The Old Course is on common land, and cows are free to graze there, to feed on the cloth flags (which they could if there were any), and to decorate the fairways with fresh dung (which they can and do).

Which brings me on to my final point in this Saturday evening stroll. Mondegreen.

Ye Highlands, and ye Lawlands

Oh where have you been?

They have slain the Earl of Murray,

And layd him on the green.

The verses above are taken from The Bonny Earl of Murray, and, as the wikipedia article details, the last line is often recited as “And Lady Mondegreen”. Hence the word “mondegreen”, to refer to aural corruptions. I guess most of the mondegreens I know come from the realm of popular music: perhaps the best-known is “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy” (for “Kiss The Sky”), somehow shoehorned into Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Which is why this site, containing the most famous misheard lyrics, has the url www.kissthisguy.com

A coda. How long before we start seeing “etymologies” for urls? Just a thought.

We all have our foibles.

An aside. I was inordinately pleased to see that the BlackBerry predictive text support actually recognised the word foibles, even though it suggested doubles first. And how do I describe such words?. Surely there must be some word analogous to synonym and homonym that describes words thrown up as alternatives by predictive text systems. Qwertonym perhaps?

This train of thought reminds me of my delight when I first read The Meaning Of Liff, sometime in the early 1980s. It was a little black book, a stocking filler containing words to describe things that we didn’t have words for.

My particular favourite was Didcot, the word suggested by the authors to describe that tiny bit of card that was punched out of my railway ticket by the ticket inspector, who would use a device looking like a stylised nutcracker.

I digress.

It’s a glorious day, the sun’s shining, God’s in His Heaven and all’s well with the world. I’m on my way to the only place I could want to be this morning.

Lord’s. And may the best team win.

What a truly fabulous game cricket is.In the past, there was a part of me that felt purist about the very concept of one day cricket, feeling that it despoilt the true game. Now, some thirty years later, I am grateful. Because it has made the game accessible to many more.

I have American colleagues pretty much queueing up to come, a French colleague openly curious about what makes the game tick. And most important of all, I have a child of mine accompanying me. Something I feel would not have happened but for the one day game. Now he even comes to watch Test matches.

Who knows, maybe the next generation will speak the same way about Twenty-Twenty games?

What matters is access, as Dave the Lifekludger is wont to remind us. The more accessible something is the better.

We shouldn’t worry about the effect it has on the long game, the true game. We are now used to seeing abridged books available for over a century now, yet book publication has probably not been at higher levels.and, if you take the JK Rowlings and Vikram Seths of this world, they’re not particularly short either.

So it’s off to Lord’s I go, ready to watch a day’s jousting between willow and leather, at Headquarters.

Paradise enow.

I had the pleasure of spending some time this morning with Don Tapscott, who dropped in to see me at the office. Don is someone I’ve tracked ever since I read Paradigm Shift maybe fifteen years ago. Fascinating book. He was in the country doing a number of seminars around Wikinomics, his most recent book, and we’d arranged to meet.

The conversation meandered across a wild range of subjects,  all linked, to a lesser or greater extent, to that strange space where the enterprise meets social software.  And one of the subjects we touched on for a while was the power of context. Conversations using social software tend to be wrapped in context, a context that is portable across time and space, with a significant reduction in switching costs as a result.

You only have to use a decent “true” group IM application once to know what I mean. It becomes easy to figure out who’s doing the “talking”, something that isn’t all that easy in audio conferences. For some reason, the socially induced begging-your-pardon pregnant pauses that occur in audio or video conference tend to be minimised in group chat. If the baby needs seeing to, or there’s something on the hob about to go ballistic, you can walk away, attend to the pressing need and return to the conversation with complete continuity guaranteed. You can see what you missed. Where you have global distributed teams, you can even minimise losses due to translation errors, they tend to occur more frequently in speech rather than in “written talk”.

Who spoke. Who spoke before. What was said before. In what sequence. On what subject. For how long. Who interrupted. Who was there. Where was all this. When. Why. Everything. Those are some of the things I mean by conversation wrapped in context. And it will get better. As the tools get better.

Now some of you may be thinking, JP’s completely nuts, there is no better context than live speech, who needs any of this contextual wrapper horse manure? And if you feel that way, I understand. Told you I was Confused. All I can do is to offer you, for your particular weekend delectation, this story of what happens when, for some reason, you don’t have all the context you need in a real live conversation. Enjoy.

I’ve been taking a look at the newish PayPal blog, which has been around for about a month or so. At first glance I couldn’t help feeling that they were taking a traditional broadcast-static unidirectional site and trying very hard to make it a blog, and failing. It seemed to lack authenticity, it felt somehow plastic and artificial.

I read the comments, and many of them felt the same as well.

I could be wrong. It may just be the plastic and antiseptic smell that you get when, for example, you enter a new car. Maybe the car is real. Maybe the blog is real. Maybe all I am sensing is its newness.

My jury’s still out. I can’t tell for sure. But they have got one thing right. They call the blog The Official Place for all things PayPal.

And that’s what it will be, if it truly becomes writable, if there is bidirectional authenticity.

Worth watching. Thanks to Bill for the tipoff.

About three weeks ago my ICD alarm went off, most inconsiderately, at about 1.30 am Central Time, while I was holidaying in Texas. I’d been feeling great until then, but could not prevent a frisson of concern. Spoke to the cardiologist, agreed that we would keep a quiet watch on things; as long as I felt well, I could afford to wait and have the device checked at leisure upon my return home.

The next morning the alarm went off again. My wife noticed it happened at around the same time; again, I didn’t worry too much about it, since I continued to feel well. But I resolved to stay up on the third day, wanting to see if the alarm went off precisely at 1.28 am (as shown on the hotel room’s alarm clock). My rationale for staying up was simple. If it happened at the same time, then it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with me, my heart or the position of my body while I slept; all fingers would point at “device malfunction”.

And that’s the way it turned out. Stay up. Wait for alarm to go off at 1.28am. Observe it going off precisely on time. Breathe a sigh of relief, nothing to do with me, minor device malfunction, let’s have it looked at sometime over the next month or so.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The device was doing precisely what it was designed to do.  The alarm was real.

That fascinated me. Because I was so sure that a regular repeating alarm couldn’t possibly be a cause for concern. And so I had to find out more. What was happening and why.

Apparently what was happening was this: The device would keep checking regularly for various rates and levels and strengths of things, comparing the measurements against preset tolerances. If any tolerance level was breached then a specific alarm would be sparked off. All fine so far.

Many of the reasons for such alarms going off were not particularly time-sensitive. So, in order to “improve the customer experience”, I guess, the device is designed to let the patient know about the problem at a civilised and reasonable hour. 8.30 am in the patient’s home local time. In my case, GMT. Which is 7.30am British Summer Time. And 1.30am Texan time.

All’s well that ends well. The device did what it was designed to do. I was alerted to there being something not quite right, had it checked, and I have all the time in the world to take corrective action.

But the whole incident made me think.

We live in a world where more and more devices are being churned out; the devices are getting smaller and cleverer day by day; many of them act as decision support tools, dashboards, alarms, control panels, you name it. More and more of the devices support some sort of wireless communication, and many of them are “connected” to the web.

Everything’s becoming real-time and alert-driven and context-specific. But.

But.

While all this is happening, we aren’t keeping up. We don’t really know what many of the alarms mean. What the tolerance levels are. What the rules are. What we should do when an alarm goes off.

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in a car whose dashboard is littered with various alerts and alarms. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen kitchen appliances whose control panels are flashing whatever they flash. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen televisions and video recorders and DVD players and radios and computers with bits and bobs flashing away merrily.

I have lost count of the number of times people pass serenely by shops and flats and offices where there’s an alarm going off, pass so serenely it seems that they must be deaf as well as blind.

It makes me think. More devices. More alarms. More alarm-apathy. There’s something wrong with the picture. Never mind the waste of energy (which itself is a good enough reason for us to do something about it). What concerns me more is that we are getting so sensitised to alarms that we don’t do anything about them. We don’t investigate the whys and wherefores, we don’t take corrective action, we just sail on merrily along.

This is not just about electronic alarms, by the way. Our bodies are designed to send us alarms; there are behavioural and social alarms at home, at work, in society at large.

The alarms are there for a reason.

So is the apathy.  Apathy sets in when we have too many alarms, too many meaningless alarms. Alarms should be risk sensors that help us make decisions that carry risk. Instead, we may be moving towards a world where nanny-state numbness is moving on to devices, and as a result apathy will increase.

You know what I mean. You know that we live in a world where a “talking” bag of peanuts is no longer science fiction, where the bag says “Warning: The bag you are opening contains nuts”. Where you can’t take something out of the microwave oven without someone intoning the words “Warning: Contents may be hot”. Where swimming pools will recite the mantra “Warning: contents wet” as you enter.

We need to be careful. Otherwise our alarms and nanny-state-hood will have appalling consequences, as alarmapathy increases to terminal levels.