Time travel

On any given day I get sent maybe 20-25 messages through one communications channel or other, with links to new sites or apps. Most of them are of no value to me at all. Maybe I’m growing old. A friend sent me a link today; I can usually rely on him to send me interesting things, so I took a look. This, despite the site and app having one of those oh-so-oughties names.

Radiooooo.

I tried it. Not having to register in order to try it out helped, that was a big plus for me. Chose Canada, Slow, 1970s. And up came Neil Young and Vampire Blues. After a while switched to India, stayed Slow and 1970s. And I was served Ananda Shankar and Raghupati. Registered straightaway. Downloaded the app as well. I like being able to vary how I want to engage with such things.

It’s still in beta, and I’m still learning about the site. Some categories are empty. I have no idea how many people have uploaded music, but that number feels low at present, I see the same names come up a few times. That may have to do with the selections I’m making.

I’m intrigued by the Share and by the Buy options song by song; the prominence given to the uploader suggests that over time this is going to become a blip.fm with an edgier UI.

The ability to time-travel around a music site is itself not new; neither is the serendipity offered in various forms. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw India turn to British India when I chose 1930. But being served Yom Hashabat by Nathan Solomon Satimkar was, to say the least, unusual.

Fascinating.

Radiooooo feels a bit like the first time I came across a food hall at a mall in the US. I was like a child in a sweetshop when I realised that I could choose to have something sensibly spicy while other family members could do their own thing, and we could still sit together and eat together.

That’s how I feel about the site right now. It’s fascinating to be able to mix genres so easily. It’s almost as if someone decided to build a mechanism by which each one of us could design our own StumbleUpon for music.

The ease with which I can get to, discover, shuffle through disparate times and places and genres is very attractive. There’s a long-tail aspect that soothes me, I’m not a hit-culture fan. I am even less a hit-culture fan when people I haven’t learnt to trust make the choices for me, but that’s another story.

I haven’t uploaded anything yet, nor shared anything so far. I’m still in early explorer mode.

But what I’ve seen so far, I like.

Radiooooo has possibilities. And I shall continue experimenting, and watch with interest.

 

 

 

Thinking lazily about notifications and alerts: Part 2

This is the second in a series on notifications and alerts, building on what I started sharing earlier today, as promised.

First, a musical interlude.

Someone’s knocking at the door, somebody’s ringing the bell/ Do me a favour/Open the door/And let them in.

Mum, the kettle’s boiling/Daddy, what’s the time/Sis, look what you’re doing/Can’t you see/The baby’s crying

We get used to receiving and processing notifications while we are still children. Doorbells ringing. Kettles boiling. Hearing footsteps approach, learning which ones are friendly, recognising the patterns made by parents and siblings.

And yet the one I remember most vividly is to do with what’s exemplified in the photo below:

kayarakhet31.jpg

[My thanks to VikalpSangam whose photo of Mohan, above, helps make my point].

It’s  a very strong childhood memory, one that is almost as strong as sensing the presence or return of a parent. You see, I wasn’t much of a sleeper. [Never was. And now that I’m approaching 60, it looks like I never will be. The power of habit]. As I lay awake, tossing and turning in the sweltering heat of a Calcutta night, I’d hear a strange sound. A sound I came to treat as a friend. The sound made when a stout stick gently hits a lamppost. A strange sound indeed.

We used to live on a street called Hindustan Park in the 1960s, in Ballygunge in Calcutta. I don’t know the precise history behind the phenomenon, but what I can remember is this. The local darwans, who performed roles of building manager, maintenance man and security guard, used to take turns to walk around the neighbourhood while their colleagues dozed. The one doing the walking would signal his presence and doing of the rounds by twanging the occasional lamppost with his danda, his lathi.

It seemed to me that his lamppost-striking action achieved many outcomes: it alerted his colleagues that he was doing his rounds; it probably alerted would-be burglars as well, but more of that in another post; most importantly, it made me feel that God was in his Heaven and that All was Well with the World. It wasn’t just about presence being signalled over distance, it was about the sense of security implied by that presence.

Which brings me to the first class of notification: All is Well.

There’s a rhythm, a pulse, a cadence, to the All is Well notification. It’s a repeating signal. It’s like hearing the sounds a baby makes while asleep. It’s like seeing an ECG at a hospital bedside. There is no need for alarm, no warning threshold has been breached, no action needs to be taken. But its absence is often a signal for action, for investigation.

As the number of sensors continues to grow exponentially, and as we get better at joining the data collected and creating value via insights, we will learn to build baselines for many such things. Initially these baselines may well pertain to single senses, but as we learn and adapt we will build multisensory baselines as well. We will describe whole environments in multisensory ways: a child’s bedroom; a person working out in the gym; a restaurant kitchen in full flow; a factory floor full of robots; a street with a mixture of driven and driverless vehicles. For each of these, we will have established when All is Well: the temperature, the energy consumption, the heart rate, the breathing sounds, the ambient noise, whatever.

It’s important to distinguish the All is Well notification from all others; I think it would be a mistake to assume that people only want a variant of “management by exception” reporting. It’s like the mother wanting to check that the child is still alive, asleep, relaxed. There’s a wellbeing signal, a Linus’ security blanket involved, and this should not be confused with exception management.

Right now it may not be obvious why we should concern ourselves with the All is Well notification when in the context of enterprise software. But I think it’s only a matter of time. One of the implications of hyperconnectedness appears to be that by the time we find out something’s wrong, it’s too late to avoid damage. Our early warning systems will learn to become more sophisticated in order to deal with the problems of connectedness.

It’s worth taking a leaf out of David Agus’s book in this context. Marc Benioff introduced me to David some years ago, and I found his line of thinking very instructive, concentrating on wellness rather than illness. The human body is just one great example of complex adaptive systems in operation, and there is much we can learn from people like David as a result; it is then up to us to adapt that learning to the enterprise context. With the Second Machine Age  of Brynjolfsson and McAfee now upon us, we have to get a move on in understanding how to keep notified of a state of wellness at work and at play, as collectives and as individuals.

So there’s a lot of work to be done in fleshing out the All is Well notification. How to form the new baselines. How those baselines move from being single-sense to multi sensory. The role of time series in all this. The increasing march of robotics, of augmented reality, of hybrid operating environments. The likely arrays of unintended consequences we will face as we go through the learning: the world-ruled-by-algorithm issues identified by people like Kevin Slavin,  the problems caused by poorly designed filters as described by people like Eli Pariser, modern versions of Asimov’s Three Laws, we have all that and more to face and to adapt around.

That’s only the beginning, as we then learn more about which notifications to receive on which devices, and when;  how those notifications will announce themselves when they arrive; when the receipt of a notification has legal standing.

It’s only the beginning.

In my next post I shall be dealing with the next two classes of notification: the Houston, We Have a Problem class and the I Am Here class. After that I shall try and wrap up the remaining classes of notification quickly, so that I can concentrate on the filtering/subscription processes.

Some of you have suggested that I should hold these thoughts and write a book around them. I’d rather share and learn via places like this one here, even if the conversations are with just a small number of people. It’s not that I don’t want to write a book. I do and I will. Sometime. But not about this. More to the point, I want things like this to be discussed openly so that we can all learn. Maybe I have the most learning to do. I will find out soon enough, even if only in private.

Feel free to engage via Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or even here, if it’s not too retro for you. Use e-mail only if you absolutely must, we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

 

Thinking lazily about notifications and alerts

There are some things  that I can sense for myself. I can see something, hear something, touch something, smell something, taste something, provided it happens within the range of the sense needing to be used.

With the necessary training, I may be able to add granularity to what I sense. Some people can gauge distance with great precision, assess the weight or height of an object. Sometimes this is done with senses working in combination: a smell may impart information about taste.

Most of the time, granularity is added by our using tools: measuring jugs, scales, thermometers and the like. The dashboards we build at work are just examples of measuring tools, often providing granularity to something that a skilled person can “sense”. For example, a good sales manager will know how she is doing against target, but use a dashboard to add granularity to that knowledge.

Ever since I first heard Kevin Kelly speak of technology as something that can speed up evolution, that concept has fascinated me. The internet of things may mean many things to many people: what intrigues me the most about it is the idea of “more sensors, more actuators”. When those sensors are networked together, then terms like collective intelligence and “global brains” start gaining prominence. When the datasets collected by those sensors are labelled usefully, then terms like “big data” become more meaningful.

Connecting sensors together allows us to conquer “distance”, to sense things that are happening elsewhere. It’s been a few decades since terms like “the death of distance” were used to describe what the internet and the web represented. As mobile devices proliferated and became “smarter” this trend continued.

As it became possible to persist the data collected by these myriad sensors, and to make that data available across networks, we began to talk about our new-found ability to “shift time”. A trend that was probably first seen in messaging (centrally held paper-based phone messages, then paging services, then locally held voicemail, then remotely accessible voicemail, and so on) managed to work its way into other spheres of activity. The television industry was the one that felt it quite deeply, as people decided to record stuff to watch later; it then became only a matter of time before video on demand became normal and TV went “nonlinear”.

Whenever I think of notifications and alerts, I tend to view them with all this in mind. That the notification or the alert is made possible because I can “sense” more. That the sensing is taking place while I am able to shift time and/or place.

There’s one more thing. Filters. Something which regular readers will know I’ve spent quite some time on before, here, in this series, and even earlier in this series.

When you have sharp increases in the number of sensors available, when these sensors allow you to sense things far away, when the event being sensed may have taken place earlier, then the ability to filter notifications and alerts becomes very important.

I’ve been spending time thinking about this, and plan to share my thoughts here over the next few weeks, looking for criticism, for feedback, for advice. Stay tuned.

 

 

Thinking about transfers and value

Happy New Year.

It’s that time of year again, when the English Premier League is at its precise halfway point, and the experts start looking forward to the end of the season and speculate on winners and losers.

Since the 2002-03 season, it’s also the time of year for the winter “transfer window”, a late Christmas present of sorts for football agents, and ostensibly an opportunity for those battling at either end of the table to call for reinforcements.

So I thought I’d take a look at what actually happened in the transfer windows since the end of the 2013-14 season, to see what stands out in the five windows since (three summer, two winter).

What I did was to load up each window’s net transfers club by club so that I had a column for each of Summer 16-17, Winter 15-16, Summer 15-16, Winter 14-15 and Summer 14-15. [The Winter 16-17 window has just opened]. Then I accumulated them in reverse chronological order, adding a window at a time. So I had a column for the last two windows, the last 3 windows, the last four windows and all five windows.

My source of the data was Transfermarkt, a really useful site for such things. Here’s the precise tab I used, making the selections I needed to make. And thank you Transfermarkt!

Here’s what my own spreadsheet looked like when I finished:

Screen Shot 2017-01-02 at 10.48.52.png

[I haven’t embedded the actual Numbers sheet here. If any of you wants a copy just let me know where to send it to].

Some observations.

  1. There’s the usual “lies, damned lies and statistics” risk to any such exercise. Why did I choose the last five transfer windows rather than the last ten? Why did I choose to use reverse chronological order for the aggregations? Why did I separate the windows rather than go by entire season? Why did I only show net figures? These are all fair questions, every one of my choices introduces some bias and it will show in the results. My reason for making the choices I did was simple. I wanted to be able to figure out for myself: This is what happened under Guardiola, this is what happened under Mourinho, this is what happened under Klopp, this is the Conte timeline, you get my drift. That’s all, no other reason.
  2. The teams in italics are those that have not been present in all the seasons covered. Only 15 teams have been in the Premiership throughout the period under review, with 9 other teams missing out on one or more seasons.
  3. The “rankings” columns to the right only try and rank the 15 “ever-present” teams.
  4. The transfer money laid out was dominated by the two Manchester clubs, that’s to be expected. Arsenal was consistently the nearest to them, also predictable. What was mildly surprising to me was where a team like Sunderland stood when looked at this way.
  5. The last three Premiership winners were Leicester City, Chelsea and Manchester City. Leicester were mid-table as “transfer investors”, while Chelsea were almost bottom. There’s a lot more work to be done before we can understand the real correlation between investment and table position.  What if a team invested really well in soccer academies and then sold a small portion of that investment in the external transfer market, making just a few judicious buys? Looking just at the transfer markets isn’t enough. But it’s a start.
  6. Keeping net spent low is not in itself necessarily a good thing, given where Swansea are right now. Both Newcastle and Sunderland have tried to spend their way out of trouble, with different outcomes, and the promotion/relegation outcomes this year will prove as interesting as ever.
  7. When you look at the current first/second in the league, not much has been spent net by either Conte or Klopp. But maybe football is like the airline industry, it’s easy to make a small fortune. If you start with a large one.

As with anything else, I just wanted to get a little bit more familiar with the topic by actually looking at the data for myself.

While Leicester’s win last year was remarkable, it’s an outlier. The standout team for me in all this has been Southampton. Net £48m up in the past five windows. Net up in every one of the past three summer transfer windows. I want to dig deeper, see how much of that is through youth schemes and how much is based on careful “bargain” purchases from less fashionable markets, whether the approach they are taking will make them into a “feeder” club (which may not be fair on the fans) or whether there is sustainable advantage to be gained.

Much to think about.

In the meantime, happy new year to all of you. Once again, if you want to play with the data, to plug in this January’s winter window data, but don’t want to construct the spreadsheet yourself, just get in touch with me.

 

 

Thinking about pink balls

[Note to readers. This post may appear to do with cricket. Perhaps it does. But it’s about more than that].

I had to smile when I first came across what Douglas Adams had to say about our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I tried to interpret the word “technologies” as broadly as possible, looking for areas where his description matched my reaction to something. And the first one I came up with was cricket. I realised that my attitude to cricket could be summed up in his words. Test cricket? Fine. County and regional? Of course. One-day? As long as it’s the 50 or 60 over variety. Day/night? Pshaw. Pfui. Balls coloured other than red? Over my dead body. Clothes coloured other than white? When hell freezes over.

Until I thought about my attitude to cricket through the lens described by Adams, I considered myself a fairly progressive person. Since reading what he’d had to say, I’ve been working on that attitude, not just to do with cricket but to do with life in general. [That’s a general principle for me. I may write about music or food or sport or work or books or whatever, but what I’m usually trying to do is to understand something else about life].

So it took me a while to get used to people wearing pyjamas on the cricket field. It took me as long to get used to a night game and a white ball. I’m still getting used to T20.

And now.

Now comes a real test. A Test test. There’s a day-night Test in Edgbaston this coming summer. The ball used will probably be pink. Will I try and go? Will I even be willing to watch it?

Hmmm. There’s a part of me that says I should harrumph through my moustache, if I had one — that I should return some prize or honour, resign from somewhere, refuse something. Protest somehow.

But I won’t listen to that part. I don’t. Not any more.

[A digression. I don’t like DRS. Not DRS per se, which I’m fine about: but the way it has been implemented leaves much to be desired. The way the technology providers were chosen and imposed. The madness of the way “umpire’s call” has been protected. Stuff like that. I don’t feel any less progressive for disliking the way DRS has been implemented].

When I heard that day-night Test cricket was on its way, I decided I wanted to understand more about how changes like the 60 over game, the 50 over game, the 20 over game, day-night cricket, the wearing of pink pyjamas, the DRS, and so on, had actually affected the game.

The first pink-ball Test was actually Test number 2190. Does it mean the end of Test cricket as I know it? What could I learn from all that had gone earlier? Here are some of my observations:

We’re playing a lot of Test cricket. In the last seven years, we would have played about the same number of Tests that we played in the first seventy years of Test cricket. Test attendances may appear to be in decline, at least anecdotally, but just try getting a ticket for an Ashes Test in London and you may get a different view. I have debentures at Lords and at the Oval just to make sure I get to see all the touring teams.
I regularly hear assertions that the short game is somehow corrupting the long game, “twittering” cricket if I may be allowed to mangle the term that way. So I looked at the data.
Test number 2243 is being played right now. Since the Second World War, the number of games drawn as a percentage of games played looks like this:

1950-59: 31.1%
1960-69: 47.8%
1970-79: 42.4%
1980-89: 45.9%
1990-99: 35.7%
2000-09: 24.6%
2010-16: 22.7%

Surely fewer games drawn is a good thing. While I cannot draw a causal relationship between the short-form game and the improvement in the percentage of games not ending in a draw, it is a reasonable indicator of the health of the long game.
The first ever individual 300+ scores were compiled in the 1930s. So I took a look at the Tests-per-300 ratio, again by decade, concentrating on Tests since the Second World War:

1950-59: 2 triple centuries, 82 Tests per triple
1960-69: 3 triple centuries, 62 Tests per triple
1970-79: 1 triple century, 198 Tests per triple
1980-89: No triples recorded
1990-99: 4 triple centuries, 87 Tests per triple
2000-09: 8 triple centuries, 58 Tests per triple
2010-16: 7 triple centuries, 42.7 Tests per triple

So the number of Tests taken to score a triple century is the lowest it’s been since 1950. In fact there’s only one decade ever (1930-39) where the ratio was lower, and it’s an outlier for a number of reasons. If the short game is spoiling the concentration of the batsmen then it’s hard to understand how this trend is being evinced.
If I look at the RPO or runs-per-over data this is what it looks like:

1950-59: 2.3
1960-69: 2.49
1970-79: 2.69
1980-89: 2.86
1990-99: 2.86
2000-09: 3.2
2010-16: 3.22

So the batsmen are scoring more runs per over than they did before, they’re taking fewer Tests to churn out triple centuries, and more of the Tests are getting to a non-draw result than ever before. What’s not to like?
Not everyone is a fan of such quantitative ways of looking at the game. Some people prefer to complain that the game’s not the same, that something classic, something essential to the game, has “gone” with all the changes. It’s hard to deal with such statements, but here’s my personal take:
There was a time when the job of a Test opening batsman was to see the shine of the ball off, to batten the hatches while the pace bowlers tired themselves out. There was a time when batsmen were expected to “play themselves in”, to get used to the pitch and to the ball and to the conditions; this playing-in time was measured in overs, sometimes hours.
Along came people like Jayasuriya and Sehwag, and suddenly playing-in time became a myth. They started scoring freely from the moment they walked in. I don’t have good scientific evidence that there’s a causal relationship between the advent of the short game and the emergence of this phenomenon, but it seems unarguable. Limited-overs games aren’t particularly accommodating of playing-in time. It’s also nice to notice that both Jayasuriya and Sehwag have triple centuries to their names.
There was a time when there were no cross-bat strokes expected on the playing field, when Test cricketers played copybook cricket. Now we have strokes like the reverse sweep and the overhead thump over the wicketkeeper’s head. Good batsmen still play largely copybook cricket, but their repertoire has increased.
There was a time when bowlers were expected to be poor fielders and even poorer batsmen. Nowadays you see relay fielding and relay catching being considered normal, where one fielder stops a ball and another throws it back, or one rescues the ball back into the field of play and another catches it. Fielders have become a lot fitter and use techniques learnt largely from the short game. And bowlers can bat. Teams now bat all the way down the card.
All in all, when you look at modern Test cricket from a qualitative viewpoint, the batting’s better, the fielding’s better, the bowling’s better, all showing signs of having learnt from the short game.
I cannot spend this much time talking about how progressive thinking is changing the world of cricket for the better without mentioning Cage Cricket.

 

 

Yup. Cage cricket.

A six-player one-winner enclosed-space form of the game, designed to be gender-neutral.
Okay, I hear you. Harrumph in your moustache. Resign from your clubs. Return your OBE. Have your Victor Meldrew moment. Go on.
Once you’ve done that, please go take a look at the game.

And then look at these photographs I’ve just googled (my thanks to the originators of the photographs, I claim no authorship, just the use of search strings for street cricket).

 

 

Still think that Cage Cricket is all wrong? People have called it all sorts of things, in India I’ve heard terms like para cricket or galli cricket. What matters is that we lower the barriers to entry, get children involved early. Not in watching but in participating. Making it possible for them to play without having to have a cricket pitch or 22 players. Making it possible for them to learn, to develop, and even to compete at world level. Designed to suit the world they inhabit. With peer respect and feedback built in, gender-agnostic.

If you want to learn more about Cage Cricket, just go to the web site and click on Learn More. Simple as that.

It’s not just about cricket. These are things we have to get better at for everything: lowering barriers to entry, adapting to the world our children live in, building things that are relevant to their context, designing to enfranchise all.

I started with a quote from Douglas Adams, ostensibly to do with technology. I think I’ll end with a quote from Roy Amara, as quoted by Robert X Cringely:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

As I suggested at the start of this post, be generous in your interpretation of “technology”.

It’s a systematic treatment for something. It comprises tools and practices. It is based on some real knowledge, based on scientific methods of collection and testing.

I like what Kevin Kelly said about it many years ago, that “technology” is a means of speeding up evolution.

So nowadays, when I learn about a new technology, I check for myself. Am I falling into the trap of looking through the Adams lens? Am I discarding everything recent for everything I am used to, staying in my comfort zone? Am I falling into the trap of not seeing Amara’s Law in action? Am I overestimating short-run impacts while underestimating the long-run ones?

Am I basing all this on data? Reliable data? Data that stands up to corroboration, to source verification, data where I understand the basis of collection and analysis?

Otherwise it’s not cricket.