First Hand Account Of Christopher Hitchens Attack in Beirut

Michael J. Totten wrote a first hand account of the attack on Christopher Hitchens in Beirut last week.

Mike and I went to school together in Iowa City. Someone gave him the nickname of 'McGyver Mike' back in school. Mike had a pretty sweet mullet back then. He certainly is living an action hero like existence.

Good Essay on DRM and the Myth of Piracy

Ken Fisher wrote an excellent essay about Digital Rights Management and the real motivation for using it on Ars Technica.

I've believed that the litigation, threats, and the nastiness shown by the trade groups, specifically the RIAA, has less to do with combating losses through piracy and more to do with control and maximizing revenue through their customers.

I'm very curious what the public reaction will be to the next ridiculously inflated lawsuit the trade groups attempt to litigate. I think the reaction will meet far more resistance from the public now that people are finding themselves jobless and out of their homes. People are going to have less sympathy for the industries that employ do all that they can to deliver as little value to their customers as possible while also trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the customers at the same time.

More thoughts on the viability of evolutionary computation

I thought a little bit about the viability of using evolutionary computation in the field. That is, using Darwinian principles to design software.

In my writeup of Richard Gabriel's presentation to OTUG, I speculated that using evolutionary design may be a natural extension to the working specification or Test Driven Development principles. Essentially, if a specification can be provided in terms that can be fed into an evolutionary development environment, then the implementation can be left to evolution.

The downside to using evolutionary computation to implement our software is that not many humans may intimately understand how the implementation works. I began to think about how different letting a computer implement our designs is versus what many companies are doing with offshore development.

The model of offshore software development with many companies is to keep the architects and high level designing engineers stateside and send the work in the trenches overseas, i.e., all the finer grained detail work. I believe that many organizations that adopt this type of model are naive in thinking that it will simply work without a significant investment in establishing communication protocols between the high level designers and the people responsible for actually implementing the software.



The designers become an intermediary between the business/business analysts and the implementing engineers. The high level engineers take the requirements from the customers and give them to the engineers. They rely on their ability to communicate those requirements. Their people skills if you will.

The pitfall that friends of mine have encountered when trying to operate as the designer/intermediary reads like a Threes Company episode, i.e., breakdowns in communication cause considerable problems that seem to get discovered so late in the product development cycle that they require either a heroic effort to keep the project on schedule or they cause delays in the product's release.

People complain about the code coming from India being sloppy and difficult to read. It is clear that little attention is paid to considerations, such as future maintenance. Much of this I believe is due to cultural differences between Americans and the people who are hired to write software.

One must question the reasons why an offshore model of software development is implemented. Some organizations do this because sufficient qualified domestic help is unavailable. Company's are trying to save money by shipping work to a cheaper place. That's the theory, but the practice is wrought with more hidden costs and difficulties that often make offshoring more expensive than just doing the work in-house.

If the motivation is having cheaper workers regardless of the added burden and workload of the senior people in house, one should consider the difference between the added workload of the architects and high level designers and specifying the program parameters to a computer to design the software.

If the difference between specifying the acceptance criteria to a program is not sufficiently more expensive than specifying the acceptance criteria to a team of developers on the other side of the globe.

Given sufficient specification and evolutionary cycles, the resulting software will outperform the software that is developed by any human designer.

I think the next step in evolutionary computation is a system whereby human designers specify an interface and behavior and fitness model for software components, and the computer figures out how to meet those specifications as closely to the specification as possible.

Letting a computer handle class implementations, or even class level optimizations, seems like a natural progression from the current state of software development. Consider the level of abstraction that object oriented development and programming in domain specific languages has taken us. We're already trusting much of the implementation to the computers. It only makes sense to push the bar and see what we can do with another level.

Facebook's new Terms Of Service, WTF?

I never got into Facebook. If you want to find me, my name is shared by a couple other people, I'm the Paul Wiedel from Naperville, Illinois, in case you, dearest reader, were wondering.

My wife is a big fan of Facebook though. She's constantly getting back in touch with old 'friends' from high school. She enjoys it.

Some of my current friends who I do keep in touch with have been recently discussing whether to get a Facebook account. Some of them cite privacy concerns as a foreboding reason. Others, or maybe just me, think that Facebook is a time abyss and prefer to keep a web presence elsewhere.

It seems there is a new reason not to go on Facebook, Facebook's new Terms of Service.

My shorter version of the TOS is Facebook claim's ownership of everything that is put on Facebook. Considering how people like to put intimate details of their lives out on Facebook, this should be alarming, or at the least regrettable, by many of Facebook's users.

One of the big selling points to Facebook when it became more popular than MySpace is Facebook's privacy settings. People felt more comfortable sharing details about their lives on Facebook because of the privacy settings.

I can imagine quite a few people with very private facets of their lives turned to Facebook for support. Facebook claims exclusive rights to that information.

Take for example people with gambling problems. Perhaps they felt comfortable joining a support group for people with gambling problems. Now Facebook claims that they have the exclusive rights to do with that information what they want. If I wanted to monetize that information I'd build a list of those people's contact information and sell it to casinos.

They can do more than just put your name on a list for telemarketers. People upload and tag images of themselves. Say one of these problem gamblers has pictures of themselves on this list of problem gamblers. This is also valuable to the gaming industry. Casinos use facial recognition software to identify cheats and undesirable people. I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't use the same technology to identify 'desirable' people and make sure that they receive a little extra attention should they fall off the wagon and walk into a casino.

I personally think that something will come to replace Facebook as the preferred platform for social networking. I don't know what it is, but it seems that Facebook is on its way down.

I don't mean to alarm people, but there are people out there who are going to use the information you share with the web against you. If you have a chunk of time, I recommend watching Steve Rambam's lecture about privacy. Rambam is a private investigator who is very good at finding people and finding information about people. He says that people and technology make his job very easy for him.

My advice with Facebook is the same advice that my dad gave me back in 1991: assume everything you communicate electronically is going to be read by the rest of the world.

EDIT: It seems that Facebook has changed their mind.

Google Tech Talk: Beyond Test Driven Development: Behavior Driven Development

Here's a good talk about Behavior Driven Development by Dave Astels, given to Google.



BDD is different from Unit Testing and TDD by specifying pieces of behavior for software and testing that that behavior is build within software. Don't take my word for it, check the video out yourself.

It's 47:41 of well spent time.

Richard Gabriel's lecture at OTUG: 2/9/2009-- my mind is blown

Gripes first, praise second.

 
First gripe: it was a bummer that Jared Richardson was in town to speak at the Twin Cities Java User Group on the same night. I would have wanted to see him speak. EDIT: Jared was kind enough to record the presentation, link here.

Second Gripe: I hate slow reveals. They waste everyone's time. Gabriel's lecture was a slow reveal. The first half of the lecture built context into the concept of Ultra Largescale Systems(ULS), and descriptions of Metadesigns for building them.

I'll cut to the chase of the first two Metadesigns: 1 is waterfall or what I heard Neil Ford describe as a Big Design Up Front, BDUF. Metadesign 2: is stepwise design, or what we're calling iterative development, or Agile development.

I think that it would have been sufficient to state that Metadesigns 1 and 2 are insufficient for developing ULS and proceed straight to the meat of the lecture. Effectively, I think that over half of the lecture was spent recanting things that we already know.

That is the conclusion of my negative criticism.

Conceptually an ULS is a system that is beyond a human's comprehension. Some examples that were given are the entirety of New York City, a healthcare system for every living being on the planet, the entire ecosystem of the planet's oceans. An Ultra Largescale System is by definition beyond the design and understanding abilities of humans.

How do humans build such systems? Metadesign 3: evolutionary design, or using evolution to design the solution.

In my opinion, this is where the lecture started getting interesting.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

I must confess that Genetic Algorithms are a curiosity of mine. I like the idea of tellin a computer what a want, giving it some information and letting the computer come up with a solution.

The example Gabriel gave is Adrian Thompson's Exploring Beyond the Scope of Human Design: Automatic generation of FPGA configurations through artificial evolution.

Thompson's experiment was to use the principles of evolution to dictate computer logic. In the case of Thompson's experiment, the desired trait of his circuit is to produce a circuit that can differentiate the following tones: 1 khz, 10 khz, and every other tone. The building blocks of the circuit are 100 FPGAs, or a 10 x 10 matrix of relatively simple programmable logical components.

A fitness algorithm was set in place that mimics the principles of evolution. Circuit designs that are the most fit carry their traits on to the next generation. Ones that are not deemed to be fit, do not carry their genes on.

...how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!
--Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

The evolution was allowed to run for 5000 generations. The first thousand or so produced circuits that performed poorly or outright failed. The circuits improved over time though. The circuits evolved to outperform human designed circuits.



The circuit was analyzed after the experiment and some very curious details emerged. Only 21 of the FPGA gates were used. 79 of the 100 gates could be removed completely from the circuit without affecting the circuit's performance.

5(in gray) Gates appeared to serve no logical function. However, if they are removed from the array, the circuit fails to work. The same circuit's performance degraded when it was duplicated on another array. On software it also was degraded.

The circuit adopted feedback loops and other characteristics of an analog circuit.

What's truly amazing to me is the design. It is something that is outside of the realm of human comprehension. Nobody would think to design a circuit this way because it doesn't make sense to include seemingly disconnected and worthless elements.

I shouldn't speak for others, but I would never think to include the extra elements of the circuit because it would strike me as wasteful and cluttered. The result looks like a maintenance nightmare.

The circuit is truly amazing. Experts don't have a clear understanding of why all the elements are necessary. Only by removing them are they able to see that they are.

My own speculation is that there are small variations in the FPGA gates and only through evolutionary exhaustion were they found.

This is fascinating to me for many reasons and the implications of using the principles of evolution through natural selection to design solutions to find optimized solutions to problems.

Consider the current results of evolution through natural selection. Life, is truly amazing. Consider the diversity of animals, plants, and microbial life. Life is able to adapt exceptionally to myriad environmental conditions. Life at an evolutionary level is unforgiving, you fail, you die, and there aren't any little ones like you after you're gone.

The same rules work surprisingly well with software. I think that it can be complementary to Test Driven Development. I wonder if evolutionary design could actually replace the human part of development.

Consider the differences between TDD and evolutionary software development: both can state their acceptance criteria upfront and both provide a solution to the problem until the acceptance criteria can be met.

The advantage that evolutionary design has over human designed solutions is the absence of any human prejudice. Evolution is really a results oriented environment--maintainability, comprehension, beauty, personality, and all the other human influences are not part of the equation--well unless they are defined as part of the acceptance criteria. Given enough generations, an evolutionary design will produce the most fit solution as defined by the acceptance criteria.

By letting evolution manage the implementation of our goals, implementations that exceed the abilities of human comprehension can be produced. In essence, the programmer is god like in her ability to create programs that exceed her own ability to create a program.

Gabriel said that the results of evolutionary design is troubling to creationists and evolutionists. The trouble to creationists should be obvious. It shouldn't be a concern to the rest of us though. There are plenty of examples where observable reality should be troubling to those who buy in to a religious dogma. For example, if the universe is only 6,000 years old and we are able to observe stars that are 5 million light years away--and much further for that matter--and we know the speed of light to be constant; how can one honestly continue to believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. Something has to give.

For those who believe in evolution, Gabriel asserts, the results of evolutionary design should be troubling because we, humans, may not be able to explain the results. Are we to believe that an intelligent designer stepped in and created the results of the evolutionary design? The results actually affirm my belief in the viability of evolution.

But I digress, evolutionary design certainly does raise some issues that some may find in conflict with their faith. Gabriel did mention a computer scientist who refused to work with evolutionary design because, presumably, of her beliefs.

Other questions arise though. Who should take ownership and responsibility of the results of evolutionary design? Certainly the first person to claim ownership of something that can be monetized will want to claim ownership, but what about responsibility. Will that person accept the liability of the software that they claim to own. What if an evolutionary designed program turns out to cause people harm? Who should be held liable? The concept of ownership can be challenged by this method of design.

Second Life for Software

Gabriel concluded with a proposition that for evolutionary designed software to take the next step and be integrated into an ULS an environment where software can interact must be created. He suggested a Second Life be created for software. His proposition is a virtual world where humans and software can interact. In this world software would take on physical characteristics of volume, mass, odor, color, shape, and sound.

In this world software would be free to evolve. The software that is useful or beautiful to humans would thrive. Gabriel kind of lost me at this point. I'm going to have to think about it for a while.

Removing the suck out of Experts Exchange

There's nothing I don't like more than thinking I've found an answer to a technical problem only to find that the solution is on the Experts Exchange.

For those who have not had the misfortune of running across the Experts Exchange, it is a web site that purports to have 'expert' solutions to technical questions. It very well may have the solutions, but they want more money for the solution that I have yet to be willing to part with.

They actually do offer the solution for free, but it's buried under a ton of spam quality ads. It has been a long time that I've needed technical help so desperately that I would wade through an Experts Exchange page, but alas it is no longer necessary. Coffee Powered offers instructions for bypassing the spam and getting to the good stuff with the help of the Remove It Permanently plugin for Firefox.

Foxes Jumping On A Trampoline

Much better than the bear on a trampoline.

Here are some command one liners

Command-line Fu is a pretty cool site.

Excellent Set of Notes for Java Programming

Fred Swartz put together a wonderful set of notes on Java Programming.

I wish I had a nice comprehensive and clear list of the little details about Java programming when I started.

As we speak, many words are dying, you can help

Save The Words has a fun challenge and a fun UI. The site gives users the opportunity to 'adopt' a word and find a way to work it into our regular conversations.

For example, during the Minnesota Wild game on Friday, instead of noting that a fight broke out I could have commented that a display of the players' pugnastics was occurring quite early in game.

What? You aren't familiar with pugnastics? Surely you gest. Certainly you know that pugnastics is a display of one's pugilistic ability and it has nothing to do with gymnastics for any breed of dog.

Nice Write Up On Cash 4 Gold

Cockeyed.com has a nice write up of an experience trying to sell some 'scrap' gold to Cash 4 Gold.

Cash 4 Gold is a company that advertises during the late night demographic and during some of the shows I watch--not sure why they think the science show demographic would be interested in their business. The sales pitch goes like this: send us your gold and we'll send you money. They show people with cash and they look happy.

Cash 4 Gold does claim that they have their own furnaces and can therefore offer excellent prices. They really ought to explain how they can deliver and insure sending gold through the mail.

In the linked article, the authors had some gold appraised at a pawn shop for approximately $200. They sent their gold in to Cash 4 Gold and received an offer of $60. I wonder if the $140 is to pay for the postage.

The Cockeyed.com authors called Cash 4 Gold and refused the offer. Cash 4 Gold offered to tamper with the paperwork and make it look like the gold is really worth $178. Ooh, I feel naughty, they messed with the numbers. Don't tell the boss or you might get fired. That better deal is still a good $20 less than the pawn shop would give them.

Now here comes the fun part of the transaction, getting your gold back. The authors didn't state whether they ultimately accepted the offer. I'd like to know how Cash 4 Gold plans to return gold if an agreement can't be reached. If they are like other businesses that drag their feet or worse when doing things that don't make them money, people could be looking at a long wait, lots of frustration, and lots of uncertainty.

Caveat Emptor. Please, if you think about doing business with someone over the television, check them out first.

EDIT: here's more information about Cash 4 Gold from a former employee. Surprise, he says they're shady.

I can't think of a good reason why a person would want to business with an outfit like Cash 4 Gold or the Goldkit people.

From Lifehacker: Instructions for setting up Boxee on an Apple TV

Lifehacker has a nice set of instructions for setting up the free media center software Boxee on an Apple TV.

The cost of an Apple TV is about $200 and the software is free.

There seem to be quite a bit of sources for getting content that don't run the risk of civil litigation. It might be worth trying out.

They claim that it makes a good replacement for cable and satellite television service. I'm intrigued whether I could ever break my addiction to live television. If watching my college team playing football were not such an irrationally high priority for me, I'd probably be happy with dumping the television service.

I wonder if Boxee will make a suitable replacement for the HBO subscription I have now. There really isn't anything on HBO that I feel I need to watch anymore. It seems that every show I really liked has run its course or been canceled.

Not Sure What to Serve This Superbowl? How About A Snack Stadium

For less than $90 you can get over 24,000 calories of snack, over 1,200 grams of fat, and the most awesome arrangement of snacks ever made.

Behold the snack stadium.

For what it's worth, I think the summer sausage blimp is not optional.

JQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet

Cheat Sheets are awesome.
Here's one for JQuery 1.3.

Social and Market Norms in the workplace, OR How to play with fire with payroll costs

I've been reading Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. It's an outstanding book that looks at why people act in irrational ways.

Predictably irrational gives fascinating insight into some of the forces that cause people to act against what an objective observer might judge to be their best interests.

Each of the chapters is excellent, but one that really struck a chord with me is the one regarding social and market norms. In this chapter Ariely cites an example from Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, the one where an Israeli daycare provider found that issuing fines for parents picking up their children late had an effect that is contrary to the providers' intent.

Nutshell synopsis, daycare provider wants parents to pick up their kids on time. Daycare provider issues a fine to late parents. More parents are late after the fine is imposed.

What happened? Levitt and Ariely believe that the parents felt obliged to pick up their children in a timely manner because social norms influenced their decision. When the fee was imposed, the parents felt that they no longer had a social obligation to pick up their children on time. Instead, they could evaluate whether their time is worth the fee. What is more surprising is after the fine is revoked, there was no noticeable decline in late parents. The genie was let out of the bottle. Once the relationship moved to a market relationship, the social norms went out the door.

Social norms are truly a powerful force. Social norms are the social rules that we observe because we feel it is the right thing to do. Often, social norms coincide with other rules. For example, there are legal and social rules that strongly discourage murder.

The interesting thing about social norms and market norms is the social norms are more effective than the market norms for motivating people, but once the market norms are introduced into the equation, the social norms lose their value.

Take occupations like teachers for example. Relative to other professions, teachers aren't particularly well compensated. Any teacher who got into teaching because of the money, probably shouldn't be teaching. Not because they aren't doing it for the benefit of educating children, but because getting into education because of the money brings to question serious deficiencies in one's ability to make sound decisions. Who knows what kind of crazy things such a person would try to teach children.

I digress. It's fair to say that money is not what drives our teachers to do what they do. If teaching were about financial compensation and only about financial compensation, there would be a shortage of good teachers of crisis proportions. Either the median salary of teachers would need to rise or the quality of education would continue to dwindle to make up for the difference in the market.

It's also fair to say that there must be significant social benefits that our teachers receive. There just isn't a logical explanation for why so many well qualified, capable, and intelligent individuals choose a profession that does not compensate them competitively. The same can be said for other professions, such as police officers and fire fighters.

What Ariely postulates is that introducing more market norms to the equation will introduce a negative effect. By adding incentives for getting students to reach higher test scores or meet other performance metrics, the focus of educating will no longer be on educating children, but on meeting those performance metrics.

What would the net effect of nullifying social compensation and increasing market compensation? I predict that more good teachers will leave the profession and the quality of our children's education will continue to decline. Plainly put, if you make the job about money and meeting performance metrics the job will only be about money and meeting performance metrics. Considering what is at stake in our education system, any decline is a tragedy.

How does this affect the rest of us? We all receive social compensation for our work. We often do not realize it, but it is real and it is powerful. Social compensation is fragile.

You Can Do It, We Don't Care

Take a look at Home Depot. People who worked at the Pre-Nardelli Home Depot say that the environment of that business was about helping people and following the motto "Do the right thing." Many retired tradespeople chose to work at Home Depot because they enjoyed the job and they enjoyed helping people. By most accounts I've heard from people who worked at Home Depots, they all claim that they didn't want to leave until Nardelli came in.

There isn't enough room to discuss all the things Nardelli did to change Home Depot, but one thing that did change was the atmosphere. Cutting the number of people on staff and changing their focus from customer service to other tasks does more than reduce costs, it completely changed the personality of the store. In short time Home Depot changed from a store where a do it yourselfer could go in to a store and not only get good service, but also good advice on how to do a home improvement project to a gigantic store that is staff anemic and lousy with automatic checkout lanes.

The Home Depot changed from a warm friendly store to, well just go to one and you'll see. Friends of mine who used to work there said their return policies were so generous that enterprising fraudsters would take items off the shelves and go directly to the customer service counter to return them. They wouldn't even bother shoplifting and the store would give them cash. When was the last time a business was that willing to provide an outstanding customer experience?

When Home Depot had these policies and staffed helpful people who had time to be helpful I used to almost exclusively shop there for my home improvement needs. It was great, I couldn't look at a shelf full of products without having someone ask if I had any questions. When the staffing was cut at Home Depot it really changed how I viewed the shopping experience. We went from having copious help to insufficient.

I remember one experience where my wife and I waited a good twenty minutes in a nearly empty store to order some blinds for our windows. We waited because the one person working there was juggling helping the customer who was there before us, and answering drive by questions by other customers. The person did the best she could, but still our experience wasn't very good. Without the service value I began comparing my experiences shopping at Home Depot with my experiences shopping at Menards.

Save Big Money

Menards is cheaper. Menards doesn't have exceptionally knowledgeable people working there, but they know their products. There are also quite a few people working there. I've never had trouble finding someone to help me. The inventory at Menards isn't as high end as what I see at Home Depot. There are some cheap things at Menards, but there are also some good things there too. The inventory isn't always as organized as it could be, but there's a lot of it. The Menards stores in my area have done a good job improving the way that their items are organized. There are still the occasional areas where you need to hunt through the displays to find what you want, but it's been a while since I've seen a pile of mixed plumbing fittings in an area.

After comparing the two stores I prefer Menards. If I can get what I need there I'm happy to do it. The Home Depots just don't give me anything extra that I want.

What happened there? At one point I was willing to ignore the allure of lower prices, and a shorter drive to shop at the Home Depot instead of Menards. The value of good service outweighed the price and convenience. Once my perception of Home Depot changed through my own experiences and some of the Nardelli era snafus I saw no advantage of shopping at Home Depot over Menards. Once my perception that my business was unimportant to Home Depot, they couldn't compete.

I have friends who worked at Home Depot during the pre Nardelli times. They look back on it fondly. My friend Keith, a retired electrician, said that a single sentence directed them back then: "Do the right thing." He laments that it was all about helping people, back then the customers were happy, the employees were happy, and the stores were doing well.

Now, when I see a Home Depot commercial that shows customers getting hands on help from a Home Depot employee it has an effect that is what I think is the exact opposite of what the commercial makers' intent is. I imagine that the images of a friendly and ethnically diverse group of helpful, clean, and competent Home Depot employees thoroughly explaining and educating a couple of delighted customers would create a positive image in my mind of what shopping at the Home Depot is. It's funny though. I think about how much the commercial misrepresents my experiences at Home Depot. I think about how the commercials are not a factual representation of my experiences or their reputation. In fact, their reputation is the opposite image from the commercials.

The net effect on me is I believe that not only is the assertion that customer service at Home Depot is the opposite of what I see on the commercials, but everything else asserted with the commercial is also equally inaccurate. Why the hard feelings? I think it's a natural reaction of my emotions. The Home Depot used to sell itself, and deliver, on the fact that doing business with them is more than just doing business. They played with social norms. It feels personal. The company chose to no longer continue selling the social norms and it feels like we lost something. It's like an old friend is trying to cheat us. It hurts.

Social Norms in the Workplace

How does this apply to the workplace? Well, a lot of the same forces are in play in the workplace. Many of us do not view our employment as strictly a professional endeavor that is devoid of any personal interaction. We form relationships with our colleagues, our managers, and our subordinates. We form friendships, romances, and acquaintanceships through the workplace. It happens, we're social animals. Different companies have different cultures, but the vast majority of them try to define their culture as being more than just a 9 to 5 job.

There are many advantages to selling the social benefits to a job. Defining a corporate culture is a way to displace workers demands for higher pay. Look at Google and Apple. Both of them have a reputation for bringing in some of the most talented people in their fields. Nobody can compete with Apple's industrial designers. They make beautiful functional products. Google's web applications are world class. Would it surprise you to hear that the base salaries isn't that great at either of these companies? The reputation is that most people take a pay cut to go work for Apple or Google. There are the exceptional few who got in early and made millions from the companies, but there are also the many who are simply doing well. Why do people choose to work for Apple and Google, the interesting work is one big reason, but I posit that the allure of the cultures at Apple and Google is just as attractive if not more.

If a company can get excellent people to work for 10% less than their market value by spending 1% of their market value on expenses that define a corporate culture: e.g., free meals, corporate outings, onsite speakers and events. If you can get away with hiring an exceptional engineer who could make upwards of $200,000 for $180,000 plus spending $2,000 a year on free onsite meals doesn't it make financial sense? That's an $18,000 savings.

Obviously it makes sense, many successful companies do this. The people who made the decisions to provide these benefits may not be aware of the sociological explanation for why defining a culture through perks and benefits makes financial sense, but they do see value in it. The real value is the social relationships and the connections the people feel through the culture. That's what displaces the difference between the actual and market values for the employees. The stronger the culture, the wider the gap can be between the market and what people will be willing to enthusiastically accept.

Salary is the most expensive benefit. Salary can make up for a lack of culture or a negative culture, but it's very expensive.

There is a catch to displacing salary with culture. If the social compensation is reduced, subverted, or eliminated it can have a catastrophic effect. The effects are not only damaging to morale, but they can actually raise payroll above market rates.

Consider the following two points: Once people think about their work in market terms, they tend to ignore social benefits. People tend to be satisfied with what they have if they are not thinking about what their external options are. Both of these points are covered in Ariely's book, and are backed with sociological experiments.

Think about them this way: we're happy to help people for free. We're happy to help until we find out the the other people helping are getting paid. If we're getting paid to help, we're happy with it until we find out that everyone else is making more than we are.

One of the seemingly obvious opportunities to cut expenses is to discontinue the seemingly unnecessary 'perks'. The 'perks' have a value and an ROI. The value can be measured by subtracting the salary of each employee from the perceived market salary of each employee. If the employees aren't constantly issuing ultimatums for more money, the value of the perks/culture can be defined as the difference.

That's All Well and Good, but Money Doesn't Grow on Trees

It is not surprising that perks tend to get cut during down economies. The obvious reason is that perks are perceived to be unessential expenses. When funds are tight, people would rather have jobs than free coffee. This only works when groups of companies are cutting costs. People are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their social compensation.

It's difficult to differentiate the essential from the ceremony in what defines social compensation. Cutting perks, may only remove the ceremony, but preserve the essence. Conversely, it may kill the social compensation.

The perks aren't the social compensation, they just facilitate them. That's the thing about the perks, the real value is how they bring people together and form relationships.

To ignore the value of social relations, culture, and how they relate to perks and social compensation is to misunderstand people and to neglect an asset.

If highly skilled workers find themselves not only without the social benefits that they to which they became accustomed and valued, and making less than their market value; consider the situation. The worker feels that they not only lost something they enjoy, but also they feel like they are not being fairly compensated. Should that employee procure an employment offer, it's safe to assume that they will find something at or near their market value. To keep that employee the employer would need to match or, more likely beat the market offer. This isn't the end though, there are two side effects that further move to increase the cost of employment: 1) the social norms are gone for the first employee, he will likely continue to court other potential employers. The employer will find the act of matching offers a more regular occurrence. 2) Other employees will find that they can be in the situation of the first employee. Before long, most of the employees will be thinking about their job in market norms and looking to upgrade.

Providing culture as compensation is like playing with fire. An employer can reap tremendous value by providing perks and benefits that facilitate or spawn social compensation. An employer can also lose that value and more by subverting foundations of the social compensation.

My advice to those employers who find themselves in a position where budget cuts need to be made is this: the goodwill that is generated through the social compensation can be preserved if the market norms are not introduced into the equation. The perks can be removed so long as the culture is maintained. If a 'We're all in this together.' attitude is sincerely projected from an employer, the employees will sacrifice and stay loyal through tough times. A wise leader, will demonstrate that those at the top are sacrificing as much as those below them, if not more. That will preserve or grow the culture and the social compensation.

It's only when the employees feel that they are sacrificing disproportionately to the managers that the social compensation is eroded.

Beautiful Visualization Of Zip Codes

This is a really nice way to display Zip codes.

Handy Python Cheat Sheet

Added Bytes has a handy cheat sheet for Python programming. I love these things even if I never really use them.

WHAT?!!? Those Amish Made Miracle Heaters Don't Run On Special Amish Magic

I hope that none of this is a surprise, but there are people who actually believe television ads that sell products that claim to produce free energy. There are people who aren't instantly skeptical of any product that is not sold in stores and is sold directly through television.

If you take anything I say to heart, please take the following: 1. If you are concerned with getting the best value for your money, you will not be well served buying unfamiliar products through television.
2. If a free, or nearly free source of energy were available, wouldn't everybody be using that source and stop using coal, oil, and the other sources?

With that said, I read a nice write up about those magic Amish heaters.

The Amish are not well known for their prowess in the applied sciences. I don't think that they have any Nobel Laureates to claim as a community yet. In fact, I think they have some sort of a religious aversion to science. According to some people's beliefs, God made everything, and if I recall correctly, science is a thing, so that means God made science. If we are to honor the things that God made, shouldn't we embrace science. Isn't that a divine gift? But I digress.

Anyhow, the Amish don't have a reputation as proficient technologists. Even if they did, why really sell the fact that the product is Amish made? As the original ads read, the heaters were more efficient than other heat sources and if you'd buy the Amish made mantle, they'd throw in the magic heat source for free.

Hmm, all I need to do is buy the mantle at a price that is not readily disclosed and I get free magic Amish heat. Sounds like a heck of a deal.

As it turns out, the magical Amish heater is really a regular electric space heater with a non-functional Amish made wooden mantle. Scientists still have not identified the magic, but it does seem to produce just as much heat as other electric heaters for about the same cost.

For the low low low price of ~$300 to $350, free magical heat sounds wonderful. I will use it to power a generator to provide all of my household electrical and heating needs.

That all sounds wonderful, but there is little substance to the claims. The heaters are about the same as the ones that you can get at a store and the mantles don't add any functional value to the equation.

I would venture to guess that the reason that the products are sold as Amish is because we, as a people, are unfamiliar with the Amish. We also tend to think of them favorably as good, honest, hard-working people. Why would these good people rip us off?

The company that sells the products is likely not an Amish company. They purchase one of their parts from Amish people and market the whole appliance in such a way that can easily confuse people to believe that it is an Amish product.

I would advise anyone who is considering purchasing this product to take another look at what's being sold and not make a purchase that may disappoint them.

Collection of Code Smells

Here's a nice collection of code smells. It's been a while since I've had to suffer the stench of really bad code smells.

The non-obvious-names smell is my own least favorite. I remember wondering what the class ApplyMeToo.java was supposed to do. Apparently it was meant to complement the logic in ApplyMe.java.

I can't recall the exact logic that ApplyMeToo.java was doing, but I think it had something to do with assigning drugs to a benefit plan, or some such. Like doctors, health insurance companies get to bury their mistakes.