Category Archives: Blegs

Weighting criteria bleg

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Steven Jobs is perhaps the best CEO of the last hundred years.  This may reflect my ignorance of other CEOs – which is bordering on the comprehensive – but my reasoning goes like this this: In identifying extraordinary talent, one has to guard against luck.  How do we decide between luck and extraordinary talent? Run the experiment again.  I don’t know of too many executives who, in addition to having about five huge wins running a corporation – in this case Apple II, Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad (not to mention Pixar) – (and OK that’s not five things but no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition).  And he got himself ousted in the middle of this performance his successful comeback providing the best possible test of whether his earlier successes were just luck.

In any event I often wonder how Steve would go in a CEO review. After all, he’d be ranked on all sorts of metrics, the weight of each metric would probably be fixed in advance so his skills of leadership and vision (surely where he excels) would be rated 10/10 if there’s any sense to the world, but there would be other criteria. Like “makes all staff feel involved and valued and provides them with confidence in the transparency and integrity of the organisation”. Criteria like “has a transparent, open and constructive relationship with the board”.  Now I expect that Steve would do badly on the first of these and who knows about the second. So if, together they account for say 30% of his score, he wouldn’t do particularly well.

In fact an organisation is an organic entity and what one really wants is people at senior levels who are very good at certain things and some effective division of labour – so there’s an effective spread of talents and expertise and people play to their strengths and cover others’ weakness.

I wonder if anyone can point me to literature which explores the fallacy of composition I’ve implied is going on above and what might be done about it in determining criteria and the weighting between criteria that should apply when deliberating on important decisions.

Skype spamming: Bleg

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Skype spamming seems to be on the up and up. I had about six people yesterday telling me they wanted me to add them to their contacts. I just got my second today. When I tell them I’m busy, they all seem fine with that, and don’t keep bugging me – or most don’t. But most want me to add them to my contacts. Why is that such a big deal for them – and am I taking a risk chatting with them for a minute or so?

What’s the economic model behind this? And yes, some are from Nigeria. (Though it surprises me they say so.)

And the winner is . . .

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A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I’d buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews. Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt’s advice on the thread and buying a Motorola Atrix. It’s got bigger battery capacity and possibly better reception than other phones on Telstra.

So far so good, though it seems a bit clunkier than the more consumer/gaming friendly phones. Also the greater battery capacity seems mostly consumed in greater power consumption rather than longer life, but reception does seem noticeably better – not a small benefit. For a while I was crestfallen that it didn’t auto-reformat webpages on zoom, but I found a way to do that – I still can’t do it on iPhones or iPads though perhaps the cognoscenti can tell us how.

And of course there are those things that you’d need to hire the phone for a week or so to really find out before you buy – which I didn’t do. I can’t get it to auto-format when I’m zooming on Google Reader where I spend a lot of time – even though my last Android did that. Is there another browser I can download that will? Atrix seems to have some cut down Firefox as a default rather than the standard Android browser. A quick search on the Android market doesn’t turn up anything answering to that description however.

I had also imagined that the phone would synch with Outlook if I asked it to. Not a bit of it. I’m amazed and a bit outraged, but there you go. I have set up a kludge where I synch contacts in g-mail, but you need to be a paying customer of Google Apps to have it cross synch to Outlook – though Google release their Calendar synch without ties.

Also, someone gave me a Samsung Gallaxy II S to play with on a plane. The guy who’d just bought it loved it and I was seriously impressed.  It seemed very user friendly – and very thin which somehow more or less irrationally appealed to me. So I think I made the wrong choice, but I now have a new phone. I console myself with an analogy with Machiavelli’s suggestion that changing things is hard because the people you hurt hate you much more than the people you help love you. I notice the things that bug me about the Atrix, but I guess if I’d bought the Samsung I’d be noticing all the things that I didn’t like about it – perhaps its battery life is quite a bit shorter, which would be a pain.

Nevertheless all up, I leave you with the picture above. Only engineers could work out a docking arrangement in which you get to see the screen of the thing you’re docking with OR the screen of the thing you’re docking. In fact it’s worse than that – by the look of it.  If you want to look at the screen of your Atrix, you can’t operate your computer. I don’t think the UX guys got a look in. (Stop Press: on going through to the page on which this picture appears it says that the laptop ends up with a picture of the Android screen on it. Why the two couldn’t be side by side – or have an option for that is a bit beyond me, but there you go.  The review shows that the Atrix’s great merit is its power – it’s certainly fast.

The other part of the deal is Telstra for its better reception. They’ve already entirely stuffed up so many things, it makes me want to weep.  But it will all work out no doubt.

Troppo helps raise over $30,000 for Africa!

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I’m thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I’d promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by referring their clients to the site I’d match them. They proceeded to come up with some substantial and one very large donations. This took me to my maximum exposure – which was bounded by half the amount needed to fund all the kids shown which took Troppo’s contribution to over $11,000 with the final result being over $30,000 for the kids of Kibera. Pretty good huh? And thanks to all for participating.

And of course it’s not to late to give. Just download this pdf for the bank details and follow the instructions on the previous post and off you go.

Time to buy a new smartphone

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My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone.  I’m rather proud of being a technology laggard – it’s nice to have others at the bleeding edge.  Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I’d better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed – the iPhone – by then the latest version was a “2S” I think. Anyway I managed to leave it in a public place briefly and that was the end of it – for me anyway.  Someone had a second hand Android phone for sale so I bought it and have been very happy with it.  It was an HTC Desire.  I was happy with it until recently when it occasionally takes it upon itself to reboot – including when you’re in the middle of doing something.  At its worst it cycles through boot ups and downs until you take the battery out.  Not good. And HTC have been the soul of uselessness claiming that my phone has a British IMEI or whatever the number is called, so I have to take it up with an international HTC centre.  Which is more than I can be bothered with. So I need a new one.

Should it be an Android or an iPhone?  The Android is not quite as well integrated or designed, but it’s cheaper, more open and the most important features work better. The most basic thing for me is that the default browser in the Android is really excellent with by far the best feature that it reformats carriage returns as you zoom in.  Someone told me that the iPhone’s browser is built on the same open source platform as the Android’s one, but it doesn’t do that.  Neither does the iPad’s browser (nor the third party browser I’ve so far downloaded – Atomic). Completely beats me why they don’t do it, but there you go – Steve Jobs is the billionaire not me, so I’m sure it’s an entirely frivolous feature that I’m after – enabling me to read different lines by just moving my eyes, rather than scrolling left and right twice for each line.

The other thing which is really useful on the Android is the four button ‘global menu’ built into the hardware.  I’m not sure why Apple sticks to its one button solutions long after more buttons are so clearly demonstrated to be superior – but there you go.  The Android also synchs all things in the cloud, which is just much better than having to synch through the iTunes which is bad enough as music synching software and a joke as a synching program for a smart phone.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting the Samsung Gallaxy II S which has had rave reviews.

Your mission, gentle reader, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the following questions.

  1. Should I buy the phone I’m thinking of, or another one and if so why?
  2. Where is the best place to buy it – presuming as I think I should that buying it outright is the best way to buy it.
  3. Is there anything else I should know?

 

 

HTC

Raising funds for the children of Africa: dollar for dollar matching shock!

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Last Christmas, instead of sending gifts to its clients, the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is Peach Home Loans sent them donations to Women for Women in Africa in lieu thereof. I found out about it because a wonderful man, Peter Toms, who used to be the Principal of my son’s Primary School was increasingly involved with them in his retirement from the school.  So the money we used to pay the Fred Hollows Foundation went there.

Not being a slouch as a charity, they followed up with an end of financial year fund raising letter.  It consisted of the information below and the invitation to contribute.

So I thought I’d throw it open to all and offer to match any contributions Troppodillians make.  So here’s the deal.  Download this pdf for guidance on how to make a donation. If you intend making a donation, please comment with the amount below, or if you don’t want to do that, email me on ngruen at gmail and let me know how much you donated. If you don’t want to do that, please email Marguerite Anne Ryan who is on ma DOT ryan AT bigpond DOT net DOT au with your name and where to email a tax invoice to.  Donations are tax deductible. Continue reading →

Bleg: Can you explain this graph? (changes in male full-time employment)

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As the graph below shows, the proportion of men in full-time work has fallen over time. Every recession the proportion falls sharply and in each recovery it fails to bounce back to its pre-recession level.

When I show people this graph they often offer explanations — it’s population aging, kids staying in education longer, or married men staying at home to look after their kids. But when I look at the data more closely, I’m still puzzled.

Occasionally people will interpret my question is a plea to return Australia to the 1950s where men won the bread and women were detained in fibro boxes surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns. I’ll be reminded that men are not a disadvantaged group and that women’s wages still lag behind men’s.

But despite the helpful explanations and the risk of having my motives misinterpreted, I’m still curious about the data. I suspect it might have something to do with structural change in the labour market — shifts in the demand for different kinds of skill. And I imagine these changes have affected some groups of women too. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the decline of industries like manufacturing?

In the end, I’m not entirely sure how to explain this. Can Troppo readers help?

More graphs below the fold.

Continue reading →