UK General Election 2010

It is general election time again and we have the usual blanket media coverage. The media, and in particular the political commentators, love elections and seem convinced that everyone else shares their enthusiasm. All the partys are busily trying to push what they hope will be vote winning policies, but sadly I don't think many voters trust any of the partys to deliver! Blair promised a referendum on electoral reform but it never happened (although the Lib Dems would definitely deliver on that one). The Conservatives are promising to reverse the planned increase in national insurance contributions, but I suspect that if elected they will say that economic situation is worse than they thought and they will not be able to do it after all.

The UK media is saturated with election coverage, all presumably to inform voters as to how they might use their vote. However I find it hard to get interested as I am one of the 60% effectively disenfranchised by our ludicrously unfair voting system, and am in a constituency which always returns the same party candidate. In the other constituencies only 60% will vote anyway, many of whom will have decided how they are going to vote before the election was called. Basically around 10% of the electorate will decide who forms the next government.

Computer Tools for Improved Communication

Social networking tools may be the answer to intra-group communication, but do you have a clear understanding of the question?

The use of social networking tools across wide-area networks is revolutionising the way some people communicate. There is now is a choice of e-mail, forums, social networks (Facebook, etc.), news feeds (RSS/Atom), microblogging (twitter, etc.), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and instant messaging (IM). The use of social networks has grown rapidly for non-office based communication, and an attraction for many people is that there are no boundaries – the world is your audience. Some of us have investigated using the same, or similar, tools in closed group environments: in the office or in education for example. However in the office one form of communication dominates: e-mail, even though it is far from the best choice for many purposes.

To facilitate discussions information has to be two-way: e-mail is two-way but is not, in my view, ideal for discussions. Micro-blogging and blogging are essentially one-way, although most blog software nowadays allow comments. IM is two-way and Yammer, which can be considered to be a combination of IM and micro-blogging, is suitable for discussions. Examples of one-way communications are news feeds, which usually use RSS and/or Atom.

E-mail

E-mail is the only tool that has reached critical mass, and in the office environment you can usually assume everyone has an account, and that almost everyone checks their mail at least once a day. The ubiquity of e-mail encourages most people to use it not only for simple messages, but also for file transfers and multi-person discussions. Discussions by e-mail have many problems: in particular the sender of a message decides who is to be part of the discussion and, if others want to join in (assuming they even know that a discussion is going on), it can be difficult to catch up with the messages already sent. E-mail discussions frequently, and often inadvertently, result in information silos and poor intra-group communication.

Forums

On-line forums are designed specifically for multi-person discussions, but they seem to be unpopular with many people.

Microblogging

Microblogging (microsharing), and in particular Twitter, is a very different way of communicating. Twitter is in many ways a remarkable concept in that it is frequently hard to explain to a non-user why they would ever want to use it. The basic idea of reporting what you are currently doing (in no more than 140 characters) at any given time seems to many rather pointless, but once you start using it it can become addictive – although some people remain unconvinced even after using it. Because messages have to be short and plain text, it is easy to deliver them to portable devices such as smartphones, and as a result many applications (Twibble, et al) have been released, feeding off the Twitter concept. The only way to transmit longer messages or images, is to upload a file and reference it in the text, and this has resulted in sites such as twitpic.com. Twitter is increasingly being used by service providers (bus and train companies, computing services, etc.) to provide service information such as cancelled or delayed trains. Google have recently released Buzz which competes with twitter to some extent, but has many more facilities. It seems to have attracted a significant following, particularly former users of the social networking site Friendfeed. (Friendfeed's future is uncertain after its purchase by Facebook.)

Twitter is not really suitable for use within an organisation (although users of CoTweet or Hootsuite may disagree), but other microblogging tools such as Yammer are designed for this market. Yammer provides a communication service for a closed group defined by a mail domain. Users register with their e-mail address, and confirm that they are a valid user by replying to the generated message. Although superficially similar to Twitter, there is no 140 character limit, and messages can be sent to pre-defined groups (similar to chat rooms in IRC systems), or to everyone. Sub-groups within the domain can be private or public , and messages can be sent to IM systems, by SMS, and by e-mail. Although the basic service is free, an organisation would need to pay to get control of the network, and if you do claim your network charging is based on the number of users. Other similar systems include Communote, Present.ly, Nurphy, and Socialtext. All these tools extend naturally to remote working: not only working from home but keeping in contact when away at meetings or conferences for example.

Using a system like Yammer does not by itself provide an effective intra-organisation communication system: it is important to understand the varying ways that people deal with information flow. I would expect most commercial organisations to mandate the use by staff of any system once introduced, but in other organisations this may not be considered acceptable. It would seem inevitable that any closed-group communication system will be less effective if its use remains optional. Either way it is better if staff want to use the system because they feel it is of direct benefit to them.

User Acceptance

People sem to vary greatly in their attitude to IT based communication systems: some avoid using them at all if they have this freedom, arguing that they have not got time to use such systems even if it only takes few minutes each day. Noise (the receipt of messages not considered relevant to the individual) is seen as a major problem by some people, but just a minor irritation by others. It is an example of the glass half-full or half-empty metaphor – some people see the noise and some the signal (useful content). So for a system to be effective I believe it is necessary to encourage people to accept that some noise is the price you pay for being better informed, and for the opportunity to take part in discussions.

Although poor intra-group communication is often recognised as a problem it seems that all too often solutions are adopted in an ad-hoc way with no clear idea of what the problem is that needs solving. This happened with e-mail which was adopted by almost all organisations, and the use of which evolved as people got used to the new tool. Evolution is often a good way to develop, but for communication within closed groups it would probably be better to eventually adopt an agreed strategy.

Conclusions

In conclusion I believe different tools are needed to handle effectively different type of communications. However it seems unlikely that they will be fully effective in the workplace without some agreement to standardise on one or more tools. Yammer meets many requirements but is let down by poor or missing clients (nothing for Nokia or Windows Mobile phones), no plugin for Internet Explorer; although most of these issues are being addressed and the site has just had significant enhancements. Google Wave, which is currently on beta release for invited users, may well be the answers to everyone’s problems. However in my opinion it was released on beta before it was ready, and releasing it initially to just a few users meant it was difficult to try it out for group discussions (you can only have meetings with people who have received invites from Google). It is based on the XMPP protocol and even if Google Wave is not successful I believe that XMPP is the way forward.

Google Wave when fully released and Yammer both seem to address problems with poor intra-group communication; providing, of course, we understand the problem!

An earlier version of this appeared as an invited contribution to Ramblings of a Remote Worker - the UKOLN blog site edited by Marieke Guy

Google and Family Planning!

The following question is reputedly one of many that Google may ask prospective job candidates:

Imagine a country in which every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child, and continue until they have a boy, then they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? You should assume that there is an equal probability of having a boy or a girl.

The question has been discussed at length on the Internet and this site is one of many that provide an answer. The answer is correct (approximately the same number of boys and girls) but I doubt whether the way it is derived would help to get you a job with Google. There are numerous other similar posts, most of which give the correct answer, but all but a few miss what I believe is the point of the question. It is an example of misdirection; the question describes a strategy for ensuring that all families have exactly one boy and zero or more girls, but what it asks for is the overall distribution of boys and girls in the country as a whole. The way the question is stated leads you to believe that the strategy will affect the overall distribution - but does it? Anyone with some knowledge of probability should then realise that no strategy that involves stopping after a certain number of children can affect the overall proportion, because all births are independent events. In the population as a whole the probability that the next child, born anywhere in the country, will be a boy is 0.5, regardless of how many boys or girls have already been born, so the proportion will be 50:50. Of course the proportion will rarely be exactly equal because the gender of the children are random events, in fact they form a binomial distribution, but for large populations it will be very close to 50:50.

To many people this is counter intuitive - probably because the strategy clearly does affect the make up of every individual family. Consider another country where they adopt the strategy of stopping after having exactly two girls. The only family distribution you would find on both countries would be two girls and one boy (but in a different order); the overall distribution however would still be 50:50.

Unlikely Events

In his book The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses how New World monkeys, who it is believed are descended from Old World monkeys, managed to get to South America. At the time this must have happened, South America had detached itself from Africa and was not yet joined to North America, so was effectively a large island. It is conjectured that rafting may have been how they got there: one or more monkeys ending up washed out to sea on floating trees for example. (If it were one it would have to have been a pregnant female.) Some people object to this hypothesis because they believe that this event is so unlikely it could not have happened, but the truth is that unlikely events happen all the time. Evolution Theory relies on the fact that extremely rare events (favourable mutations) do occur if you wait a long time - and evolution works over many millions of years.

After reading Dawkin's account I decided to see if I could come up with a mathematical example that illustrated this point. If the chance of a viable breeding group of monkeys getting to South America in any one year is, say, 1 in a million then we could calculate the chance of this happening if we wait, say, a million years. (This event would have occurred somewhere between 25 and 40 million years ago so waiting a million years is reasonable.) It is actually easier to calculate the chance of failure to get across and subtracting that from 1 to get the answer. I did the calculation for a probability of 1/n of success in one year, which gives (1 - 1/n) as the probability for failure. Because the events are independent, the probability of failure after 2 years is that multiplied by itself or
(1-¹⁄_n)² . For n years this is
(1-¹⁄_n)ⁿ , which for n=1 million gives 0.368 to 3 significant figures, or 0.632 as the probability of success. If you tried with the same probability for 2 million years then the chance of success would be 0.865, and if you kept on trying for 10 million years it would be 0.9999, or anything but unlikely.

The formula can be generalised by adding another variable, so
1 - (1-¹⁄_n)^rn would give the probability of success for 2 million years if r=2 and n=1 million. For values of n greater than 1 million the probability is the same to 3 significant figures so it is tempting to take the limit of the formula as n goes to infinity:
Lim
n→∞
1 - (1-¹⁄_n)^rn = 1 - e^-r where e is approximately 2.71828. Note that this implies that an event with zero probability will still happen if you try it an infinite number of times!

Of course this should not be taken too seriously: the probability of one in a million is pure conjecture, and it would not be the same for every year. Over millions of years as the continents drifted further apart, the chances of a successful crossing would go down.

Leaving aside this particular example there are, in general, an infinite number of unlikely events that may happen. If you take a million possible unlikely (and unrelated) events, each with a chance of one in a million of happening in a given time period, then the maths shows that there is a good chance that one of these events will actually happen. People tend to notice only the seemingly unlikely events that do happen, and some times start to look for mystical explanations when usually no special explanation is required.

Redemption for "The Wire"

The Shawshank Redemption is now at number one on the IMDB Top 250 films of all time, and regularly appears in the top ten of other lists. What makes this remarkable to me is that it was not a big success on its cinema release, its reputation and popularity have grown largely by word of mouth. The Wire seems to be following the same line - even though it was critically acclaimed almost from the outset, it never attracted a large audience, nor did it win any major awards. Although the fifth and last series was shown in 2008, its popularity continues to grow, and it is now regularly rated as the best TV drama ever. At the time of writing an incredible 85% of users on IMDB have awarded it 10 out of 10.

Word of mouth popularity seems to becoming word of Internet, so in principle reputations can now spread much faster. Just in the last week Stephen Fry send a Twitter message with a strong recommendation for David Eagleman's book Sum, and within a day or so it shot up the charts to second place on the Amazon web site. This is an interesting and somewhat alarming development, not least to Stephen Fry who is now presumably being bombarded with books from publishers and authors.

Gnu Pronunciation

I have been testing a GNU/Linux server recently which has GNOME (pronounced ger-nome) installed. This pronunciation is undoubtedly correct, as is the sounding of the G in Gnu/Linux, because the originators of these systems specified that the G should be sounded. My dictionary has 19 words starting gn, and apparently they should all be pronounced with a silent G, including gnu when referring to the African animal. This reminded me of the song "The Gnu Song" written in the 1950s by Flanders and Swann: the song is a clever satire which very gently pokes fun at those people who did not know that the G is silent. In the song they religeously pronounce all the silent letters in lines such as: You really ought to ker-now w-ho's w-ho's. The also add G's to all the other words beginning with N, as in the first two lines of the song:

I'm a Gnu, I'm a Gnu
The ger-nicest work of ger-nature in the zoo

The song was very popular in the 50's and 60's but I suspect the satire backfired however, as many people now sound the G when referring to the animal. Mind you, in the nearly 50 years since I first heard the song, the only times I can recall needing to use the word is when referencing the song!

I am told that if you go back far enough, the initial letters in words such as gnaw and knife were sounded but gradually over the years the initial letters were dropped in speech, but kept in the spelling. Maybe we should follow Flanders and Swann and start pronouncing all these silent letters; it would cause some ger-nashing of teeth in some circles but you never ker-now - it could catch on.

"Rabbit Hutch" Britain

An article in today's Guardian reports that houses built in the UK are the smallest in western Europe. I am not surprised: the high cost of land in the UK results in builders having to develop at high density to keep costs down, and this is also a major contributory factor to the fact that we never seem to be able to build enough houses to satisfy demand. Another contributory factor to the rabbit hutch phenomenon is the frequent requirement on developers to build a certain number of affordable homes in any new development. Affordable generally means small and cheaply made, but as today's report indicates we already have enough small starter homes.

Although I am not generally in favour of allowing market forces to decide everything, in this case we should just let builders build the houses they think are most likely to sell. The majority of people in the UK only own one house, so if builders build more of a certain type of house then prices will come down. People often stay in their first house for a long time (though many of them would like a bigger house), because they cannot find the extra money needed to trade up to a significantly better house. House prices in Britain are far too high: the solution is to build more houses so that supply equals demand, and it does not really matter what sort of house you build. Currently the number of houses being built is going down, but maybe builders would come back into the market if we removed the need to build affordable (that is, low profit) homes, and preferably simplified the frequently long drawn out planning procedures in which everyone from the local council to utility services try and get improvements to their infrastructure from the builder.