What happens when an ATM dispenses free money?

Apparently ATM malfunctions are fairly rare, and most often limited to "eating" an ATM card. Rare is not impossible though, and yesterday my bank's ATM failed.

It gave me too much money.

At first, after much noise and delay, it coughed up a solitary twenty. I indignantly waved the bill in the face of the video camera. Then, after several more minutes of grinding and retching, the abashed machine retched up another pile of cash. I managed to pull it free of a jam and found $60 more than I'd asked for (the receipt matched my request).

I have to cash some checks tomorrow, so I'll see what my bank does. I wonder how often this happens? I doubt that I'll get to keep the money, I suppose I'd have to donate it to charity if they don't want it.

Update 2/4/08: Here's what happens:

1. Claims of ATM underpayment are not unusual.
2. Claims of ATM overpayment are, unsurprisingly, unusual.
3. The bank investigates then corrects with an additional debit.
4. There's a presumption the customer is being honest when they claim an overpayment. I suspect that varies by age, ethnicity, race, dress and appearance when one claims underpayment.
   

Top Al Qaeda leader killed - best commentary

15 rows in the table, and counting ...

Making Light: Top Al Qaeda Leader Killed (again)

It’s like being the drummer for Spinal Tap...

Features that sell products are often useless

This is the curse of product design. The features that sell a product are most often ignored. More precisely, they are not used by the people who buy the product.

It's a curse because, as most of us have noticed by now, we live in a universe where resources are finite. The features that are not used, hence useless, have a cost. That cost is either paid by increases in product price, or by taking away from features customers don't realize they need, or by using lower quality inputs, or by spending less on quality control.

Product managers, developers and designers learn this painful lesson -- sooner or later. They put features in products that won't be used, skimp on the things that don't sell, mourn that they deliver less value than they could.

The only answer is smarter customers, but that may take a long long time ...

Of course similar behaviors are seen in mate selection as well ...

Another dumb article on exercise and aging

I'm guessing Gina Kolata has entered the death zone of middle-age and has started grasping at straws. It's the only explanation for the credulous tone of her article on how exercise can slow our entropic decline:

Staying a Step Ahead of Aging - New York Times:

...Their results are surprising, even to many of the researchers themselves. The investigators find that while you will slow down as you age, you may be able to stave off more of the deterioration than you thought. Researchers also report that people can start later in life — one man took up running at 62 and ran his first marathon, a year later, in 3 hours 25 minutes.

It’s a testament to how adaptable the human body is, researchers said, that people can start serious training at an older age and become highly competitive. It also is testament to their findings that some physiological factors needed for a good performance are not much affected by age...

...But Dr. Hagberg found that studies of aging athletes sometimes were distorted because they included people who had cut back on or stopped training...

Sigh.

So these researchers showed that athletes who don't stop doing intense exercise can be more fit that most middle-aged people.

Gee, I wonder why most athletes stop doing intense exercise. Injury? Aging?

There's nothing surprising about these results, and they hold no new lessons for us. We know not everyone ages at the same rate. We know some people have better athletic genes than others. We expect some people get both sets of genes. We know even demented 80 yos in nursing homes improve their lives when put on a weight training program.

Gina, you can do better than this. You must by now know the difference between an observational and an experimental study ...

Michael Vick's dog Georgia - a description

Reading this description, I wondered what Michael Vick was doing now:

Given Reprieve, N.F.L. Star’s Dogs Find Kindness - New York Times

A quick survey of Georgia, a caramel-colored pit bull mix with cropped ears and soulful brown eyes, offers a road map to a difficult life. Her tongue juts from the left side of her mouth because her jaw, once broken, healed at an awkward angle. Her tail zigzags.

Scars from puncture wounds on her face, legs and torso reveal that she was a fighter. Her misshapen, dangling teats show that she might have been such a successful, vicious competitor that she was forcibly bred, her new handlers suspect, again and again.

But there is one haunting sign that Georgia might have endured the most abuse of any of the 47 surviving pit bulls seized last April from the property of the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick in connection with an illegal dogfighting ring.

Georgia has no teeth. All 42 of them were pried from her mouth, most likely to make certain she could not harm male dogs during forced breeding...

Wikipedia has the answer. Still in prison, with another trial pending in 2008. Financially broken with many lawsuits pending. Unlikely to play in the NFL; particularly if Georgia appears in a commercial or two.

Has any human as cruel as Michael Vick ever been redeemed? I'm unable to think of an example.

Mahoo! - hope Google feels threatened

So Microsoft is acquiring Yahoo -- one way or the other.

Yahoo's been a disappointment for years, so that's no great loss for me. Really, Microsoft's recent work is much better than anything Yahoo's done.

The big upside though will be if it scares Google. Google needs a serious competitor, their pile of half-finished work is starting to smell a bit. I'm hoping Mahoo! puts the squeeze on ...

Charlie Stross profiles today's UK teens. Slashing?

Charles Stross, a top-rank science fiction writer almost as old as me, decided his business requires a profile of today's 18 year old. He's published a UK version of the Beloit College list he references:

Charlie's Diary: Youth of today:

I am a forty-something, which means I am out of touch with what passes for common knowledge among 18 year olds today. (Dodgy joke about keeping in touch with 18 year olds deleted in the interests of good taste.) Beloit College in the USA used to maintain a list for their staff, to explain what the world looks like to an 18 year old freshman: here's their 2006 list. It's heavily biased towards (obviously) American 18 year olds, but it got me thinking...

...Lots of people take antidepressants. Everyone slashes themselves; it's no big deal. (Statistics show a third of UK teens self-harm at some stage.)...

...There have always been cameras in shops and schools and other public places, although there are more of them than there used to be. Old folks grumble about privacy, but really, you're being watched wherever you are. If you don't like it, get a hoodie.

Slashing?! Geez, I really am a geezer. I don't think the US frequency is that high but I expect I'll find out (my oldest is 11). Forearm scars are not currently a winning point in job interviews.

Soon 18 year old Americans won't remember when smoking tobacco was a socially acceptable adult activity, but from a recent visit to the UK I know that's not true there.

Update: The comments are great, including some from the target demographic. I particularly liked Alex Gurney's remarks:

The word "digital" feels strange in "digital camera", "digital TV", "digital music", etc., since of course these things are digital. You have no idea why a "digital watch" or "digital alarm clock" would ever have seemed exciting or futuristic.

You either do not care about politics, or you obsessively follow political news, polls and statistics. Either way, you probably do not vote.

You think nothing of changing your phone handset or provider every few months. It would never occur to you to repair, rather than replace, broken electronic equipment. Even so, your data is far more important than the device, since you view phones, cameras and computers as essentially disposable.

You have never had to wait to get photos developed.

Anything which you have and don't want will probably get sold on eBay.

Obama and I are in 76% agreement.

FMH pointed to Glassbooth which told me: "Barack Obama shares a 76% similarity with your beliefs". Hilary wasn't far behind at 71%.

Oh, and who the heck is Mike Gravel?

I wish I'd done the quiz when Edwards was in the race. It's pretty sophisticated, and drills down by topic.

I discovered:

• I support gay "marriage" [1] Obama, doesn't (!).
• Obama was more willing to go along with the Patriot act than I would have been.

[1] Civil unions really. I think the state should do legal unions and religions can do what they like. Everyone who wants legal benefits would need a state sanctioned legal union, religious marriage alone should bring no legal privilege.

Wanted: examples of publicly traded companies with accounting solutions that support internal collaborative projects

It's an age-old problem for large publicly traded companies, regardless of industry.

Two groups want a new toolbox (for example)

They can each build their own to a local specification, or they can agree to build one toolbox:

Option I. Build a toolbox to local specification

Group A: $10
Group B: $10
Group A + B: $20

vs.

Option II: Build a toolbox to group specification

Group A: $14 (40% over budget)
Group B: $2 (80% cost reduction)
Group A + B: $16 (20% savings)

Options I works.

Option II saves the company 20%, but the manager of Group A is now unemployed and the manager of Group B is now a VP.

Back in Economics 101 we learned how markets solve this particular problem [1], but most publicly traded companies don't have internal markets [2].

I'm interested in examples of publicly traded companies, in any industry, that have made a go at mitigating this problem. If there are no minimally successful examples that's also important to know.

I'd be most grateful for examples of companies to look at, for comments or feedback, or for references to academic papers. Comments to this post or email to me are equally welcome!

(Brad, any thoughts?)

--

[1] See also: comparative advantage -- aka "I can do it better than you, but I have better things to do.").

[2] Apparently Czechoslovakia was relatively good at this sort of thing before the fall of the Soviet Union.

Update 2/4/08:

I now have run variations of the question: "Do you know of examples of publicly traded companies with accounting solutions that support internal collaborative projects by reducing the "cooperation penalty" problem?" by persons with knowledge of a reasonably large spectrum of public and privately held American corporations.

The answer, so far, is there is no answer. Here's my current summary:

1. Go head and reinvent the wheel, synergy isn't worth it unless the rewards are very large.
2. If there's enough money at stake do EBIT credits or some kind of internal accounting either formally or informally. This is rarely done however.
   
3. If there's a deep corporate strategic interest assign the synergy task to a very senior exec who can bang heads together.
4. In rare cases reorganize so the shared resource is under one cost center.
5. Outsource the service to an outside group who might be able to turn the need into a product or service with a larger market. An interesting variation on this is to decided that these unmet synergies are opportunities for employees to launch their own businesses with an initial guaranteed customer. This does require a robust level of corporate confidence however.
   

Update 11/25/08: As I worked this problem I became increasingly convinced I was heading into rough territory.

Time and serendipity have revealed the depths of the problem. Those depths include understanding why, on the one hand, large corporations exist, and on the other hand, why we have more than one corporation.

They take one into the Nobel Prize winning Coase Theorem, wonderfully summarized by Bruce Schneier (emphases mine);

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors. ...

In a related vein consider Coding Horror's discussion of the costs of software reuse.

The best reference on the Coase theorem I've found is from a 2007 Freakonomics article.

The synergy or collaboration tax in a large publicly traded corporation is a manifestation of the general scaling problem; it's one of the reasons corporations have effective size limits. To understand those limits though, we probably have to look beyond standard economics and consider the "military" aspects of corporate size -- the ways one can use size itself as a weapon.

At that point we move from economic theory to "nature red in tooth and claw". I suspect it's this reason that corporations can grow beyond what economic theory might suggest.

Microsoft's FeedSync: what the heck is it and why would anyone care about a trivial problem like data synchronization?

Jacob Reider, the master of the terse post, apparently likes Microsoft's FeedSync.

Of course, Jacob, you didn't bother to say why you liked it. Or even what it might be good for!

It turns out that FeedSync was originally a Ray (Lotus Notes -> Microsoft CTO) Ozzie project. I don't know what it started out as, but now claims to be an open source specification for enabling data synchronization.

Jacob is presumably interested for two reasons. One is general geekhood, the other healthcare related. First the geek stuff.

As a fellow-geek Jacob, like me, is constantly trying to synchronize data across platforms. Anyone who's been around the block with Outlook, Exchange, Palm, mobile phones, iPhones, Gmail, iSync, etc, etc, will have learned that this is a non-trivial problem even in the relatively trivial domain of synchronizing address books.

We geeks would like, for example, to move our images and metadata readily from Picasa to Flickr and back again. Good luck - even if Google claims they're opposed to Data Lock enabling synchronization between competitors is rather a difficult proposition -- particularly when the services define photo collections differently (include by reference or by copy?).

Heck, we'd like to move our metadata from iPhoto to Aperture -- two desktop apps Apple controls. We can't even do that. (ex: photo book annotations). Forget Aperture to Lightroom!

How hard is this problem? I have long claimed that data synchronization issues between Palm and Outlook/Exchange were one of the top three causes of the collapse of once promising Palm OS ecosystem. OS X geeks know that Apple has a long history of messed up synchronization even within the completely controlled OS X/.Mac environment. IBM has had several initiatives to manage this kind of issue (the last one I tracked was in the OS/2 era) -- all disasters. Anyone remember CORBA transaction standards? Same problem in a different form. The only experience I've had of synchronization working was with the original Palm devices synchronizing to the original Palm Desktop -- where everything was built to make synchronization work. Lotus Notes, of course, was into synchronization in a very big way -- that's how the different Notes repositories communicated with one another (hence Ozzie's interest). I don't know how well that really worked, but I'm told it took an army to make Notes work.

Personally, I think this problem gets fully solved about 10 milliseconds before Skynet takes over. There are too many nasty issues of semantics, of each system knowing what the other means by "place", to achieve perfect results between disparate systems. Even the imperfect results achieved by using language between mere humans requires a semblance of sentience, shared language, and even shared culture.

Reason two for Jacob's interest is, of course, his health care IT background. HL-7. SNOMED terminfo models. HITSP and Continuity of Care Records. Even Google's fuzzy Personal Health Record interchange services. Microsoft's various healthcare IT initiatives. Many HCIT vendor transaction solutions. They're really all about data synchronization on a grand scale -- even if the realities tend to be fairly modest.

Jacob, btw, is fond of those loosely-coupled mashup thingies.

So what's "FeedSync"? (emphases mine)

Windows Live Dev FeedSync Intro

The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.

The FeedSync specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

... FeedSync lays the foundation for a common synchronization infrastructure between any service and any application.

... Everyone has data that they want to share: contact lists, calendar entries, blog postings, and so on. This data must be up-to-date, real-time, across any of the programs, services, or devices you choose to use and share with.

Too often today data is “locked up” in proprietary applications and services or on various devices. As an open extension to RSS and Atom, FeedSync enables you to “unlock” your data—making it easy to synchronize the data you choose to any other authorized FeedSync-enabled service, computer, or mobile device. FeedSync enables many compelling scenarios:

• Collaboration over the web using synchronized feeds
• Roaming data to multiple client devices
• Publishing reference data and updates in an open format that can be synchronized easily

... FeedSync enables multi-master topologies,

... publish a subset of his calendar more broadly using a FeedSync feed. Consumers of the publish-only feed can only see a subset of the calendar, and don’t have permission to make changes. Because of the FeedSync information in the feed, though, they are reliably notified of updates to Steve’s shared calendar. And unlike current feeds, when Steve deletes an item from the calendar, the item is deleted on everyone’s calendar.

... RSS and Atom were designed as notification mechanisms, to alert clients that some new resource is available on a server. This is a great fit for simple applications like blogging.

But those feed formats are not a natural fit for representing collections of resources that change, such as a contact list, or a collection of calendar items. Atom Publishing Protocol is designed for resource collections, but it is a client-server protocol and isn’t suitable (by itself) for multi-master scenarios. FeedSync extends RSS and Atom so that FeedSync-enabled RSS and Atom feeds can be used for reliable, efficient content replication and multi-master data synchronization.

One of the great benefits of FeedSync is that it doesn’t attempt to replace technologies like RSS, Atom, or Atom Publishing Protocol. Instead, FeedSync is a simple set of extensions that enhances the RSS or Atom feeds that people are already using today...

There you go. Nerdvana indeed.

Grumph.

Ok, I won't rain too hard on this parade. I said "perfect results" weren't feasible. We can't do synchronization for anything that's not trivial -- at least not without monstrous effort. The interesting question is whether there's some kind of "good enough" compromise that we can start with that, with a lot of time and evolution, might lead to some sort of emergent solution. Preferably without Skynet. Something that bears the same relationship to the original Palm synchronization that Google does to the original memex/xanadu vision...

Dyer: six articles for 2008

Gwynne Dyer 2008 has new essays on Kenya, Thailand, the papacy, the Tata Motor Nano, the Middle East and, of course, the US.

As has been true for years, his are probably the most read pages on the net that are strictly .txt files with hard coded line wrap. Reminds me of Gopher. No feeds of course!

This year he's introduced tables (!) to hold his article links, which make it impossibly tedious to copy direct links to the set of recent articles articles.

He is a character, no doubt. All the same he's a very insightful writer. Alas the .txt format means it's tedious to quote directly from his writings.

Hmm. You don't suppose that's the point?

Games the media play: the race card

I've been thinking the same thing for a while, looking for an opportunity to say it.

FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: How the press played the race card

... I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.

It's the same old game -- getting attention at any cost. The American public never learns ...

Florida's 90% better future means Edwards can be kingmaker

Months after he was written off, McCain is the GOP favorite. I assume the Trilateral Commission is at work, otherwise I can't explain this at all.

The GOP now has a choice between Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney and John McCain. Assuming continuation of bizarre trends, there's only a 1/3 chance of Romney winning. If Romney wins, I'm guessing, based on Florida numbers, that there's only a 1/3 chance of his getting the presidency.

So there's about a 90% [1] probability that America's next president will be Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain.

Right wing talk radio hates McCain; it's hard to imagine a better endorsement. I would be disappointed if McCain won, but I would not be thinking about emigrating.

So today we have a 90% probability of a better future for America.

Wow, I didn't expect to be thinking that already.

So how does this change my thoughts my thoughts ahead of Minnesota's primary?

If Florida's Dem delegates had counted, Hilary Clinton would now be planning to wrap-up the primary contests. If Giuliani had won Florida I'd be wearing my Hilary button now.

Today, though, I feel freer.

I think she's still the best option for winning the presidency, but I still don't care for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic progression. I still fear Obama can't win Florida, but if McCain is the nominee that might be a risk to consider.

Or maybe I should go with Edwards, and give him the power to choose both the President and the Vice-President.

Today I'm thinking I want John Edwards to be the kingmaker.

[1] 1 - (1/3*1/3) = 8/9 = 89%

Update: Ok, so much for that.

...top strategist Joe Trippi explained the timing of the decision like this: "It became increasingly clear on Sunday and Monday that we were totally blocked out of the news story. John Edwards didn't want to play politics. He didn't want to stay in the race to be a kingmaker or a spoiler. There was just not a clear shot at the nomination.

Who mourns for the loss of Apple's unique file identifiers ...

One of the most innovative features of the early Macintosh machines were that each file had a unique identifier. The file "name" was a user convenience, the software used the identifier.

Move a file? No problem. The OS knew where it was.

That's been more and more broken in the past few years. I don't know if the move is deliberate, or if it's a sign that Apple's most brilliant developers have all retired.

Alas, Time Machine demonstrates how broken this feature is.

Exploring the sands of Time Machine

...Time Machine doesn't handle the ol' switcheroo very well; renamed files and folders get backed up right alongside their previous iterations. This means that if you have a 2GB folder of images in your Desktop called "Purty Pi'tures" one day, then do nothing but rename the folder to "Rilly Purty Pi'tures" the next day, you just ate up 4GB of space on your Time Machine drive. Going further, Murphy Mac discovered that Time Machine makes some odd (and potentially unfortunate) decisions when throwing out backups. When Time Machine decides to retain a single backup out of the previous day's hourly backups, it chooses the first one of the day (presumably beginning at 12:01am). This means that some files could still be slipping through the sands of time (c'mon, I had to), depending on your computing habits...

It will be a sad day when Vista's file system is clearly better in every way than the Mac's.

To sleep, perchance to run lossy compression algorithms

Another NYT article on theories about why humans sleep:

Sleep - Brain - Neurons - New York Times:

...So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so that the synapses’ relative strength is maintained. Those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t....

Both autism and schizophrenia have, at various times, been connected with disorders of pruning neuronal networks. (Errors both ways -- too much and too little.)

Neural gardening is hard to get right, and, in fact, there can't be a "right" answer. The "right" answer will depend on environment, which is fungible.

I do wonder sometimes if the alleged benefit of exercise for dementia prevention is entirely related to the benefit exercise has for sleeping.

Incidentally, my recollection is that this original theory was found to be too simplistic. I recall that studies published @ 2011 showed that what's occuring in sleep is a refactoring of memories into a compressed formthat sacrifices accuracy for retrieval speed and lesser storage demands. I think the researchers found a curious correspondence to lossy fractal-based compression algorithms used in early 21st century computing ... [1]

[1] Sorry, sometimes it's hard for me to forget I'm not supposed to remember the future. I think I need more sleep.