Search for Balance

Planning and Process

All projects requires some planning and process. The purpose of both is to mitigate risk — as they say, ‘a failure to plan is to plan for failure’. The problem is when people start hiding behind planning and process as a way to mitigate personal risk.

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of situations where people are propping up planning and process as giant pillars from which to hide behind. In terms of process, this may come as someone who requires every action they take to be signed off on by another person who they can hold responsible if it was the incorrect, or by creating a process so rigid that you spend vastly more effort upholding the process than what was designed to protect against. The extreme example of planning gone wrong is the person who only plans and never does anything— and is thus never wrong. Too often has never being wrong been mistaken for always being right. In the case of perpetual planning you’re both never wrong and never right, you’re just useless.

Planning by its nature is speculative, and the more you do without a reality check (i.e. actually DOING something) the further from reality you become. Even worse, as you are planning rather than doing, reality is constantly changing. Actually doing something has a very convenient feature with which you can validate what you’re doing — either it works or it doesn’t. There is no analog with planning, eventually you have to just do something. The goal is to get to where you have a good plan, and acknowledge your plan cannot be perfect. Once you think you know where are going, start going there and see where you get. Then, reevaluate and try again. In programming, Dave Thomas describes this as ‘Tracer Bullets’ — a great analogy.

Process is supposed to give you a framework for execution. Customer sign-off on a feature request isn’t meant to be lorded over them if what you built turns out to be wrong, but a means for you to try and make sure you are both on the same page in terms of what you are doing. Spending two weeks plugging your prototype it took you one week to create into an enterprise build system is asinine. If you can’t immediately extract benefit from process, it is dead weight.

One of my favorite quotes that sums this up more eloquently than I could ever hope to is by George Patton: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”

For the love of crap people, it is ok to be wrong! Take some damn risks! And while you’re at it, do me a favor and kick the next smug armchair quarterback you see where his testicles should be.

Caught in a Lie

This evening my oldest (kindergarten) daughter said something offhand that struck me as odd.  It was something like “My friends at school think it is really cool you’re a geologist.”  To which my immediate reply was, “I’m not a geologist, have you been telling the kids at school I am?”

I’m pretty sure this is her first experience getting caught in a deep lie.  I got her to elaborate: she has been telling her teacher and classmates for a few days now that I’m a geologist, thus so she knows a lot about rocks.  This has caused the lie to balloon and grow far beyond her control.  She felt obligated to show her expertise, so she made stuff up about rocks to tell the class, told of trips that we would take to the beach to collect rocks for my job, etc.

It has been only a few weeks since we transferred her to a new school.  We’re very happy with the school and the decision, but the transition has been hard on her.  Apparently her way to try and impress her classmates and make friends was via what surely started as just a little lie, and now she knows what it feels like when a lie gets a life of its own.

She is devastatingly afraid of telling them the truth now — which I’ve insisted she do.  The plan is she will take in one of the more impressive rocks from my childhood rock collection (and her teddy bear for comfort) in with her and fess up.  I told her to explain that while I do know a lot about rocks, I am not a geologist, and to apologize.  Her fear is that her teacher will be mad and all her new friends will not like her anymore.

My advice to her was as follows: Your friends won’t really care about the lie, they will respect you more for telling the truth.  Your classmates don’t like you because you told them I’m a geologist, they like you because of you.  You will feel much better because it will be over.

There are many milestones in our lives, but until you witness your own child going through it, you don’t think about things like getting caught in your first big lie as one of them.  It also gives a new perspective to help coach someone through the situation, and hopefully in the future if something like this happens to me I’ll remember my own advice to her — and have a teddy bear to hold for comfort.

Kindle 2: Reference Library

I want a Kindle 2, but I want it for all the “wrong” reasons.

I have no interest in reading fiction on it. I imagine that (and the $359 price tag) is what keeps most people from buying it.  I like reading actual books, and they happen to be very well designed for their purpose as it is.  I also typically borrow books, or buy them used, at a significant discount.  This re-use benefits all of the various readers of that physical copy, but both the original and used bookstores that it passes through.  Amazon currently has over 240000 books available on the Kindle, the vast majority being fiction.  None of them can be resold to someone else, or loaned to a friend for a month, or passed to your child so they can experience the same feelings you did when you were their age reading those exact same pages…

I have no interest in reading magazines or newspapers on it. I hardly consider pushing your print content to the Kindle “innovation”.  There is no customization, interaction, filtering, aggregation… no hint of any of the things that would actually break from the status quo.  Paper content rendered on screen is just paper with fewer trees sacrificed for the cause.

However…

I *do* have a 50lb stack of reference books next to me, and a couple hundred more pounds on my bookshelf that I would love to have at my fingertips all the time.  Not only that, I’d love to just have them automatically updated as new versions come out (this a wish, not an actual feature).  The idea of having to repurchase all of the books I’d want on it is a bit daunting, though.

It would make the perfect RSS reader.  With free 3G wireless internet and a great large format screen it would easily beat out my T-Mobile G1 for that purpose.  They claim to have about 1100 blogs — which isn’t many — but I can see them adding more.  Unfortunately, my guess is relatively few of the blogs I read are carried at this point.

I have a very large collection of reference PDFs — mostly white papers and research articles — that I consider invaluable references.  Like my textbooks, I’d like to have them at my fingertips without having to fire up my laptop to read them.

Though my T-Mobile G1 lessens the need for it, the fact that it has 3G internet and allows some limited web browsing would be nice as well.  If the Kindle became my resource for reference material, it would make sense that Wikipedia was on it as well.

The Kindle replacing textbooks is the thing that excites me going forward.  Textbooks are unwieldy, heavy, quickly outdated, and hard to search through.  Carrying around a single Kindle with all their textbooks would not only save the backs of many students, but suddenly they can run text search through their books instead of having to leaf through, distribution is streamlined and uses less materials, so the books should come down in price.  I really hope that technologies like the Kindle can eventually redefine the textbook industry.

Sentiment Accuracy vs. Sentiment Accuracy

** Posted as a comment to this post at lexalytics **

Great post, we’ve also found it pretty easy to build a system that gets 70-80% accuracy in almost no time at all.

Sentiment accuracy is also interesting and measuring it becomes all the more difficult when you consider it as a spectrum rather than simple agree/disagree.

For example, when dealing with financial sentiment measurements as we do, you can be a little wrong, or you can be REALLY wrong.

Getting the right polarity 80% of the time is great, but you also need to consider what 20% you missed. Humans who disagree will usually have agreement on the highly polarized articles. We expect people to disagree on the more intricate cases.

In our experience, even if you are getting the same % agreement overall human-human or human-computer, computers are much more likely to throw articles humans would all agree on into the wrong bucket.

LoveRX

I saw this article in the paper this morning, which made me wonder just how soon we’ll start seeing love pills.  If they have found the centers of the brain and are narrowing down the chemistry, it can’t be very long.  Here are my proposals:

Accumbenz: When the marriage counselor thinks it shouldn’t be saved. (Nucleus accumbens)

PallidumRX: Why tell your boyfriend to ‘shit or get off the pot’ when you can drug him into proposing to you.  (Ventral pallidum)

Tegmental VTA: When your mistresses all start seeming the same, a little Tegmental VTA will bring back that puppy love feeling all over again. (Ventral tegmental area)

Rapheipnol: For those spinsters who are stressed out about losing their virginity in their 40s. (Raphe nucleus)

Suggested mixtures:

Accumbenz + Tegmental VTA: Rebound relationship in a bottle.

Tegmental VTA + Rapheipnol: Gives you the sense that you’re cheating on your husband even though you’re unmarried and alone.

Accumbenz + PallidumRX + Viagra: Really enhances the “Breakup-Sex” role-play.