On the Planet Money show, there's been discussion about the practice of High Speed Trading. This is where traders use computers and high-speed connections to the stock market to analyze trade data and put in trades making penny or sub-penny profits on transaction trends by responding faster than other players.
So, for example, if someone is trying to make a buy of stocks, and they can't get them in one lot, their first partial buy might trigger an algorithm in a computer. Then the computer might use it's high speed trading connection to buy up available lots of the stock that it anticipates will soon go up by a small tick, reselling to a slower moving buyer trying to close out the complete order with a slower connection.
Institutional investors, such as those managing your pension mutual funds, are understandably wary of the practice because they're frequently the ones whose transactions become marginally more expensive due to high-speed trading algorithms. So how might they neutralize the effects of high-speed traders?
I see an opening where a larger traders could help to neutralize or even marginally improve transaction costs due high-speed traders via counter trades. In aircraft control theory, there is a phenomenon called pilot induced oscillation (PIO). This is where a pilot tries to damp out an oscillation, but because they're responding with the right response, but out of phase, the situation ends up inducing larger oscillations in the path of the aircraft. Usually, aircraft designers (and pilots) are looking to avoid PIO, but a counter trade would be trying for the opposite by inducing high speed trading responses.
The basic idea would be to issue a number of counter trades to trigger the high speed trading algorithms, then use the window of movement in price that the high-speed algorithm creates to run your intended overall transaction. For example, if you were selling, make a few buys first. Let the high speed algos try to drive the price up by buying up all the shares at that local price level, then you would issue your sale at a higher transaction price. If the high speed trading algorithms stay agressive, then you can continue to open windows for your intended transactions. Alternately if the high-speed algorithms are dialed down to become less aggressive then your marginal losses from the actions are drastically reduced. Either way, counter trading would be one way to bound the high-speed trading algorithms.
Update: in the same vein, here's an article in the Atlantic about how odd trading patterns have been identified in trading data, presumeably from high frequency trading bots.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Phase Change Capsules in Drywall
What a great idea. Daytime heat is absorbed into little capsules of a material that changes phase. The material is mixed into drywall plaster. Rooms stay cool. At night the heat is released. Great primary function, but the material is made from a process that coats Paraffin wax. I have to wonder how that does for fire resistance.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
iPad and Interface Single Tasking
Geeks of the world went through a collective wave of anticipation and lament yesterday at the unveling of the Apple iPad. If there was a single most missed feature, it was probably the lack of multitasking. I'm going to say something contrarian here. The iPad doesn't need multitasking now, and possibly not ever.
With the iPad, Apple is taking a step down the path where separation between interface and application (or Model from the View and Controller if you prefer) is not just a convenient software architecture boundary, but is an actual physical interface boundary. As much as you might wish it, humans are, at best, serial-taskers when it comes to interfacing to a computer system. Notice I said system. The next logical step after the iPad is to seamlessly connect it to other higher horsepower devices; devices on the net, or devices in a cloud. Personally, the link net devices are fairly mature over the browser, but I'd like to start maturing the link to my personal, home computing devices, the cloud can come later.
If the iPad is just an interface device with just enough computing power to ease local controls processing, you can then multitask to your hearts desire by giving server type devices tasks to go off and perform. Basically, as long as you can push images onto the iPad and control commands back to a server, and do lightweight processing for compromises between those two extremes, you can think of the iPad as a physical manifestation of a application gui window on your desktop computer.
The only thing you need is a multi-event notification system, which iPhone already has a least laid a foundation.
There are some short-term, established ways to pursue this link, the X window system is a prime example. For more recent examples, you could look at VNC/Remote Desktops type applications to extend your interface device. Ironically, the VNC/Remote desktop applications are less rich than the X system. And of course, browsers are increasingly delivering reasonably responsive application over web technologies. This should only get easier with the rise of HTML5. However, Apple has always dabbled in interesting interface and display technologies. I'm hoping that Apple has it's sights set on a longer term view of this path and is preparing some newly rethought method of linking server side power to an exportable iPad interface that may blow the doors off of all these paradigms.
With the iPad, Apple is taking a step down the path where separation between interface and application (or Model from the View and Controller if you prefer) is not just a convenient software architecture boundary, but is an actual physical interface boundary. As much as you might wish it, humans are, at best, serial-taskers when it comes to interfacing to a computer system. Notice I said system. The next logical step after the iPad is to seamlessly connect it to other higher horsepower devices; devices on the net, or devices in a cloud. Personally, the link net devices are fairly mature over the browser, but I'd like to start maturing the link to my personal, home computing devices, the cloud can come later.
If the iPad is just an interface device with just enough computing power to ease local controls processing, you can then multitask to your hearts desire by giving server type devices tasks to go off and perform. Basically, as long as you can push images onto the iPad and control commands back to a server, and do lightweight processing for compromises between those two extremes, you can think of the iPad as a physical manifestation of a application gui window on your desktop computer.
The only thing you need is a multi-event notification system, which iPhone already has a least laid a foundation.
There are some short-term, established ways to pursue this link, the X window system is a prime example. For more recent examples, you could look at VNC/Remote Desktops type applications to extend your interface device. Ironically, the VNC/Remote desktop applications are less rich than the X system. And of course, browsers are increasingly delivering reasonably responsive application over web technologies. This should only get easier with the rise of HTML5. However, Apple has always dabbled in interesting interface and display technologies. I'm hoping that Apple has it's sights set on a longer term view of this path and is preparing some newly rethought method of linking server side power to an exportable iPad interface that may blow the doors off of all these paradigms.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Healthcare Soda: Predictably Broken Competitive Markets
Interesting data on health care by Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review in this article. (he actually has a lot of interesting articles in HBR.) I've been thinking that the private healthcare industry as a competitive market is pretty broken in the US. It's not really surprising to me that a competitive market works very poorly with its characteristics. For a market to work best, a purchase should have verifiable quality and needs to be repeatable or reversible, meaning you make that purchase decision again and again, or if you find a choice was bad, you can change the choice or reverse it. For example, that may mean giving back the product, or discarding it for another, or selling to someone else. Here's an example:
Suppose you buy a soda, then take a sip, and find that you hate the taste. No big deal - if its really that bad, you could stop drinking it partway through and toss it. Choose another brand next time.
Healthcare doesn't work that way. Now imagine if the only way to shop for soda is to buy a can every month and put it in the garage. If you open that soda you have to keep that can, finish the drink, finish what's in the garage, and keep buying it for a while. That's what happens if you get seriously ill and really need to lean on that health insurance. You might know how an insurer handles routine care, but you really don't know the quality of your health provider until you're in dire straits. At that point, you can't switch.
In these circumstances, is it any wonder that there is a fundamental disconnect between the profit of health insurance companies they quality they deliver. In California, there's been an ongoing fight about insurance companies cancelling policies when when serious care is needed (search for "California lawsuit health insurance cancellation" or click here. Some of insurance companies even paid employees bonuses to cancel policies of very sick people based on technicalities on their initial applications (sometimes years back). Settlements in some of those cases after the fact must be very bittersweet I'm sure that some of those patients received worse care, or suffered permanent injury or death. Finally, if you can't work, eventually you hit the end of what you're employer is willing and able to provide and you go bankrupt. This drives a suprisingly large portion of bankruptcies in the United States (article here).
I haven't even touched upon how things are even more broken because we're not even the ones shopping for this healthcare soda. Our employers are usually the one shopping for it.
I don't know how to fix things - I do like to idea of a publicly chartered competitor to private insurance, but really we need to find a way to connect up the healthcare market costs to delivered value to us, the consumers.
Suppose you buy a soda, then take a sip, and find that you hate the taste. No big deal - if its really that bad, you could stop drinking it partway through and toss it. Choose another brand next time.
Healthcare doesn't work that way. Now imagine if the only way to shop for soda is to buy a can every month and put it in the garage. If you open that soda you have to keep that can, finish the drink, finish what's in the garage, and keep buying it for a while. That's what happens if you get seriously ill and really need to lean on that health insurance. You might know how an insurer handles routine care, but you really don't know the quality of your health provider until you're in dire straits. At that point, you can't switch.
In these circumstances, is it any wonder that there is a fundamental disconnect between the profit of health insurance companies they quality they deliver. In California, there's been an ongoing fight about insurance companies cancelling policies when when serious care is needed (search for "California lawsuit health insurance cancellation" or click here. Some of insurance companies even paid employees bonuses to cancel policies of very sick people based on technicalities on their initial applications (sometimes years back). Settlements in some of those cases after the fact must be very bittersweet I'm sure that some of those patients received worse care, or suffered permanent injury or death. Finally, if you can't work, eventually you hit the end of what you're employer is willing and able to provide and you go bankrupt. This drives a suprisingly large portion of bankruptcies in the United States (article here).
I haven't even touched upon how things are even more broken because we're not even the ones shopping for this healthcare soda. Our employers are usually the one shopping for it.
I don't know how to fix things - I do like to idea of a publicly chartered competitor to private insurance, but really we need to find a way to connect up the healthcare market costs to delivered value to us, the consumers.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Touchable Holograms
Popular Science posted this article and video about touchable holograms at Siggraph '09, this year. It's a combination of three items: a 3d display using concave mirrors something like this 3D mirascope toy, two wii-motes strapped statically for position detection, and a home-brewed (university-brewed?) phased array of ultrasound drivers.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
A Sheeva Plug Computer would make a great NAS
I've been looking at the Sheeva Plug dev kit from Marvell. It seems to be an ARM core System-on-Chip (SoC), Linux compatible, with an interesting combo of device controllers hanging off of it, including ethernet, USB, and SATA ports.
The dev kit seems to be the size of a large wall wart and part of Marvell's "Plug Computing" marketing drive. Not sure about plug computing bit, but I'd love to fit the board into a small two or three bay external drive enclosure, or maybe a drive dock. Running a minimal linux system, a looks like it would be a nice way to setup a local Network Attached Storage (NAS) backup system with enough smarts to do offsite backups to Amazon S3 or Rackspace's Mosso.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Telephones over the Internet, a Skype vs Gizmo5 comparison
Engineers are always trying to optimize value - sometime's we choose the wrong values to optimize on, but thats a discussion for another day. Recently, I've been looking through different VoIP services to see how viable they are as ways of augmenting or replacing my residential land-line phone service. VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol. The per-minute prices for VoIP are free-to-low, with direct computer-to-computer calls typically free and computer-to-phone service typically at a low monthly or per-minute fee. A computer-to-phone call is often called PSTN or Public Switch Telephone Network termination. There are also other variations on this where you call and the service calls back but, for me, those services are more hassle than they're worth.
VoIP phoning isn't as reliable as regular landline phones. e.g. in a power outage, you have to have your own backup to run the computer or other devices needed to connect to the internet -- and even that is futile if you net connection goes down with the power. Between the power and issues about getting correct 911 service, etc, VoIP is something I see as a way to augment my current service by reducing cost for non-emergency calls.
So far, after looking through a number of different options, Skype and Gizmo5 are two services of interest. They break up their costs in different ways, and there are various technical and market aspects that might make one favor one vs another. For example, I like that Gizmo5 uses standard communication protocols to initiate and transfer calls while Skype uses more proprietary methods. They also both offer other services that I wouldn't use very often, such as video chat.
Incidentally, one thing that both work with is my Ipod Touch 2G. An Ipod application called "Fring" allows calls over WiFi using a number of VoIP services. It's a geeky feature to play with but there constraints there that make me think that this won't be the way I put the most hours on a VoIP service. More on that later maybe, but I'll just close out talk of Fring with the statement that it's use of standard protocols such as a SIP VoIP interface is what allows Gizmo5 to work with Fring. This is one reason to like standards
As of this writing, both offer service-to-service calls for free. So really I'm comparing the cost of making computer to phone calls. Gizmo5 offers bridging calls to Skype for a flat fee for time. This seems somewhat unreliable, presumably because Skype doesn't encourage this. Skype has a larger user base, but is owned by questionably consumer friendly Ebay (also owner of PayPal).
In terms of flat rate service, Gizmo5 offers 1.9 ct/min rates while Skypes are 2.1ct/min. Skype also charges a connection fee of 3.5 cents. So for flat rate service Skype loses out pricewise. Skype, however, also offers unlimited calls for $2.95/mo. So the breakpoint is ~155minutes for Gizmo5 vs skype. Meaning if you plan to consistently use more than 155 minutes a month on a service like this then Skype will be cheaper. Since this is an addon side service, I think I'm going with Gizmo5 - I liked their use of open connection protocols anyway.
Since I first wrote this post the LA Times ran an article on a study citing the average cost that consumers pay for cellular service -- over $3 per minute wow...
(photo by: asdelwood, under a Creative Commons license on Flickr)
Saturday, February 21, 2009
ATT U-Verse vs. ?
About a year ago ATT started rolling out U-Verse in my neighborhood. Since then, every quarter or so, I get an ATT marketing visitor to my door trying to sell me the service which is, at its full glory, a combined phone-internet-cable service. (and I think, is fiber-optic to some sort of neighborhood box, but not to your house). Today was the latest visit, but the first marketer was the worst, they didn't know any details about the service except is fiber-optic and really great. They didn't know what channels they deliver, they didn't know the up and down speeds of the net connection, they didn't know the price of the accounts after the "promotional period" was over. Somehow they were trained to expect such exitement over the phrase "fiber-optic" that they could instantly sell the new U-Verse service. Oh, that and combined billing. I really really don't care about combined billing. I care about what I actually get for my money.
Since then, things have improved a little. At least the reps know the very basic details of whats offered, like what is the actual speed of the network link that I get. Still when the ATT rep shows up at my door again, and we talk about the detals beyond "its fiber-optic and it's great", I find again and again that for the services that I care about - all three categories are more expensive then my current services. Maybe I'm just an uber-consumer.
Actually, I think the fundamental problem is that ATT doesn't understand that I'm a telecom Luddite. My landline service is basic with no additional phone services like caller ID, etc. My cell phone is pay-as-you-go. Between the barebones local-only ATT account and my third-party long distance company, my family and I make basically unlimited calls for a combined 20-35 a month. The ATT price would be $30/mo. I only very occasionally break $30 a month so really ATT loses here.
My net connection is a third-party DSL provider at $20/mo for 3Mbps down and 768kbs up. ATT's rep today claimed 3Mbps down and 1 Mbps up (their website claims 512bps up) for $30/month, or for $20/month I can get 768/384 kbps. Either again the shiny fiber-optic almost-to-the-home service loses again. The ironic thing here is that ATT supplies the underlying DSL connection here either way, but can't seem to keep from offering pathetic value for internet connections.
Finally, I'm also a cable Luddite. Dish Network charges about $35/mo for local channels and a number of basic cable channels. It's pointless comparing the actual number of channels between a given ATT and Dish plan because it would inevitably end up with a race bewteen who offers more QVC or Jewelry TV shopping channels. ATT's U-Verse service starts at $54 a month. My family already watches as much programming as they have time for, and with a Netflix account, we what whatever piques our interest. Maybe that makes my family post-telecom consumers or something like that. I value the Netflix service more than I value a higher tier cable service, but if I added that cost in, ATT would come in at $4/mo higher. Still U-Verses loses again to the tune of $4 to $20 a month.
So for me, U-Verse offers no reason to pay more per month for about the same service. Maybe U-Verse offers some value to people paying for more premium services that I care to get, but until ATT offers some better value to this customer -- well, I guess I'll see them in three months.
Since then, things have improved a little. At least the reps know the very basic details of whats offered, like what is the actual speed of the network link that I get. Still when the ATT rep shows up at my door again, and we talk about the detals beyond "its fiber-optic and it's great", I find again and again that for the services that I care about - all three categories are more expensive then my current services. Maybe I'm just an uber-consumer.
Actually, I think the fundamental problem is that ATT doesn't understand that I'm a telecom Luddite. My landline service is basic with no additional phone services like caller ID, etc. My cell phone is pay-as-you-go. Between the barebones local-only ATT account and my third-party long distance company, my family and I make basically unlimited calls for a combined 20-35 a month. The ATT price would be $30/mo. I only very occasionally break $30 a month so really ATT loses here.
My net connection is a third-party DSL provider at $20/mo for 3Mbps down and 768kbs up. ATT's rep today claimed 3Mbps down and 1 Mbps up (their website claims 512bps up) for $30/month, or for $20/month I can get 768/384 kbps. Either again the shiny fiber-optic almost-to-the-home service loses again. The ironic thing here is that ATT supplies the underlying DSL connection here either way, but can't seem to keep from offering pathetic value for internet connections.
Finally, I'm also a cable Luddite. Dish Network charges about $35/mo for local channels and a number of basic cable channels. It's pointless comparing the actual number of channels between a given ATT and Dish plan because it would inevitably end up with a race bewteen who offers more QVC or Jewelry TV shopping channels. ATT's U-Verse service starts at $54 a month. My family already watches as much programming as they have time for, and with a Netflix account, we what whatever piques our interest. Maybe that makes my family post-telecom consumers or something like that. I value the Netflix service more than I value a higher tier cable service, but if I added that cost in, ATT would come in at $4/mo higher. Still U-Verses loses again to the tune of $4 to $20 a month.
So for me, U-Verse offers no reason to pay more per month for about the same service. Maybe U-Verse offers some value to people paying for more premium services that I care to get, but until ATT offers some better value to this customer -- well, I guess I'll see them in three months.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Etch-A-Sketch Patent
Here's a link to the patent for Etch-a-Sketch - originally called the GrandJean Tracing Device on Google Patents.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Olympics Siverlight missing?
Hmm, cleaning out my bookmarks, I opened up the NBC Olympics site. At the height of the 2008 Olympics they had been running Microsoft's Silverlight pretty heavily all over the place. Today, because I run NoScript on Firefox, I see a big pre-loading box saying - download Adobe flash 7 or higher all over the place. The videos still seem to use silverlight though... Ah I'm probably just remembering wrong.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Sun Images
I love these solar images. Nature is beautiful. #9 is one of my favorites. Once you're through with looking at the sun imagery, look at some of the other Big Picture columns. Who says that newspapers can't figure out the web. The Boston Globe seems to be doing well in the medium in this case.(from Digg)
Friday, November 21, 2008
Bailout Opinion
Not that it would ever happen, but I think that if the taxpayers are bailing out the Big 3 automakers, we should basically require them to be broken up into smaller independent companies. Down the line, if they waste the opportunity (ahem Chrysler), then at that point, they should be small enough to fail and would be replaced by healthier, more responsive companies that can restart from a fresh perspective -- like Aptera or Tesla or Wrightspeed (and those are just the exciting ones there are more boring competitors...).
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Eclipse DTLK and Ruby
I've started playing with the Eclipse in general and the Eclipse dynamic languages toolkit (DTLK) specifically for it's Ruby support. The 1.0M3 version doesn't seem to be the update servers so I downloaded the full package version and unzipped it into my local eclipse install. The "Mx" numbers must be prerelease milestones.
So far the experience has been much better in general than past forays into using both Eclipse in general, CDT, and RDT (though that was quite a while ago for all of the above). I havent tried, but I don't think this version doesn't seem to have any particular support for rails, however I'm mostly doing quick algorithmic prototyping or utility scripts in Ruby.
One nice feature is the binding of build configurations to a specific ruby interpreter so, on my Mac, it's a nice way to develop and play around with an install of ruby 1.9. Also, I do like to support for unit tests and execution. It also automatically indexes and pulls up rdoc strings. Both nice touches, though I have yet to figure out if there's a way to configure a Ruby project to autorun the unit tests while you type or for every resource save.
The DTLK project in Eclipse is a smart project in that it seems to building a foundation of eclipse support for dynamic languages in general - and there has to be a lot of commonality there. So I'm looking forward to getting more comfortable in the DTLK Ruby environment.
I have some motiviation as I'm also trying out eclipse for embedded development using CDT configured with an embedded toolchain. Eclipse Ganymede is a much nicer enviroment for code browsing than many of the mini-embedded IDE's provided by the vendors.
So far the experience has been much better in general than past forays into using both Eclipse in general, CDT, and RDT (though that was quite a while ago for all of the above). I havent tried, but I don't think this version doesn't seem to have any particular support for rails, however I'm mostly doing quick algorithmic prototyping or utility scripts in Ruby.
One nice feature is the binding of build configurations to a specific ruby interpreter so, on my Mac, it's a nice way to develop and play around with an install of ruby 1.9. Also, I do like to support for unit tests and execution. It also automatically indexes and pulls up rdoc strings. Both nice touches, though I have yet to figure out if there's a way to configure a Ruby project to autorun the unit tests while you type or for every resource save.
The DTLK project in Eclipse is a smart project in that it seems to building a foundation of eclipse support for dynamic languages in general - and there has to be a lot of commonality there. So I'm looking forward to getting more comfortable in the DTLK Ruby environment.
I have some motiviation as I'm also trying out eclipse for embedded development using CDT configured with an embedded toolchain. Eclipse Ganymede is a much nicer enviroment for code browsing than many of the mini-embedded IDE's provided by the vendors.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Lego Sifting Box
I recently purchased a Lego organizing case for my son called Box4Blox. It was a little overpriced if one was comparing cost at the material level, but it had a great feature of being able to sift and grade Lego parts. The item has four trays with different sized gridded grilles underneath three of them. From top to bottom, the grills get increasingly smaller, sifting out larger Lego pieces and letting the smaller ones fall through. My only complaint is that the box wasn't larger for the price. Once a tray gets about 60% full, the "sifting-action" gets a little choked out. Overall the Box4Blox sifter is a great product. My son happily found a renewed interest in his Lego toys as soon as he was able to get to a wider array of different types and sizes of parts easily.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
U.S. Farmers Save By Installing Manure Digesters
Popular Mechanics has posted an article interviewing dairy farmer Shawn Saylor. Saylor describes the multiple benefits of the anarobic biodigester system he installed. I've always thought that there was an archetype of a small, savvy, independent citizen-farmer at the heart of the image of a pragmatic can-do attitude of America. It's great to see that showing in the article.
The digester system is fundamentally improving Saylor's bottom line dairy finances while providing a number of side benefits. For example, on the finance side, the digester provides electric, heat, and fertilizer. It makes him money by offsetting his electric bill, fuel for heat, in addition to putting electric back into the grid. Incidentally, it also reduces the dairy manure waste stream into the watershed while also diverting a lot of gases which would otherwise enter the atmosphere driving global climate change. I am speculating a little here on the overall benefit - the gases are still burnt, generating carbon dioxide, but I'm guessing that's less harmful that methane going directly into the atmosphere. The electricity put back into the grid would offset other carbon sources that would have been used anyway for the farm and his neighbors...
This installation was helped by a government grant partially offsetting the cost of the system. To me this is a great example of how government should be involved in accelerating common sense green technologies. Or in economic terms, reducing the cost of social externalities while improving the efficiency of businesses. The cost of the grant is offset by the long term efficiency in the dairy business which benefits the government in improved long term tax base.
(article from Popular Mechanics, Creative Commons photo from Flickr user foxypar4)
Monday, September 22, 2008
Residential Wind Turbines
EcoGeek has a comparative review of residential wind turbines. None of these turbines would be a single-item install to replace all your electricity use, but they're affordable and if your electricty structure is anything like mine, taking the most expensive tier out of the bill would actually give you a financial payback pretty fast. It's on my list of back-of-the-envelope modelling articles to post an analysis of just what the energy and financial return might be for installing one of these.
If you're interested in making some estimates yourself, the Energy department has some useful data for windspeeds at 30m altitudes. (30m! no wonder many cities don't encourage them in urban settings.) Alternately, if you're lucky, you might find data for a Weather Underground station near you - however, I think most stations are rooftop vs on a 30m pole and so may be much slower.
If you're interested in making some estimates yourself, the Energy department has some useful data for windspeeds at 30m altitudes. (30m! no wonder many cities don't encourage them in urban settings.) Alternately, if you're lucky, you might find data for a Weather Underground station near you - however, I think most stations are rooftop vs on a 30m pole and so may be much slower.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Miscellania: Basic Aerodynamics
For anyone with curious kids (or is a curious kid) who want to know more about how airplanes fly, NASA has posted some material in an index of informations meant for K-12 education. My favorite part is the FoilSim Java applet with controls and displays to illustrate what is going on with various parameters with a 2D airfoil.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Medical UAVs
This has to be one of the coolest UAV uses I've come across in a while - delivery of medical samples or critical supplies like snake anti-venom between remote locations and labs. New Scientist quotes TB researcher Ruth McNerney Ruth McNerney of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, "It's a very exciting idea. We need to know if it's reliable enough from a technological point of view, but we will only find out by trying." - an attitude which is far too short a supply in the world.
Of course this predates the truly important use of UAVs - who's willing to try UAV pizza delivery with me!
via New Scientist via Gizmodo
Of course this predates the truly important use of UAVs - who's willing to try UAV pizza delivery with me!
via New Scientist via Gizmodo
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Gov't Blocks Private Testing for Mad Cow Disease
I had intended to keep this blog mostly technical, but this just makes me angry. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef was blocked from performing "mad-cow" tests on 100% of its beef by U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and USDA. This is an issue that affects both free market practice within the the United States and an international competitiveness issue as Creekstone was trying to use the testing to increase its ability to sell its beef to other countries.
The authority to block the testing seems to be granted by a 1913 law allowing the USDA to regulate "treatment" of animals. The court accepts the argument of the government that treatment includes diagnosis and testing. The LegalTimes blog writes:
"There is a two- to eight-year incubation period for mad cow disease. Because most cattle slaughtered in the United States are less than 24 months old, the most common mad cow disease test is unlikely to catch the disease, the appeals court noted. If the government does not control the tests, the USDA is worried about beef exporters unilaterally giving consumers false assurance."
Here's where it gets at least a little technical. Maybe instead of blocking a company wanting to perform additional testing on it's products, the USDA should be advising the company how best to perform its testing. The language implies that there is a more accurate test for the disease - why not require the better test if they are concerned about false assurances. Or design an experimentally robust methodology to maybe hold back a few cows from slaughter to age them to maturity where the disease could be detected. Anything is better than willful ignorance of a fatal disease!
One technical aspect we have to come to grips with here is that in this case is that tests often aren't perfect. It's a wide problem. Almost all medical tests have statistical probabilities in at least four states:
Overall though, the actions of the government here seem particularly onerous when we lose an opportunity for government to work with a private company that seems willing to implement new approaches to at least characterize the rate of a serious disease. It also seems like the government values the profits of the beef industry over pushing forward to proactively address a public health concern. If the tests aren't perfect now, we should be able to create policy to handle the real complexities while allowing the free market to bring down costs of safer products.
Imagine if a government agency told one car manufacturer that it couldn't install seat belts and airbags because consumers might demand the additional safety procedures from other car makers. "Volvo, you are barred from putting traction control in your cars because Ford might be put at a disadvantage... " Shouldn't we be promoting a free market that actively competes on adding customer safety into products!
(From the Federal appeals court via the LegalTimes blog via Slashdot)
The authority to block the testing seems to be granted by a 1913 law allowing the USDA to regulate "treatment" of animals. The court accepts the argument of the government that treatment includes diagnosis and testing. The LegalTimes blog writes:
"There is a two- to eight-year incubation period for mad cow disease. Because most cattle slaughtered in the United States are less than 24 months old, the most common mad cow disease test is unlikely to catch the disease, the appeals court noted. If the government does not control the tests, the USDA is worried about beef exporters unilaterally giving consumers false assurance."
Here's where it gets at least a little technical. Maybe instead of blocking a company wanting to perform additional testing on it's products, the USDA should be advising the company how best to perform its testing. The language implies that there is a more accurate test for the disease - why not require the better test if they are concerned about false assurances. Or design an experimentally robust methodology to maybe hold back a few cows from slaughter to age them to maturity where the disease could be detected. Anything is better than willful ignorance of a fatal disease!
One technical aspect we have to come to grips with here is that in this case is that tests often aren't perfect. It's a wide problem. Almost all medical tests have statistical probabilities in at least four states:
- true positive: the cow has the disease and the test correctly identifies it
- true negative: the cow is disease free and the test correctly indicates this.
- false positive: the cow is disease free and the test incorrectly indicates that is diseased
- false negative: the cow is diseased and the test incorrectly indicates it's safe
Overall though, the actions of the government here seem particularly onerous when we lose an opportunity for government to work with a private company that seems willing to implement new approaches to at least characterize the rate of a serious disease. It also seems like the government values the profits of the beef industry over pushing forward to proactively address a public health concern. If the tests aren't perfect now, we should be able to create policy to handle the real complexities while allowing the free market to bring down costs of safer products.
Imagine if a government agency told one car manufacturer that it couldn't install seat belts and airbags because consumers might demand the additional safety procedures from other car makers. "Volvo, you are barred from putting traction control in your cars because Ford might be put at a disadvantage... " Shouldn't we be promoting a free market that actively competes on adding customer safety into products!
(From the Federal appeals court via the LegalTimes blog via Slashdot)
History of Agile Software Principles
In an article inside Crosstalk, the Air Force Journal of Software Engineering, Alistar Cockburn reviews a 1968 NATO software engineering conference. He observes that many of the core beliefs and techniques of the modern Agile software development movement aren't such recent developments after all. Both the 1968 conference and the Agile movement focus on the central effect of people over processes.
I understand that there is a strong temptation to develop processes with a mindset that success will result when all that is needed is to capture the collective history of all past processes within the current one. Over time, I believe that approach is guaranteed to be ineffective.
It's not that you don't want to develop processes, but if one focuses on the development of process before people, your process will build up unwieldyness, and the people applying it will either lose confidence in the process, or worse, may not recognize why the steps they are taking are going wrong. To capture knowledge of past projects, you need to allow time to writeup retrospectives. To transfer the knowledge, you want to encourage time for less-experienced engineers to talk and read about past projects. Then going forward, people are better informed to create and apply approaches to the problem at hand.
It takes people to figure out if things are working. For example, I don't think that most aerospace software development can blindly follow the iterate smaller / continuous flow focus of the current Agile software development. They need to consider that they're not purely software systems, and that costs of design-reversals can be much higher when hardware and physical environments are in play.
p.s. if you new to the term Agile Software development see the Agile Manifesto or search on "Agile Software", or "Lean Software" or post a comment.
I understand that there is a strong temptation to develop processes with a mindset that success will result when all that is needed is to capture the collective history of all past processes within the current one. Over time, I believe that approach is guaranteed to be ineffective.
It's not that you don't want to develop processes, but if one focuses on the development of process before people, your process will build up unwieldyness, and the people applying it will either lose confidence in the process, or worse, may not recognize why the steps they are taking are going wrong. To capture knowledge of past projects, you need to allow time to writeup retrospectives. To transfer the knowledge, you want to encourage time for less-experienced engineers to talk and read about past projects. Then going forward, people are better informed to create and apply approaches to the problem at hand.
It takes people to figure out if things are working. For example, I don't think that most aerospace software development can blindly follow the iterate smaller / continuous flow focus of the current Agile software development. They need to consider that they're not purely software systems, and that costs of design-reversals can be much higher when hardware and physical environments are in play.
p.s. if you new to the term Agile Software development see the Agile Manifesto or search on "Agile Software", or "Lean Software" or post a comment.
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