Posted by
Pete McBreen
27 Mar 2019 at 03:41
With the recent news about bad corporate behavior by facebook, Cambridge Analytica misuse of data, lying about cambridge analytica, asking for phone numbers for login and then using those numbers for advertising targetting, second link, letting scammers search for you by phone number and finally livestreaming murder. Maybe it is time to start the conversation about how to regulate, break up or revoke the corporate charter for some of the larger social media companies.
The argument that they are just a common carrier not responsible for the content does not fly. They are wittingly allowing propaganda, agitprop and other unwelcome content to be disseminated around the world, and benefiting by getting advertisers to pay to be associated with the content. The common carrier excuse worked in for some industries, where the carrier was transmitting content from known providers, but now that the carrier is enabling the publishing and broadcast from any random internet connection, facebook is now the publisher and the carrier. Hence it is responsible for the content.
If it cannot make a valid business model out of properly curated content, then too bad, it does not deserve to exist. There are many business models that society does not allow to exist, and publishing/promoting propaganda, agitprop and dubious content is one of the business models that needs to be controlled by society.
Twitter probably falls into the same category with the way the platform promotes extreme political rhetoric. There is reasonable evidence that multiple elections around the world have been adversely affected by the various social media platforms over the past several years, so before outside influences create more havoc, societies around the world need to come up with a strategy to deal with social media companies that profit from spreading information designed to decrease the quality of life for everyone.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
17 Mar 2019 at 20:22
Dave Snowden is writing up the Definitive History of the Cynefin Framework, so I thought it was time to mention it here. Dave was one of the creators of DSDM that I covered in my Questioning XP book, so it is nice that he has now come up with a way to talk about methodologies
Cynefin documents five different domains, earliest documentation is in article on Complex Acts of Knowing back in 2002/2003.This link is an archive of the Creative Commons version of Complex Acts of Knowing in case the Wiley link goes down.
- Obvious - this is the domain of Best Practices, where everyone knows how to operate, so it is process of just doing what everyone knows how to do.
- Complicated - this is the domain of learned expertise, there are multiple good answers, but careful analysis might be needed to discover the way forward. One metaphor refers to this as the domain of the bicycle, if it is not working right you can take it apart, discover what is broken and then reassemble it.
- Complex - this is the domain where good answers are only discovered in retrospect. A metaphor for this is that of the frog - you cannot take it apart, discover what is wrong and then reassemble it, you have to try different treatments on the whole organism. Dave Snowden talks about Safe to Fail experiments in this domain.
- Chaotic - this is the domain of no clear cause and effect, so you just need to take action to try to move out of the chaotic state into one of the other domains.
- Disorder - this is the domain of not knowing which domain you are in.
There are some things in software development that fall into the Obvious domain, but mostly there is an existing product or library that handles this domain for you. So if your application needs to store some data, then depending on what the data is, the choice of the filesystem, transient cache, a database or offsite cloud storage will be obvious. There may be some debate as to the flavour and/or vendor of the storage mechanism, but storing data is a known problem with well known solutions.
In part some of my Software Craftsmanship book was raising issues about using techniques that are relevant to the Obvious domain in Software Development. A Factory with a mechanical metaphor is appropriate for the Obvious domain, after all we know how to assemble a car. But the reason we know how to assemble a car is because experts working in the Complicated domain did a lot of Design for Manufacture work on the design of the car so that it could be economically made in a factory. Designing an assembly line is a very complicated process, but once it is built, it is Obvious what you are supposed to do at each work station along the line.
In software development, all of the Obvious domains are well served, so what is left is the Complicated and Complex domains where off the shelf solutions are not available. Looking back up to the image of the Cynefin domains, some Methodologies are better suited to domains that are not very Complicated, bordering on the Obvious, others like Jim Highsmith’s Adaptive Software Development are targeted at working in the Complex domain, with the three project phases of speculation, collaboration and learning.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
04 Mar 2019 at 15:44
In 5 Years There Will Be Moaning and Wailing writes Marcus Ranum about the logistical management software for the F-35
I love it when software developers say “How hard can it be?!” and decide to build their own complete replacement system. The results are usually about as bad as the first system, for the same reason. To be fair, this stuff is really hard to write – which is all the more reason to be skeptical when someone says they’ll just put together a modular cloud-based version of their own. You should always ask “why do you believe you will get right the things that everyone else got wrong? Because the reasons that they got it wrong apply to you, as well.”
Posted by
Pete McBreen
04 Mar 2019 at 03:45
Playing with a book idea:
Learning the world, an introduction to SQL for Business Analysts. Uses PostgreSQL but most of the SQL in the book is standard and could be used on any other database. Might need an appendix or web reference for other database specific queries looking at the table catalogs.
Link updated with newest draft Sept 2019
Posted by
Pete McBreen
02 Mar 2019 at 18:15
Of all the places that you would expect to find cognitive bias, Theoretical Physics is not the place
When asked how particle physicists address group-think, Gianotti explains instead why some research avenues require large communities.
You would think that sufficiently much has been written about cognitive biases and logical fallacies that even particle physicists took note, but at least the ones I deal with have no clue. If I ask them what measures they take to avoid cognitive biases when evaluating the promise of a research direction, they will either mention techniques to prevent biased data-analysis (different thing entirely), or they will deny that they even have biases (thereby documenting the very problem whose existence they deny).
Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math has a lot more about the background to this.
The obvious fun question that arises from this is where are we doing this in software development?
