Jonathan Davis

• Stephen Lawrence, Gary Dobson, David Norris and a political trial | England calling – Robert Henderson rips into the Lawrence trial and make a compelling case it is a show trial.
• Lawrence case: the elephant in the room | Brendan O’Neill | spiked – Whilst most celebrate the Stephen Lawrence murder conviction, some are pointing out it comes at too high a price to our liberty. Ancient legal protections were destroyed by New Labour and we may yet live to regret their passing.
• The Blog : The Truth about Violence : Sam Harris –
• Official anti-racism: the new nationalism? | Mick Hume | spiked –
• Lawrence verdict: this isn’t justice – it’s politics | Brendan O’Neill | spiked –

“Goal Setting - Mental Rehearsal - Self Talk - Arousal Control

With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy Seal discussed how he set goals such as making it to lunch, then dinner. With mental rehearsal they were taught to visualize themselves succeeding in their activities and going through the motions. As far as self talk is concerned, the experts in The Brain documentary made the claim that we say 300 to 1000 words to ourselves a minute. By instructing the recruits to speak positively to themselves they could learn how to “override fears” resulting from the amygdala, a primal part of the brain that helps us deal with anxiety. And finally, with arousal control the recruits were taught how to breathe to help mitigate the crippling emotions and fears that some of their tasks encouraged.

This very simple four step process increased their passing rates from 25 percent to 33 percent, which is excellent in a rigorous program as theirs. It demonstrates that achieving success doesn’t always have to be a complex process. A few minor additions and tweaks may be all that is needed.”

I had to agree with Don Riddle writing in the Times this Sunday, that Diane Abbott’s comments about “white people” love playing “divide & rule”" were not really racist, but it is gratifying seeing her hoisted in her own petard.

From “It hurts to be hit by the racism stick, doesn’t it, Diane? by Rod Liddle”

Poor old Diane Abbott: never has a petard hoist someone so high, or to such jubilation. I wonder who will be next to be accused of racism? The Archbishop of Canterbury? Nelson Mandela?

….She has been forced to apologise for having said in a tweet that “white people love playing ‘divide and rule’. We should not play their game.”

…Of course, when placed in context, Abbott’s comments are entirely explicable and harmless. She had been having an online discussion about the Stephen Lawrence court case and racism in general with a chap called Bim Adewunmi (who was making some very sensible points).

In other words, she was grandstanding to a largely black and leftwing audience. That’s fair enough. And what she said — about white people loving to divide and rule — has an element of truth about it, if you clamber backwards to colonial times. But Twitter does not give you the time and space to issue qualifiers, caveats, historical context and what have you. It demands a muscular brevity: it is not a statement to the House of Commons. And within that context, what she said seemed to me to be understandable and fair comment. Ripped away from that context, though, it’s — altogether now ! — raaaaccccist.

She has form, of course, Abbott. She is at least a two-time racist, a multiple racist. She once intimated that black mothers would do more for their kids than white mothers, which provoked howls of outrage, largely from white mothers.

…But it does not matter that in both cases she had a point and that her comments were taken out of context in a most egregious manner. Because Abbott would be first out of the blocks to condemn a white person for having made similarly stereotypical observations about black people. She would not give a monkey’s about either the context or the veracity; nuance does not matter to the likes of Abbott. And the fury she unleashed online and, I suspect, within the hearts of a lot of white British people is not a consequence of what she actually said, but the consequence instead of this hair-trigger sensitivity when white people make the same sorts of generalisations, and are pilloried and sacked for it.

…That she is now being beaten about the head with an anti-racist cudgel is a shame, all the more so for having helped to fashion the cudgel herself.

Of course that old race warrior Lee “Black Power!” Jaspers rushed to her defence. Of course he excused her words, using the truth defence (i.e. what she said was true). He goes on to link to a BBC article about an Institute of Race Relations report claiming that since Stephen Lawrence was murdered n 1993 there have been 96 racial murders in the UK, and this is evidence of continued white racism. As the BBC point out, that IRR report leaves out obviously racist attacks against whites and the Far Right keeps its own lists of race attacks on whites. The grim fact is that most interracial murders in the UK are committed against whites.

No concern from Mr Jaspers about black racism at all. In one post Jaspers bemoans the appalling violence in the Black community, but he would denounces as racist anyone who pointed out that some of this violence is racist in nature and targeted at whites.

The black community experience over the last decade of serious violence and murder is comparable to that of a country at war. The numbers are compelling.

Since 2001 up to the 4th July 2011, a total of 375 British forces personnel or MOD civilians have died while serving in Afghanistan since the start of operations in October 2001. Of these, 331 were killed as a result of hostile action.

Over the same period 298 black men and 67 black women were stabbed to death. 228 black men and 14 black women were shot dead. That’s a total of 607 black people murdered over the last decade.

These figures are horrifying. One has to wonder why Mr Jaspers keeps attacking the police and their efforts to stop this with tactics like Stop and Search?

Take a look at Mapping the Location and Victim Profile of Teenage Murders in London from 2005 to 2012. Most of the victims are black, killed by blacks. Of the white victims, the majority were also murdered by blacks.

So Ms Abbott and Mr Jaspers, the black community is responsible for a disproportionate amount of racial violence. Black people are massively over-represented as both murder victims and offenders. Racial hostility appears to be a much bigger problem in the black community than in the white community. Is it perhaps time to stop worsening racism in the black community by exaggerating and highlighting white racism, and time for some anti-racism campaigns targeting racism in the black community?

A very interesting piece from MIT on Collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups:

First is the question of whether general cognitive ability — what we think of, when it comes to individuals, as “intelligence” — actually exists for groups. (Spoiler: it does.)

And what they found is telling. “The average intelligence of the people in the group and the maximum intelligence of the people in the group doesn’t predict group intelligence,” Malone said. Which is to say: “Just getting a lot of smart people in a group does not necessarily make a smart group.” Furthermore, the researchers found, group intelligence is also only moderately correlated with qualities you’d think would be pretty crucial when it comes to group dynamics — things like group cohesion, satisfaction, “psychological safety,” and motivation. It’s not just that a happy group or a close-knit group or an enthusiastic group doesn’t necessarily equal a smart group; it’s also that those psychological elements have only some effect on groups’ ability to solve problems together.

So how do you engineer groups that can problem-solve effectively? First of all, seed them with, basically, caring people. Group intelligence is correlated, Malone and his colleagues found, with the average social sensitivity — the openness, and receptiveness, to others — of a group’s constituents. The emotional intelligence of group members, in other words, serves the cognitive intelligence of the group overall. And this means that — wait for it — groups with more women tend to be smarter than groups with more men. (As Malone put it: “More females, more intelligence.”) That’s largely mediated by the researchers’ social sensitivity findings: Women tend to be more socially sensitive than men — per Science ! — which means that, overall, more women = more emotional intelligence = more group intelligence .

But where Professor Malone’s ideas get especially interesting from the Lab’s perspective is in another aspect of his work: the notion that groups have, in their structural elements, a kind of dynamic DNA. Malone and his colleagues — in this case, Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas — are essentially trying to map the genome of human collectivity , the underlying structure that determines groups’ outcomes. The researchers break the “genes” of groups down to interactions among four basic (and familiar) categories: what, who, why, and how. Or, put another way: what the project is, who’s working to enact it, why they’re working to enact it, and what methods they’re using to enact it.

…Group intelligence, though, Malone’s findings suggest, can be manipulated — and so, if you understand what makes groups smart, you can adjust their factors to make them even smarter. The age-old question in sociology is whether groups are somehow different, and greater, than the sum of their parts. And the answer, based on Malone’s and other findings, seems to be “yes.” The trick now is figuring out why that’s so, and how the mechanics of the collective may be put to productive use. Measuring group intelligence, in other words, is the first step in increasing group intelligence.

Malone and his colleagues have identified 16 “genes” so far, as expressed in groups like Wikipedia contributors, YouTube uploaders, and eBay auctioneers. “We don’t believe this is the end, by any means, but we think it’s a start,” he said — a way to rethink, and perhaps even revolutionize, the design of groups. Organizational design theory in the 20th century, he noted, generally focused on traditional, hierarchical corporations. But as digital tools give way to new kinds of collectives, “it seems to me,” the professor said, that “it’s time to update organizational design theory for these new organizations.”

MIT management professor Tom Malone on collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Old but good (2001). A primer on the economics of Information Technology.

This is an overview of economic phenomena that are important for high-technology industries. Topics covered include personalization of products and prices, versioning, bundling, switching costs, lock-in, economies of scale, network effects, standards, and systems effects.

Most of these phenomena are present in conventional industries, but they are particular important for technology-intensive industries. I provide a survey and review of recent literature and examine some implications of these phenomena for corporate strategy and public policy.

via Economics of Information Technology.

From an interview with Lee Gettler, the researcher who discovered that testosterone drops in new fathers:

What we see, specifically, in our research is that men have the biological capability to “attune” to fatherhood, responding to the transition to fatherhood with large declines in testosterone. We also see that fathers who are the most involved with physically taking care of their children have the lowest testosterone.

This does not mean that this pattern and its predicted relationships to behavior will occur in every man everywhere, but simply that, within a normative range of variability, male human reproductive biology has the capacity to respond in this way. Individual personalities and cultural norms can certainly affect, mitigate, even dictate, in some cases, how or if these testosterone patterns come to fruition and how they relate to male’s behavior, if they do at all.

Classic models of human evolution have often emphasized the role of men as hunters and providers, without much (or any) attention given to men’s possible contributions to childcare. Our findings help revise this model by showing that human male biology can specifically adjust to the demands of fatherhood and suggest an important role for fathers’ direct care of their children in that accommodation process.

From: http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/12/14/on-testosterone-and-real-men-an-interview-with-lee-gettler/

From an old Edge discussion:

Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, “The New Science of Morality”, Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were “so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country.”

One of the papers “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.

“The article,” Haidt said, “is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?”

“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That’s why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, “The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.”

“Now, the authors point out that we can and do re-use our reasoning abilities. We’re sitting here at a conference. We’re reasoning together. We can re-use our argumentative reasoning for other purposes. But even there, it shows the marks of its heritage. Even there, our thought processes tend towards confirmation of our own ideas. Science works very well as a social process, when we can come together and find flaws in each other’s reasoning. We can’t find the problems in our own reasoning very well. But, that’s what other people are for, is to criticize us. And together, we hope the truth comes out.”

…The paper has created a storm of interest and controversy and has has attracted attention well beyond academic circles. Sharon Begley (Newsweek) and Jonah Lehrer (Wired) were among the many journalists who wrote stories.  In addition, many leading thinkers have taken note.

Gerd Gigerenzer finds this view on reasoning is most provocative as “reasoning is not about truth but about convincing others when trust alone is not enough. Doing so may seem irrational, but it is in fact social intelligence at its best.” Steven Pinker notes that “The Argumentative Theory is original and provocative, has a large degree of support, and is strikingly relevant to contemporary affairs, including political discourse, higher education, and the nature of reason and rationality. It is likely to have a big impact on our understanding of ourselves and current affairs.”

And Jonathan Haidt says the “the article is one of my favorite papers of the last ten years. I believe that they have solved one of the most important and longstanding puzzles in psychology: why are we so good at reasoning in some cases, but so hopelessly biased in others? Once I read their paper, I saw the argumentative function” of reasoning everywhere — particularly in the reasoning of people I disagreed with, but also occasionally even in myself. They’re on to a very powerful idea with many social and educational ramifications.”

Read an interview with one of the paper’s authors - Hugo Mercier – here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory

Interesting speech on “the heuristic narratological basis of self-delusion”,  “the stories and metaphors we seduce ourselves with”.

Transcript is here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_stories/

Here is one extract from the transcript.

Another set of stories that are popular – if you know Oliver Stone movies or Michael Moore movies. You can’t make a movie and say, “It was all a big accident.” No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you’re watching movies. This, again, is reason to be suspicious.

He is so right. Our narrative bias feeds the engine of Ideological belief, which always holds that there are oppressors and oppressed and that the oppressors are intentionally oppressing, usually via conspiracy.

Complex systems, emergent properties, mistakes and unforeseen second or third order effects are discounted. Narrative bias demands agency, and that serves Ideology, the dominant political mode of our time.

• Personal finance software for budgeting your spending. | The Birdy – The Birdy is a simple personal finance tracker you’ll actually use every day.
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• Birth of the nerd – The Boston Globe – The origins of the familiar character.
• The Urban Legend of Multipass Hard Disk Overwrite – Love this sort of technical debunking: The Urban Legend of Multipass Hard Disk Overwrite . One overwrite of data is OK.
• European and Asian genomes have traces of Neanderthal : Nature News –
• Feminism in the 21st century | Zoe Williams | Books | The Guardian – “epistemic community”, a term which is defined by Peter Haas as “a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain … who have 1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs … 2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their analysis . . . 3) a shared notion of validity and 4) a common policy enterprise”. Such a community is the means by which ideas become practices and norms. The patriarchy isn’t going to smash itself, to paraphrase Habermas (sort of), but nor is it so entrenched that it cannot be overturned by sustained, informed argumentation.
• Corrective rape – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – "Corrective rape is a criminal practice first seen in South Africa, whereby lesbian women are raped by men, sometimes under supervision by members of their families or local communities, purportedly as a means of "curing" them of their homosexuality."

  Unbelievable!

From: http://changingminds.org/blog/0902blog/090225blog.htm

Much work these days is packaged up as projects, with plans, resources and time-bound deliverables. Managing projects is a skill as the various risks and issues can easily trip you up. In particular the sheer complexity can cause much extra work and conceal important issues.

Here, then, are four ways of making things simpler by separating out things that need your attention in different ways.

1. Separate rapidly changing things from slowly changing things. This makes changes (and communication about them) easier. For example a strategic plan, which changes little is separated from a rapidly-changing tactical plan.

2. Separate things that require attention now from points of information. This allows a sharper focus on action. For example items that require decisions may be covered first in a meeting, then information discussions continued in the remaining time.

3. Separate planned action from unexpected action. This allows both to be clearly managed and for plans to be revised as needed. For example issues are managed separately from standard project plans, thus allowing both onto the stage.

4. Separate internal project communications from external communications. Internal communications can be detailed, technical, textual and full of jargon. External communications should be focused, brief, visual and use Plain English.

You can also use the principle of separation to create clarity in documents and presentations by:

* Using colour, bold fonts, and other visual contrasts.
* Using lines and physical separation.
* Visual/physical separation into sections, pages, documents.

Gerald Weinberg is the grandmaster of consulting and project management. From the hundreds of hints and tips on offer in his excellent secrets of consulting series, Adrian Segar explores his favorite 19 :

You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit. (The Credit Rule.) Check your ego at the door.

In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always a problem. (The First Law of Consulting.) Yes, most people have a hard time admitting they have a problem.

No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem. (The Second Law of Consulting.) I learned this after about five years of being engaged as a technical consultant and repeatedly having CEOs confiding to me their non-technical woes…

If they didn’t hire you, don’t solve their problem. (The Fourth Law of Consulting.) A common occupational disease of consultants: we rush to help people who haven’t asked for help.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (The First Law of Engineering.) Must. Not. Unscrew the tiny screws just to check what’s inside.

Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell you the solution in the first five minutes. (The Five-Minute Rule.) Unbelievably, this is true—the hard part is listening well enough to notice.

If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant. (The Hard Law.) Everyone makes mistakes, and that can be a good thing.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others. (The Hardest Law.) The hardest things to notice are things about myself.

The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. (The Law of Raspberry Jam.) Or, as Jerry rephrases it: Influence or affluence; take your choice.

When the clients don’t show their appreciation, pretend that they’re stunned by your performance—but never forget that it’s your fantasy, not theirs. (The Lone Ranger Fantasy.) “Who was that masked man, anyway?”

The most important act in consulting is setting the right fee. (Marvin’s Fifth Great Secret.) Setting the right fee takes a huge burden off your shoulders.

“We can do it—and this is how much it will cost.” (The Orange Juice Test.) Jerry uses an example straight from the meetings world for this one—event professionals will recognize the situation, and appreciate the insight.

Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered. (Prescott’s Pickle Principle.) Sadly, the longer you work with a client, the less effective you get.

It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the ending of an illusion. (Rhonda’s First Revelation.) A positive way to think about unpleasant change.

When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely—and harder to take.(Rhonda’s Third Revelation.) Notice and challenge your illusions before they turn into crises.

If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking. (The Rule of Three.) The perfect antidote to complacency about your plans.

The best marketing tool is a satisfied client. (The Sixth Law of Marketing.) Word of mouth is the best channel for new work; being able to satisfy my clients led me to a successful, twenty-two year IT consulting career without using advertising or agents.

Give away your best ideas. (The Seventh Law of Marketing.) When you teach your clients to handle future similar problems themselves, they’ll appreciate your generosity and are more likely to give you further work or good word of mouth to others.

Enjoyed these rules from Immo Böhm  writing about Software Project Management.

“Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.” and “You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.”

Jason Bates (@JasonBates) tipped me off about the concept of “Approximately correct strategy”, from an interview with by Dick Harrington (former CEO of Thomson Reuters) by HBR columnist Anthony Tjan:

Recently, I had dinner with Dick Harrington, former CEO of Thomson Reuters

We talked about his three most significant lessons learned over his very successful 25+ year career as a Fortune 250 executive.

Dick Harrington (DH): First, you have to have an “approximately correct” strategy — you have to know where you are going, but directionally correct is the key. Two, you have to be highly focused and intensely execute that strategy by motivating and aligning the troops you have. And three, it always comes back to the customers and the fact that you have to manically know your customers and drive everything from that.

TT: Nicely done. So let’s start with the first point. People often worry about architecting a perfect business plan or strategy and then get lost in the minutia. How do you know when you are “approximately correct,” as you say?

DH: You want to be approximately correct instead of precisely incorrect. There is a point at which additional information or research will not change the basics of your strategy. When you get your strategy there, you have to “Nike it” – you just do it. If you continue to refine and refine, you’ll never get into action, and the incremental value of research just won’t be worth the time and money. Schedule time frames and be religious about them to launch, get feedback, and see if the strategy is acceptable to the customer or if you need to adjust.  

From: http://blogs.hbr.org/tjan/2009/08/lessons-learned-from-30-years.html

Solid advice:

You can maximize your odds of getting what you want by minimizing the work the other person has to do to help you.

From: Unschooled » Blog Archive » How to ask for things

Photo by slappytheseal . Click for original.

Or are you the Catfish?

“Vince Pierce: They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.” – From “Catfish” (2010)

Ars Technica has a fascinating inside story of how Anonymous hacked security firm HB Gary, after the security firm vaunted that it was about expose members of the group.

It is a tale of wincing humiliation for HB Gary, security experts who allowed themselves to be utterly humiliated by an attack that not only compromised their website, but led to their entire e-mail archive being published online, many of their core company servers being completely compromised and terabytes of backups deleted.

It is a genuine cautionary tale. Their folly was not merely taunting capable and motivated adversaries, but rather of not following security best practices, which as experts, they know well.

Read on…Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack

This presentation is a classic, one of the founding media of the Devops movement.

The summary of the presentation is the kernel of what we know as Devops today:

1. Automated Infrastructure
2. Shared version control
3. One step build – code to set of files in one step
4. One step deploy
5. Shared metrics
6. Use IRC and IM Robots (they use IRC and squirt logs and alerts into their IRC stream. Search engine indexes them.)
7. Culture
   1. Shared Run-books and Escalation plans
   2. Healthy attitude about failure – plan to respond, not just prevent. Fire drills.
   3. No finger-pointing and blame

The slides are here:

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