Non-Normal

I just started reading Black Swan which has been highly recommended to me. While I don’t have high hopes I do like the initial focus on deflating the myth of the Bell Curve. This has been an area of interest for me for years as you’ll soon find out.

If you’ve studied statistics you’re familiar with the basic bell-shaped distribution which is known as a “Normal” distribution. Actually, it is technically a Gaussian distribution as it follows a pattern known as a Gaussian function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function).

Anyway, almost all of popular statistical theory is based on Normal distributions. Don’t believe me? Ever used the word “average”? The average is also known as the arithmetic mean, which in a Normal distribution corresponds to the middle of the bell – meaning that it’s the most commonly occurring value. In modern parlance “average” is really just a synonym for “typical” or “common” which is a simple way of describing how the mean represents a Normal distribution.

The same is true if you’ve ever heard of a “standard deviation”, which is a way to determine how far away a given value is from the mean in a Normal distribution. These days “standard deviation” is used in passing to refer to how different something is from what you’d expect. “Six Sigma” processes actually refer to a process that covers six standard deviations from the mean (sigma is the Greek letter representing a standard deviation in mathematics).

All of that is a long way of saying that a lot of what comprises common knowledge about statistics is based on Normal distributions. There are a lot of distributions that fit the Normal pattern including the height of a given set of people or the size of raindrops in a rain storm. It’s widely used in all of the social sciences to simplify complex phenomena.

The problem is that we’re finding more and more distributions are not Normal. Social network connectivity and the size of world cities are two basic examples that follow something called a Power Law distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law) which looks nothing like a Bell curve. The entire concept of the “long tail”, which has started to pervade almost every aspect of business strategy,  is based on this kind of distribution.

Unfortunately, your average person does not have the tools to deal with this kind of distribution. Arithmetic Means (averages) are meaningless when used on a Power Law distribution. There is no standard deviation because the mean is so grossly misrepresenting the values. Nothing can help you take this kind of curve and fit it into the nice Bell curve that everyone knows so well.

It’s hard to represent how fundamental a shift this is in our understanding of statistics. Not as mathematicians (who have known about these for centuries) but as a society. Math is a tool in the macrocosm as well as the microcosm and we rely on a shared understanding to be able to make decisions as a society. Politicians know that you’ll understand it when they talk about the “average American”. Imagine if they started referring to the “long tail” of Americans – I wonder if anyone would understand.

Someday we’re going to have to encounter issues like the massive inequality of wealth in the world. Unfortunately, that follows a Power Law distribution so we’re not ready yet.

Giving Thanks

Two years ago, I wrote an ill-fated post about how happy I was with life and everything I had managed to accomplish or accumulate. Fate had other ideas and only six months later I was looking at the ruins of a life with most of those things gone away.

Yah, so I won’t be making that mistake again.

I realize now that in the end you will lose everything you have. It’s not a sad or depressing thought, life is a game with a well known ending. The only question is how you play the game along the way. That might not seem like much, but it’s really everything.

From everything that happens to you in life some good comes. In my case the good that comes from all my suffering  is my appreciation for the little things in life. It’s easy not to take the big things for granted, but to be truly thankful I believe you have to appreciate how lucky you are for each and every breath you take. I’m happy to report that I am thankful in a way I never really thought I could be before.

Case in point, I used to want to volunteer because I felt some amount of guilt for all I’ve gotten in life – and yet I never found the time. Now, I volunteer out of my sheer love of helping other people. I’m not better or worse than anyone else, but in cases when I can help people I enjoy it. I’m thankful for the opportunity to help others, not for the fact that I have some things others do not.

Most of all, I am thankful for all of the amazingly unlikely events over millions of years that resulted in me being able to sit here and write this down. If you think about it, the fact that we live on lives on a small piece of rock hurling through space is really quite amazing.

I have taken around 250 breaths while writing this post. Some people don’t even get that many, so I consider myself beyond lucky. I’m just thankful.

Propositions

Here in California we believe in a few key truths: avocado goes with everything, snow is something you drive to and the best way to pass laws is by the popular vote. Actually that last one isn’t really true but you’d be hard pressed to argue against it considering the sheer size of the Proposition system.

If you’re not from California, the proposition system is a way for laws to get passed without going through the legislature. Any citizen or organization can draft up a law and as long as the Attorney General deems it to be legal and enough signatures are collected it gets placed on the ballots for election day. If enough people (read: majority) vote for the proposition, it becomes law. It’s that simple.

No signature from the executive branch, no vote from the legislative branch. It’s as if we have no elected officials. What’s wrong with that system you ask? Well, in theory the system is a great way to keep legislative power in check. In practice the system has created the most dysfunctional government of all the states.

Don’t believe me? Consider the case of Proposition L here in San Francisco.

Proposition L, the “Sit-Lie” ordinance, would “restrict sitting or lying on sidewalks citywide from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.”. That’s a law on the ballot for the popular vote in November. Who sponsors the proposition? The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom. The mayor is working to pass legislation to make it against the law to lie on the sidewalk through a popular vote. Think about that.

Proposition L is just a symptom. Every election year there are countless propositions on the ballot at the City and state level to argue about which side of the street to park on and on the official stance on blue geese. Citizens are mailed textbooks with information on the propositions so that they can make well informed decisions.

We elect a legislature for a reason: to pass laws. That is their job. The legislators are held responsible for their work when re-election comes up and they have to justify their records. Checks and balances exist to ensure their power isn’t abused. The law makers focus all of their attention on drafting laws that will achieve the goals of the state and survive the test of time. None of that is true of propositions where no one is held accountable and no checks exist. The Mayor is supporting Proposition L because there is no political risk. If the people vote for it he can claim credit, if they vote against it – well, it was their decision they can’t hold it against him. Contrast that with an actual bill in the legislature where actual lawmakers would be asked to justify the laws. Perish the thought.

The California legislatures are incapable of compromise because they don’t have to compromise. When they disagree they just file propositions and let the people vote. It’s like kids who just go to their parents to settle every dispute.

Average citizens cannot and should not be able to properly judge the impact of legislation on the long term health of their government. California is heading towards bankruptcy because so many funds were allocated with propositions that the discretionary budget is only a fraction of revenues. The legislature literally can’t balance the budget because they don’t control it. It was created through propositions voted for by people who in no way understood the long term effect of their decisions.

There is one time that laws should be created through a popular vote and that is Constitutional Amendments. Such changes have to require the popular vote or else the legislature could vote themselves unlimited power. However, those popular votes are only to control the rules of the game and not the game itself.

California is a great state and the avocados here are really good. However, if the proposition system is not curtailed or removed it will not continue to be a great or even good state in the future. The people of California are literally choking themselves on laws that should be the domain of professional lawmakers and are instead the whim of the electorate.

If you believe that we cannot trust the legislature with creating the laws to keep the state working then I challenge you to find a better system. Seriously, it seems to be working for the rest of the free world. Then again, they don’t all have avocados…

Feeling Rich

If you missed it, there has been a firestorm online recently surrounding a law professor who tried to make the case that despite a combined income of $250,000 a year his family was struggling to get by. The barrage of responses forced him to take his blog offline but you can read about it here.

By far the most insightful thing I’ve read about the entire debate is that there is a difference between being rich and feeling rich. Making $250,000 is undoubtedly rich in a country where the median family income is around $50,000. However, that doesn’t mean you feel rich depending on what you think feeling rich feels like.

For lack of a better definition, I’m going to arbitrarily define “feeling rich” as consisting of the following:

1. Being able to buy anything you want.
2. Not needing to work for a sizable period of time without changing your lifestyle.
3. Possession of some expensive assets (house, car, etc).

Based on that definition, if you live in a neighborhood of people who all earn $500,000 a year, I have no doubt that at $250,000 you would not feel rich. You would very quickly convince yourself that you can’t buy anything you want because your definition of what you could want would change to what the people around you have. You wouldn’t be able to stop working for a sizable period of time and live their lifestyle. And you most definitely would not own anything as expensive as what they have.

All of that is a fancy way of saying that feeling rich is relative to those people around you. If you took that same professor and put him in a neighborhood of people earning minimum wage, I guarantee you that he would feel rich pretty quickly.

It is also true that everyone has a different idea of what being rich will feel like if/when they get there. Not all of it is defined by your surroundings since personal taste and personal interests definitely influence what you desire. Some people want to own yachts and castles while others really just want to live in a cabin in the woods.

All I really care about is how lucky I am not to feel poor. If you’re not sure how that feels, read this.

Jury Duty

I got my jury duty notice today.

Despite the fact that I’ve been called for jury duty at least 5 times and had to sit in the waiting room at least twice (wasting an entire day in the process) I have never learned anything about the judicial process. I haven’t even been questioned by a lawyer or see the inside of a courtroom. I imagine them as a magical place where law gets done. Or made. Or whatever you do with law.

It strikes me that this is a missed opportunity to educate the general population on civics. When you have my undivided attention for an entire day you could:

1. Take me on a tour of the courthouse, explaining why I’m there
2. Have a question/answer session with a judge or clerk about the process
3. Get a visit from a city council member (when else do you get a representative sample of the city together in one place without sample bias?)
4. Have someone from the mayor’s office talk about the projects the city is working on
5. Educated me about the 2,500 propositions on the ballot in the upcoming election

It’s also a prime opportunity to get some volunteer work accomplished. Rather than sitting there reading a book, I’d happily write letters to soldiers or make holiday cards for the homeless. If I’m willing to take a few hours out of the week to help why not let me give the time you’re already taking?

This is, of course, wishful thinking.

There may be a lot of great ways to spend the time but I have no doubt that I’ll spend it just like I’ve spent every other time: Sitting around and reading a book all day. Yay.

Seriously, Facebook is out to get us

I remember back when I first started using Facebook and it seemed so friendly.

When I first started blogging I loved the Facebook RSS import feature as it automatically posted my blog to my feed, saving me the trouble of doing it every time. If you wanted to read more you needed only click on the link to my full blog and you could read til your heart’s content.

These days Facebook doesn’t want you to use the internet – they want you to sit there like a good little Facebooker and update your status and play Farmville all day on Facebook.com. Those other websites? Oh, you don’t need them. Just stay here where you’re comfortable.

As part of this they stopped linking to the source for RSS imports. As such, I bet no one reading my recent posts knows my blog is easily found at http://seanbyrnes.com or that you can subscribe to it there. No, they want you to think I post it directly to my feed.

They also fail to follow any of the formatting for the RSS import, making my blog posts look like the incoherent rantings of a semi-crazed madman. Ok, so maybe that last part isn’t entirely inaccurate but at least I have sound formatting and passable grammar. Most of the time. Depends on how much I had to drink.

Anyway, Facebook used to be like the bar down the street where you could stop by whenever you wanted to see some friendly faces. Now it feels like a casino where they never want me to leave.

Sabbaticals

Here in the US the typical company will give a new employee 2 weeks of vacation. After a few years you can earn more vacation (3 weeks after 5 years, etc.) with some kind of cap around 4 weeks after you’ve been there 20. You can lump in federal and corporate holidays to get another week with the range somewhere between 3-5 weeks. If you’re REALLY lucky, that doesn’t include your sick days (a lot of companies group sick days in vacation to call them “Paid Time Off” and make them sound bigger). If you’re really unlucky then you don’t even get weekends off so your vacation goes into the negative.

Considering that a year has 52 weeks, that means an American worker is working over 93% of the time. That’s a lot. In other developed countries the vacation policies are very different. This is a great chart from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development (JPC-SED):

COUNTRY	AVERAGE HOURS WORKED PER YEAR	AVERAGE ANNUAL VACATION DAYS
United States	1,966	10.2
Japan	1,889	17.5
United Kingdom	1,731	25
France	1,656	25-30

Courtesy  gaebler.com

If you work in the US your first reaction should be “What the hell?” US workers work more hours and have radically less vacation than other developed countries.

Before you start arguing about how this is the engine of the US economy and how the US GDP is so enormous in comparison (yes, China isn’t on that list) I think it’s important to consider that there are more things than money. Yes, the US is still the largest economy (for now – hi China!) but the US is not the healthiest. The WHO tells us that the healthy life expectancy in the US is between 67-71  while Japan is 72-78. The UK is 69-72. France is 69-75. US workers work harder with less time off and LIVE SHORTER LIVES.

It’s also important to consider the shift from the industrial to the information economy. As more and more jobs in the US require thinking and creativity, the line between hours worked and actual productivity blurs. A worker in a high-tech field that is well rested is much more productive than the same worker with only a few hours sleep. Additionally, burn-out becomes the biggest problem with thought-intensive jobs as the creativity and analytics skills required to do them effectively diminish over time without some variety.

This is all a long way of asking why it is employers in the US short change their workers. Why is the slight cost in productivity for granting more vacation not worth the health and productivity of their employees? Why is it that we work ourselves so hard and don’t demand more time off to enjoy the fruits of our labors?

I don’t blame the employers. Everyone is an employee and everyone has the freedom to work where ever they want. Why is it that workers don’t demand more time off? Why is the market not forced to provide more vacation by the very workers they need to function?

I have no idea but things might be changing. I’m encouraged by Netflix’s policy of no limits on vacation – it’s just the honor system. Get your work done and you can vacation as much as you’d like. Considering how the Netflix stock is doing, it doesn’t seem to have hurt their productivity.

Sounds like a place I’d like to work.

Fingerprints

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been to the 24 Fitness where I work out and upon my return visit today I was greeted by fingerprint scanners. Considering that most data centers I’ve visited only recently added fingerprint security (and they are protecting millions of dollars in equipment) I was surprised to say the least. Maybe towels cost more than I think.

It turns out they want to move away from ID cards and use biometric identification for all members. Walk up, scan your fingerprint and put in your access code to gain access to the gym. Fitness, 21st century edition.

My initial reaction is that there is no way in hell I’m giving my fingerprint to my gym. I have a healthy paranoia when it comes to my personal information and avoid giving out my social security number unless absolutely necessary. Most of the time an organization will ask for your social security number when another piece of information will do (today’s date for example) but requires more effort on their part so they just try to be lazy. If fingerprints are the social security numbers of the future, I’m going to have to start thinking about where they go. I’ve seen enough spy movies to know fake fingerprints can be used to bypass the security system protecting my priceless art collection.

My second reaction was that this is actually a good thing since I don’t always have my card with me and with this system I can’t ever forget it. Also, I have no priceless art collection. So I’m thinking I’ll give the system a try.

And, hey, if they really want my fingerprints they can just get it off the equipment when I’m done. There’s a great one of mine on the 150 lb dumbbells. Seriously, it’s right next to where I wrote my social security number on the bar.

…And We’re Back

A long time ago in a far off place I used to blog a lot. I tend to find myself thinking about the strangest things and blogging was always a great way to get the thoughts out and share them with others.

Then I went through a phase where I didn’t have much to say.

I’m happy to report that we’ve resolved those technical issues and are back for more. You can fully expect to see more of my random thoughts and poetry whether you like it or not. As an added bonus I’ll start posting art and stories that I’m working on (and maybe even a little pottery). Tortured artists like myself are always prolific, of course.

And to everyone that complained that the poetry that has been up on my blog for so long is to depressing… I really don’t care. If I was writing all of this for other people the blog would be entitled “Money For Nothing” and be full of get rich quick schemes and celebrity gossip since that seems to be where all the blog traffic is these days.

When I entered my quiet phase I threw out my old blog and started fresh. I won’t be doing that again. Everything up here is a record of a thought or feeling I’ve had, both the good and the bad. You can’t always be happy just like you can’t always be sad.

I’m looking forward to what comes next, I hope you are too.

Broken Heart

Broken Heart

Quietly the fizzures show
Broken like a jagged stone
Coldness creeping in below
Broken, barren, cold, alone

Quickly, now, before sadness creeps
Forget it all but don’t let go
Push it down to endless deeps
As time itself begins to slow

Catch a glimmer, bursting bright
Dare not hope, dare not smile
For fake is hope behind the light
And awaiting is the lonely mile

Be still my heart as love is gone
The day is breaking, but with no dawn

 

 

---