In At The Deep End

I saw an excellent programme on TV last night: The History of Now. It’s a series about 2000-2009, and it helped me to put my finger on things that had been vaguely lurking in my head.

One of the things it mentioned was Mosaic - the postcode-based classifcation of people so that shops and, more recently, politicans can target particular things to particular people. It divides society up into 16 or so categories, and then says what category is most common in each postcode.

It made me think of a book I’m reading for work: Competing on Analytics. It has all kinds of interesting and scary things about how companies are storing information about customers and their behaviour, and then using this behaviour to make more money. Things like store loyalty cards, online accounts, using search engines and so on.

Apparently the industry average rate for people actually using money-off coupons is about 2%. Tesco can use its vast knowledge of its customers to tailor its coupons so that they are more relevant, and so get 20-50%. (So people buy e.g. cat food in Tesco rather than anywhere else.) It issues about 7 million targetted variations of product coupons a year, and has given away Clubcard points worth about £1 billion pounds. (Don’t feel sorry for Tesco, the points keep you with them rather than going elsewhere.)

It’s taken a while for me to realise what makes the weird feeling in all this, and I think it’s two main things (there might be more, but these are it for now). The first is that Tesco etc. know so much about me from a distance i.e. without properly knowing me. In the past, in the days before people left such a rich digital trail in their wake, to do this sort of thing you’d need to go through the rubbish in someone’s bins, tap their phones, intercept their post etc. In short, you’d be spying on them. We (at least, people my age or older) haven’t adjusted our social expectations to move this kind of knowledge gathering into the Acceptable category.

The second thing that’s behind the weird feeling is the imbalance in the relationship. You know so much about me, but I know so little about you. In fact, I don’t even know which “you” I’m dealing with much of the time - I see the shop workers, but the marketing departments, IT operations departments and other backroom boys and girls who shepherd all this data are people I will never meet. Just as a thought experiment, I imagined what it would be like if when I hand over my clubcard in Tesco (and give them yet more data) I got a little book with details of all the Tesco staff who will touch my data - their names, addresses, a photo maybe, what they typically buy in Tesco etc. ‘Cos that’s what I’m giving them.

While this rant has built up a head of steam, I’ll grumble about a particularly unpleasant version of all this. On Facebook there are occasionally adverts that say “Aged X-Y?” where X and Y just happen to bracket my age, or even “Are you a man aged X?” where X is exactly my age. I’m fairly sure that Facebook gives its advertisers that information about me i.e. the advertisers know exactly my age and sex, so they could just as easily say “Seeing as you’re a man aged X…” Putting it as a question makes it look like they just happen to have an offer on at the moment that just happens to suit me (according to them) and so I would be foolish to let such a brilliant offer pass me by. At least Tesco are honest about their omniscience (although they don’t go out of their way to help people realise quite how much data they have). While I’m in the area, there’s an interesting blog about someone trying to get Tesco to show him what they hold about him.

Of course, in some ways, there’s a choice in all this. We choose to exchange this information in return for convenience and, possibly, lower prices. Although the choice is more and more being made for us. In order to leave no digital trail you’d have to work really quite hard - as films like Terminator 3 and The Bourne Identity (and many others) show.

What provoked a wry smile is the following passage of the Competing on Analytics book. Bear in mind it was written in 2007:

Of course, any quantitative analysis relies upon a series of assumptions. When the conditions behind the assumptions no longer apply, the analyses should no longer be employed. For example, Capital One [an example in the book of a company succeeding through analytics] and other credit card companies make analytical predictions about customers’ willingness to repay their balances under conditions of general economic prosperity. If the economy took a sharp downturn, the predictions would no longer apply, and it would be dangerous to continue using them.

I got a big letter in the post at the weekend from my college. Most of it was a yearbook of sorts, showing the matriculation (joining the college as a 1st year) photo - the big one where the whole year sat in rows in suits and gowns. We all looked so young and fresh-faced, but then it was over half my life ago. Then inside was a collection of the “what I’m doing now” for everyone. Mine was very out of date - no wife, no children, and two companies ago.

There were loooooads of people doing something in the city, generic important-but-boring-sounding law, or management consultancy and unsurprisingly quite a few academics. A handful had got married to each other. Two stood out as quite hard to beat in the Reunion Top Trumps stakes: one has been doing legal stuff for the UN in Cambodia - human rights abuses and so on. The other is presenting Newsnight. Our paths crossed at college so little (i.e. not at all) that I had not even been aware of her until I read the yearbook. I managed to imagine back from how she is to how she was and pick her out in the photo.

I dropped out from that year and restarted in the year below. I’ve lost touch with most people, but I know one is now deputy ambassador to Jordan (the country, not Peter Andre’s ex). Here’s a recent newspaper article and photo, for all you Arabic fans.

la la la laaa la-laa, la la la laaa la-laa …

Today the consultation process into the proposed redundancies at work formally ended. The redundancies will go ahead, so on Monday the normal programming work in the office will basically stop - all that the people being made redundant will need to do on Monday is receive the formal letters, hand in company property, collect their belongings, and leave.

The number of people who, like me, have got new jobs with the company (in the same office) has gone up a bit, but still about three quarters of the people at risk will go. There were some other people who have never been at risk (the people running the data centre, and technical support) but not many.

When the UK company I used to work for was bought by the US company I currently work for, there was an interesting interplay of influences. Both companies had a billing product, but aimed at overlapping rather than identical markets. The US had a few mega-customers, the UK had many small customers. The US had, for several reasons, a get-it-out-the-door-fix-it-later approach, and the UK (also for several reasons) had a get-it-right-first-time approach.

What happened was the US product was pensioned off, and the UK product adopted as pretty much the only show in town but needing lots of work to cope with mega-customers. The two approaches were combined - officially it was the UK approach, but it never got the whole way to adoption (for several reasons ). The UK high-ups gradually all left or were made redundant, so the official clout of the UK was reduced, but the slight change in culture and complete change in code had already become permanent. An Indian outpost was set up, to take advantage of the large pool of talented cheap labour.

And now, the UK development group has stopped. All work previously done by the UK is supposed to be done by India (with the US continuing as before). Whether or not India is up to the job is uncertain.

Those like me who are left are supposedly doing new jobs - proper research e.g. investigating new technologies and new markets, and also consulting with customers over things that don’t fit easily with the development sausage machine view of the world. Whether or not we will actually be pulled back to help India is uncertain. We will all be huddling together in one bit of the office - this means a change of floor for me, and also a change of boss - so that half the office can keep its lights off.

Every Friday for about a couple of years there has been something called Happy Hour (cakes etc, starting at 4 p.m.) so that people can mingle, particularly aimed at building a community between our building and the local sales office across the car park. This week one of my long-standing colleagues, who worked in the sales office and was a prime mover behind Happy Hour, died suddenly after a long illness. She was a lovely woman - always smiling and enthusiastic in a nice kind of way.

Anyway, today our section went to the pub for lunch, and then back to the office for an especially extended Happy Hour. The pub was great - lovely surroundings, no sign of gallows humour or unhappiness, just friends enjoying themselves together. A colleague on maternity leave brought in her very cute baby. And there was a very nice pub cat.

Happy Hour was bittersweet. I tried not to think too often that I wouldn’t see most of the people after Monday. I wouldn’t say that I got on hugely with everyone, but there was no-one that I actively disliked, and I knew pretty much everyone and trusted the judgment of most that I knew. Many had worked together for 5 years, and quite a few for 10 or more - we were a team, who had achieved a lot. But no more. My new job does sound like it could be very good, but there’s a lot of ways I can see it not going well, so I’m not fully happy or sad or anything at the moment.

I still have a job that pays the bills, I have a home (at least, the bank has ), a lovely wife and four children who are smashers, so in the proper way of looking at things I am richly blessed.

(Even more than usual from me, that is.)

When I read this article about a proposed data centre, I had mixed reactions.

The immediate ones were positive - well done, Ken and well done Telehouse for being sensible and having the foresight to realise what you could view as waste is actually a valuable resource, and so looking after the environment a bit better. (I know Ken’s not the mayor any more, but the rules were introduced when he was. )

Then I was reminded of a friend who used to work for or do some consulting for British Sugar. They had a similar problem - their main activity (creating refined sugar etc.) produced lots of waste heat. They used this to heat greenhouses on site, and so grow tomatoes, which is a good bit of lateral thinking I think.

But then I compared the two sources of the waste heat - a factory and a data centre. How much has the UK moved away from its industrial past? The shift of the economy towards financial services has been highlighted by the recent stupid bankers saga - are we putting too many of our eggs in this basket? How much do we depend on the rest of the world (e.g. China) to do the unfashionable jobs i.e. make things? Do we realise the full social and environmental costs of this?

Also, it reminded me of the physical side of modern computing. We usually see our home PC as this shiny tidy portal into a huge amazing world of useful and/or fun stuff like online shopping, email, online banking, searching for and getting information quickly and easily. This is all true, but all this virtual-ness has physical underpinnings. The chips in all these computers were etched using nasty, nasty things like Hydrofluoric acid and contain arsenic and other unpleasant things. The big data centres run by the like of Google consume so much electricity they need to be built near power stations. When all these computers are got rid of (which, due to Moore’s law, is often fairly quickly) the cadmium, lead etc. put into them when they are made doesn’t always get disposed of safely.

I’m not saying all this to guilt anyone into not using their computer, just to bring in all the information when decisions are made. As I said, lots of hot air - time to put my brain to something more useful.

This is a cloud of stuff swirling around in my head that I’m trying to pin down on paper, so sorry if it comes out wonky.

The thing that prompted me to blog was a thought-provoking article in Salon on What’s Wrong With Science As Religion?. I can reconcile science and a religious faith - not always easily, but for me it’s the best explanation of life. Given that have a foot in the science / reason / logic camp, I get extremely frustrated at the arrogance and bigotry of the New Atheists (see the article), just like I get frustrated at similar arrogance and bigotry in the name of religion.

Here’s an little thought experiment - take a militant rationalist and apply a 5 year old child using standard rhetorical techniques i.e. asking “But why?” repeatedly (I’ve embroidered it slightly to make it more interesting).

There is no need for religion. Science is all you need.
But why do you say that?
Science can explain everything.
But why do you say that?
Because we can explain stars, computers, volcanoes, birds - lots of things.
Yes, but science hasn’t explained everything yet, has it?
No, but it will eventually.
Why do you say that?
We’re confident that it will.
But confidence isn’t the same as proof, is it?
No, but it will get there.
Why do you say that?
Because, err…

There is nothing in science that proves that science is true. A chain of logic reasoning always starts with axioms i.e. things you assume to be true or take on faith. You just have to accept on faith that science is a good way of explaining the world - this is an axiom of science. Militant rationalists seem to ignore the element of faith required in their world view. I’m happy to take science and Christianity on faith, because they seem to make sense.

Another thing that militant rationalists seem to ignore is that the core engine of rationalism - logic - misfires in some circumstances and no amount of going back to basics will fix it. Kurt Gödel showed via his Incompleteness Theorem (which I have no hope of understanding, but take on err… faith) that paradoxes such as “Am I telling the truth when I say I am lying?” aren’t just the result of sloppy thinking but are inevitable in logic.

So, you need to accept it on faith and paradox is unavoidable - sounds a bit like religion? The article speculates what the world would be like if militant rationalism held sway, and suggests that bad things would happen. This new religion would be a new excuse for atrocities and other bad things - the fault seems to be an underlying problem with human nature, rather than whether people believe X rather than Y.

This then led me to wander elsewhere. I flicked through The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook last night and it has a whole chapter on what the author calls fifth columnists. Something like home education, that could be great, can be diverted to be a tool for other things such as making money, religious dogma and anarchy.

Similarly Esperanto. As far as I understand, the idea is to have a single language so that we can all understand each other. If you look at a widespread language such as English, French or German, there are regional dialects and variations. I can’t see how if it were used around the world, there wouldn’t be local dialects and variations in Esperanto too. That is, it would be a victim of its own success.

It’s all messy, and I think that the fact that life is imperfect is a key lesson you learn when growing up.

UPDATED: I’ve thought a bit about this since posting it (maybe I should have thought more before I posted) and wanted to make a few things clearer than they might be. If you have a religious faith and don’t believe science explains important things like creation, that’s fine by me. If you have atheist or agnostic and think that science explains everything then that’s also fine by me. (If you think science and religion both explain things, that’s also fine by me and is my general position.) What I’m ranting about is people of whatever persuasion thinking they are completely right and those of different persuasions are completely wrong, evil, superstitious, weak-minded etc.

I’m sorry if I have got in the way of you believing in whatever you hold dear as that is not my intention. If you think I’m un-Christian to hold the position I do, then I would point to Isaiah 55:9 and 1 Corinthians 12:13. I know that you could use the Bible to justify almost anything; I’m just saying that my position is no exception ;-).