Yesterday I saw a drinks machine that had three selections – Tea, Coffee or Random (Tea or Coffee).  However, the machine was wired up wrongly so that each button does not give what it claims. If each drink costs 50p, what is the minimum that you have to put into the machine to work out which button gives which selection?

What I like about this is that it makes more natural several of the constraints of the original puzzle (a crate of apples, a crate of oranges, and a mixed crate):

• Why can’t I just peer into the crate and look at the contents?
• Why only draw one fruit at a time?
• Why do I care how many fruits I have to sample?

It also makes more sense of the effectively-unlimited supply of fruit that is implied by the question: if it’s the wiring that’s at fault and not the hopper of tea / coffee, you could refill it as many times as you want without affecting the wiring.

The puzzle, of course, hinges on the listener not paying attention to the crucial fact: the wiring for each button (or the labelling on each crate) is known to be wrong, not just unknown. It’s one of the neat things about this puzzle that an intelligent solver may well mishear it, but can easily prove it’s impossible if the wiring is entirely unknown. In point of fact, it’s a fairly simple to show that if it is possible, then the answer must be one: we can’t necessarily distinguish a random stream from a constant stream with any number of samples. Constructing a proof that one sample will suffice is fairly easy, given that there are only three possibilities of which to sample, and by symmetricity only two possibilities that differ.

Does this make a good interview question for a software developer? I’m not at all convinced it does. It feels like a meta-puzzle: you reason through it by knowing the implicit rules of the game of puzzle-writing (one obvious one being that the answer can’t be impossible, and it can’t rely on luck or “good enough” solutions like 1000 random samples). Good software engineering often involves judgment calls where such rules don’t exist, and great software engineering often involves rethinking the rules of the game entirely.

It seems odd that having immunity to a disease should drive up my costs for getting vaccinated for another disease. It seems downright bizarre that my making it easier (or at least, no harder) for the government to deliver the free service should mean I have to pay. It would be fashionable at this point to rail against the fundamental inefficiency of government-provided healthcare.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. The mistake the NHS seem to be making here looks like the same sort of mistake that is made every day by thousands of software developers. The set of rules for Hepatitis has a bug in it (no pun intended).

It seems to me that in this case the bug is a leaky abstraction. The obvious goal is to provide immunity to both diseases, and a policy of providing a combined vaccine looks from a high level as if it fulfils that goal. When the details of the policy are implemented, an obvious refinement is not to provide a combined vaccine to someone who’s already had one shot (whether this is a matter of health or cost-saving I don’t know, but it doesn’t affect the argument).

Obviously this is an over-simplification; looking at the world through the eyes of a programmer, things naturally form into shapes and idioms that are common currency to the techie. But I think this there’s something to be gained from seeing the world this way. When people try and build rule sets, they get things wrong. Not because they are stupid, or unwilling, or corrupted, or bureaucratic, but simply because creating perfect rule sets isn’t something that humans are naturally capable of.

As of a month from now, I’ll be moving to Zambia where I will be living and working for at least three months. I’ll be working in a technical role for a local ISP. On the surface my job description may not be all that different, but I expect the culture and business environment to be a radical departure from the UK.

The main difference to this blog is that I intend to post more about the experiences of preparing for and living abroad, in the hope that some of this will be of interest to others. People who were expecting a blog on technical topics (something I never stuck to particularly well) may be inconvenienced by this. I had thought about starting a separate blog, but for such a short-term period it hardly seems worth it.

The punch line? Bob’s email hadn’t been working all morning, and nothing I sent had got through to him. Bob’s emails read to me as if he’d got my instructions and somehow failed to follow them correctly, so it looked to me like he was being inept. From Bob’s point of view, I was giving him stony silence that could only be explained by a lack of motivation.

I’m sure this kind of problem has been plaguing the interactions between technical and non-technical people for as long as there has been technology to bicker over. Users complain about bugs that don’t get fixed, while techies whinge that the users misdescribe their problems, foul things up further with misguided attempts to fix them and then fail to follow instructions when they get them. Why isn’t it going away as people get more tech-savvy?

Behaving correctly when you encounter a fault and reporting it in a productive way is a reasonably subtle task; Simon Tatham’s piece on how to report bugs effectively is a very approachable and effective guide, but it’ll probably only ever be read by the motivated. Even so, you might think that sheer trial and error would teach people that certain ways of reporting a bug get the solution they’re after more quickly than others.

Some people suggest that we techies are lacking in communication skills, and that we need to work harder at making ourselves understood in order to engage with the modern workplace. This isn’t entirely without merit, but I think it’s facile. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some very articulate developers, and none have been immune to this kind of misunderstanding.

I think there’s something deeper going on here, and I think it lies in psychology. The fundamental attribution error is the observed effect that people tend to attribute other people’s behaviour disproportionately to their character, neglecting the possibility of simple situational explanations. For example, I attributed Bob’s inability to solve his problem to his not taking the time to read my instructions properly, or being too poorly-skilled to put them into operation. All the time I was building up in my head a picture of Bob as an incompetent, over-confident bumbling oaf who shouldn’t be trusted to go near a keyboard—and all because his email wasn’t working.

But it goes the other way too. I’ve no doubt Bob had painted a picture to himself of me as an uncommunicative nerd who didn’t appreciate the importance of Bob’s project to the business. Neither of us even considered that there might be an alternative explanation.

The thinking that leads to the fundamental attribution error makes some sense, when you think about it. When you’re dealing with someone on a casual basis you can come to great harm by not making an assessment of their character, and assuming that any flaws you observe are likely to hurt you again in the future is a sound defensive position. This might lead to missed opportunities in casual acquaintances, but that could be a price worth paying.

This thinking is catastrophic, though, when it becomes an entrenched pattern that prevents the very nature of the problem from being properly understood. Blaming developers for being aloof, or users for being incompetent, only reinforces the stereotypes. Working on our communication skills only helps if the thoughts we communicate are based on the right model.

public class HigherLevelClass
{
   public event SomeDelegate MyEvent
   {
      get { return impl.MyEvent; }
   };

   private LowerLevelClass impl;

   /* ... */
}

Unfortunately this isn’t valid syntax, and at first glance that seems to be the end of it. However, I discovered today that the designers of C# have actually thought of this, and provided a way round it:

public class HigherLevelClass
{
   public event SomeDelegate MyEvent
   {
      add { impl.MyEvent += value; }
      remove { impl.MyEvent -= value; }
   };
}

Simple, once you know how. But this illustrates an interesting problem with keyword search when applied to programming techniques: I’ve searched for just this information on several occasions, but wasn’t able to find it until I hit on the magic phrase “event forwarding”. In my experience it’s pretty common to know how to describe what you’d like something to do, but not be able to find the same words as the person who knows how to do it.

I’m sure this is far from the only reason, but perhaps it goes some way to explaining why there are eight separate implementations of every single open source library type, each of which is partially complete.

Currently some of the discussion in publishing centers on the fact that music is now sold in $1 downloads rather than $15 albums. But this too is an accident of circumstance. The length of a CD album is not a golden standard of the quantity in which people like to enjoy music, but one person’s personal taste: Sony vice-president Norio Ohga wanted a CD to hold the entire of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and so for over a decade that is how we purchased our music.

Current commentary sometimes seems to imply that the music industry allowed the business model to be shifted to single-track purchases (to its cost) due to poor negotiation, and that the print industry might avoid making the same mistake. This is a delusion: certain changes in technology simply invalidate the old assumptions.

I expect the Amazon / Macmillan negotiation soap opera will resolve itself before long, but is in danger of drowning out discussion of the lasting shifts that the industry will inevitably go through. Here are a few of my predictions:

More competition with out-of-copyright works

In a physical book shop works that are out of copyright tend to sell for almost as much as recent releases. This is not unreasonable, since they still require editing, desigining and promoting, not to mention the cost of printing the physical book. Shelf space is a major cost in high street book shops, and costs no less when the work is out of copyright.

In a market for electronic books, some of these costs go away. The rest can be defrayed over a much longer period of time, since there is no opportunity cost to keeping books on the shelf. Competition with amateurish free copies will drive down the cost of a professionally-edited version to far below the cost of a new work, while still allowing publishers to turn a profit.

Most authors are not blessed with the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, the wit of Jerome K. Jerome or the inventiveness of Arthur Conan Doyle (just three authors I’ve enjoyed for free on my Kindle). Of course the modern world has its own share of geniuses, and even those of middle rank can offer great value to readers by writing about the subjects that interest them, but it would be a sad world indeed if people didn’t capitalise on the opportunity to enjoy classic works for peanuts.

More flexibility in length of published works

It used to be that a book had to be of a certain length to be worth publishing. This is going to change, since the fixed costs of printing have gone away. The only question remaining is whether people will consent to pay small amounts for small amounts of content. There is no rational reason why not, but the field of paid content isn’t a shining example of rational consumer behaviour to date.

More competition from the back catalogue

The ‘long tail’ effect, where stock can diversify as shelving cost drops to zero, can flourish in the electronic market as the cost of warehousing drops out of the model. No book need ever again be out of print. This is going to help some authors and hurt others: books that have fallen from prominence aren’t necessarily bad, and if priced keenly they might prove a worthy substitute for recent publications at hardback prices.

More competition from the ‘gift economy’

Once you discard the requirement that books have to be printed on paper to be consumed, the barrier to entry to the market is much lower. Vast amounts of text in blogs, wiki articles and social network postings become readable in exactly the same circumstances as published books.

People who infer that this will drive the price of all textual content down to zero are unjustified in their conclusion and hopefully wrong. A well-researched, professionally-written and carefully-edited document is worth substantially more than an amateurish one, and a rational consumer will be prepared to pay more for it. However, for the portions of our reading time (hopefully not all) that are idle escapism, it may well be that the difference isn’t worth caring about.

Don’t shoot the messenger

I’m not saying the above out of ideology, but because I think the trends are inescapable, in direction if not in extent. More important is what won’t change: people will still exchange money for items that are of value to them. The lesson from the music industry’s experience is that the publishers that embrace the new rules and figure out how to turn them to their advantage will prosper.

A natural disaster befalls a certain part of the world, and people wring their hands over it. Soon this settles down and people devote their energies to providing aid: governments and NGOs swing into action, and the general public mobilise their best efforts to provide funds from T-shirts, concerts, bake sales and good old-fashioned donations. The sense of hopelessness is temporarily assuaged until news gets back that aid can’t get through: Haiti’s lack of infrastructure combined with the crippling effects of the quake mean that aid is blocked by sheer logistical difficulties—and we’re back to hand-wringing again.

Nobody likes to feel powerless. But if you want to prevent unnecessary deaths, then I have good news for you: it’s easier than you think. Around one million people die from malaria each year, and nearly two million from tuberculosis (TB). An incredible 36 million die each year from causes related to malnutrition (this number very likely overlaps with the numbers for malaria and TB). The vast majority of these deaths are preventable, and at surprisingly low cost, since the limiting factor isn’t the Herculean logistical task of getting emergency aid in through narrow transport channels already at maximum capacity—it’s simply lack of funds.

Haiti may not be getting all the help it needs right now, but it’s quite possibly getting all the help it can handle for the moment. Meanwhile, poverty hasn’t let up elsewhere in the world, and by the third day of the Haiti relief effort an equivalent number of preventable deaths had happened elsewhere in the world.

I don’t pretend to have any answers to global poverty, but I’d like to suggest two questions that could usefully guide our human desire to make the world a better place. Firstly, how can I target my giving to optimise the amount of suffering saved in the world? Secondly, how can I target my giving to be sustainable and continue to pay dividends over time? If we can satisfy these, then I don’t see what more can be asked of us.

Luckily, as well as diagnosing an insidious problem this book provides clear and actionable advice that could be helpful to anyone, whatever their current level of communication skills. The authors blend well-observed general principles with specific examples from professional and personal contexts. They have done particularly well to reduce a potentially confusing topic to a single clear model that is simple enough to comprehend and general enough to be useful.

The scope of the book is both broad and narrow. It’s narrow in that it focuses almost exclusively on a single case: people who have violated an agreement or expectation. However, in a sense this still has great breadth since these situations occur in all walks of life. The examples in the book show how the principles apply equally well in work and at home.

I never feel like I’ve written a fair review unless I’ve picked a few holes in a book, and I’m struggling to do so here. The worst I can say is that this isn’t an instant classic, if for no other reason than its narrow scope. However, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be well advised to give it a read.

I’m not too worried about Amazon’s technological ability to delete books that have been purchased and downloaded to the Kindle, because Amazon’s actions are still constrained by the only two things that really matter: the law, and good business sense.

If I go to eBay and purchase a laptop that later turns out to have been stolen, I don’t have any right to retain ownership of the laptop once that fact has come to light, no matter how innocent my purchase was. The laptop will (ideally) be taken away from me by the police and returned to its rightful owner. I won’t even get my payment refunded by default, it will be up to me to pursue the matter with the seller (who may themselves not know they had been dealing in stolen property).

The Amazon case isn’t so different to the stolen laptop. By selling the book to people, the right of the copyright holder to control distribution had been taken away from them, and it was only right that that was corrected. The innocence of the purchasers of the book (who received an immediate refund when the book was taken away from them) doesn’t change that.

The capability to remove books could in theory be used for suppression of ideas, but I can’t see it making business sense to do so. The Streisand effect means that removal of an existing book will make much more of a splash than not listing the book in the first place (which they are equally well able to do with plain old dead-tree books). The vast majority of books in the Kindle store sell so few copies that the best way to keep a text out of people’s minds is simply not to promote it.

Incorporating advertising into a web offering is often seen as a no-brainer: free money that you would be stupid to turn down, whatever your business model. However, I believe this assumption holds insidious consequences that can be bad for producer and consumer alike.

Advertising solves nothing

It always surprises me how blind people are to the cost of advertising. If I watch a movie on TV, I might sit through 15 or 20 minutes of advertising content that I wouldn’t say I wanted to watch. How much yould you pay to get 20 minutes of your life back to spend on something else?

Advertising has costs on the producer as well, in terms of trust. Seth Godin describes the problem eloquently:

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they’ve been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.

Basically, it’s a race to the bottom, with so many people spamming trackbacks, planning popups and scheming to trick the surfer with this or that that we’ve bullied people into a corner of believing no one.

In addition to the hidden cost, advertising doesn’t bring more value into the economy, it merely reallocates it. Advertising-funded services aren’t really being provided for free, they are being paid for by the people who buy products that have been advertised (the sellers having passed along the cost of advertising to the consumer).

There are two possibilities as consumer of advertising-funded material: either you are one of the customers of the advertised products, or you are not. In the former case you are paying just as much for the content as you would if you paid directly. In the latter case, you appear to be getting a good deal by getting “free” content that is being subsidised by somebody else, but there’s a hidden problem.

The problem is that if you aren’t the one who pays, the content producers have no reason at all to cater to your tastes. If your favourite TV show is cancelled or your favourite blog stops being maintained, you don’t have any cause to complain: you were jus a freeloader, who was getting by on the fact that someone else was willing to pay for the content you enjoyed.

Missed opportunities from advertising

So advertising isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, but it’s still the choice of individuals. If both the producer and consumer are happy with their ad-funded arrangement, even if it’s not 100% efficient, why should I care?

I care because I think using advertising has externalities. The most obvious is that making everything free at the point of use hides pricing signals. The amount of ad money made by reading a 3-page article is roughly the same as made from a worthless advert-packed spam page. In fact, you might be less likely to click on ads while reading a worthwhile article. Certainly there’s no way to show that you value one web page 3 times as much as you do another, when it’s all free at the point of use.

Right now I’m writing an article about internet business models, but it’s to my economic advantage to include terms like ‘mesothelioma’ or ‘acai berry’. In fact, I could probably do better for myself by dropping the whole attempt to create original content and writing keyword-heavy blogspam. Would this make the world a better place?

One of the most annoying things is that we’re missing the potential afforded by dynamic pricing. The real problem with charging for content isn’t that its value is zero, but that the price is rarely right. Paying newstand price for an online newspaper is a rip-off, getting it for free is a bargain. Somewhere between those two prices is the true value of the content, if only we could find what it was. Using advertising is tantamount to abandoning this search and letting the advertiser call the shots.

“Free” may not be as important as people think

On the topic of free news content, The Economist noted the following:

A poll by Harris Interactive for paidContent:UK, a website owned the Guardian, finds that three-quarters of Britons say they would switch to an alternative free news source if their favourite website began charging.

So what? Are you telling me that if Mars bars were free, their sales wouldn’t drop by 75% when they started charging? Nobody suggests that Mars have an unsustainable business model by trying to charge money for chocolate.

Strategically, a small number of customers who care about your product enough to pay is better than a large number of uninterested consumers, all other things being equal. With advertising in its current depressed state, it’s quite likely that payment from 25% of readers would amount to more money than they could make from advertising to 100%.