Nigel Pepper // his place on our web

Excuse my emissions... No. Its for your own good

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 13:55 | Labels: cars, CO2, efficiency, emissions, europe, motoring, regulation

The motor industry are (understandably) not happy about the ever tightening emissions controls under which they find themselves. Increasingly stringent EU directives specify that volume car manufacturers must ensure that their fleet averages a CO2 output of just 130g/km. This is not much at all. Its a bit like asking a fat man, to come back in a month, 100Kg lighter. Achievable, but rather difficult. As a keen driver I too initially saw this as the end of enjoyable motoring, banishing one and all to the inexplicable dullness of Toyota Prius motoring (if indeed it can be called that).

Thinking about this a little more, I am however, now tentatively hoping, no, expecting, that these new restrict limits will have something of a positive effect for all concerned; mother earth, you, me, our offspring, and maybe theirs too.

You see, like our aforementioned anonymous fat gentleman, cars and also benefit greatly from improved efficiency, and one way to acheive this is to carry less weight.

In their ruthless search for CO2 reducing measures, the likes of BMW and Ford (something of pioneers in this area) started on a programme of efficiency measures including energy reuse, weight saving, even dynamically altering a car's aerodynamics based on its engine temperature. The rest of the motor industry are following suit, VW in particular, showing a marked reduction in emissions across their range.

So what does this mean for the motorist? Well it means your car will cost less to run, will weigh less and consequentially (we hope) handle better, all while (probably) maintaining, or improving power output through increased use of turbocharger technology which has matured significantly over the years. I expect to see an increase in the use of high torque electric motors either replacing or augmenting the output of a traditional external combustion engine over time. Downsides? Ok our cars might not sound as beefy as those big V8s and V10s but really, in this day and age, they don't really make sense when considering it's not ridiculous to see 250+ Bhp from a 4 cylinder engine.

Roll on efficiency, and let us all benefit from it!

The world revolves faster than you think

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 18:22 |

A couple of years ago, I was passed a copy of the cluetrain manifesto from a friend raving this will change how you think about your information on the web. I hate bold assertions like this as it sets up the subject matter to be a literary creation of Orwellian standard. Fortunately on this occasion he was vindicated.

For me, the core message of the book read something like

You, your opinions, and those of your peers matter. The speed and visibility of the web, now mean that this really matters to business. Most businesses don't realise this.

The Lefty, tree-swinging liberal in me took great delight in this message. For a long time, I have felt that advertising and media in general, was due a good shakeup. Media IMHO should be democratic, available, and free. Attempts to constrain it, create distortions (enter Daily Mail). I'm not against media organisations either. I believe they have their place in a future of fast comms. I digress however; the purpose of this post was this:

Amazon, forward thinkers, arguably pioneers of the first (commercially successful) cloud computing business, the vanguard of book distribution; an establishment shaker. Clearly a company I have viewed in a positive light, have now, through seemingly ignorant policy making and BBCesque inaction found themselves at the centre of censorship scandal. It amazes me that such a company can fall foul of the very essence of their success.

As @girlonetrack succinctly puts it

the lessons to be learned here are simple: don't piss off the web, or your reputation will be seriously damaged.

Old Blighty, Black Swans and a Spot of Bother

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 21:32 | Labels: Black Swan, determinism, finance

Over the past few months, it has surprised; no, alarmed me, how the financiers of our age have allowed banking to reach its current hiatus. (Don't worry, I'm not going to start harping on some high falutin rant about finance), simply that it's amazing that we can misunderstand ourselves to such a degree. Jeremy Clarkson sums it up perfectly in his recent article:

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth.

More interesting still, are the reactions of the intelligentsia at such times. The Economist: "Redesigning global finance", "Capitalism at Bay" and other evocative titles enshroud tales of job cuts, ruination and impending global failure. London's daily pulp "The Metro" struggles to open the eyes of the bleary 7am eyes of city workers with such titles as the good folk of the big smoke are tired of hearing the economic equivalent of "FUBAR" and "All your base are belong to us".

And yet looking upon all this with a cynical eye, one can't help but observe simply, that this crisis was widely expected, wholly predictable, and consequentially, massively more damaging than had first been thought possible.

Two recent enlightening factors have influenced my view on predictability and determinism, and hence on how such events can be better negotiated.

Reading Nassim Taleb's interesting, if slightly patronising "The Black Swan" he effectively outlines the characteristics of situations where linear determinism is applicable, and those where random, or highly improbable phenomena are more likely to occur (a phenomenon he calls a 'Black Swan').

In a similar vein, Malcolm Gladwell's recent TED talk touches on how difficult it is to decisively arrive at a single probable outcome for a situation, specifically in his example, the choices consumers want are largely unbeknown to them; or at best, ill-understood.

And so I believe it is this essential combination of human need to categorize events, coupled with the fact that our internal reasoning often differs from what is expected by others, leads to situations such as the current global financial state. This is all horribly woolly and ill-defined, but ultimately what I propose, is that as humans we do not behave as expected, and further that our need to categorize events is vulnerable to imprecision, and hence further misinterpretation.

I haven't spent enough time devising a highly improbable solution to this but it rests at the fore of my mind if only for the reason that it'd be a shame to see Old Blighty fall prey to a spot of dodgy banking.

His words, not mine

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 12:52 |

Last week a couple of friends descended on the latest of geekdinner's events. Speaking at the event was Ryan Carson of Carsonified.com, the guys behind FOWA, FOWD and a few other rather good things.

I thought i'd post something up about what was said that evening, as these points from Ryan which were mirrored in the ethos of his colleagues, really struck home as a refreshing, maybe slightly idealistic, but nonetheless worthwhile principles to strive towards as a work ethic or indeed for life in general to a greater or lesser extent.

1) Work smarter - At Carsonified, they work a 4 day week. They make a big point of this but for the right reasons. Ryan states that it's "not about working less or just trying to be 'rad' but when you only have 4 days, you make sure you get it done in that time". This is something i'm sure you'd notice thinking about it. When you have 5 days to complete something, it'll take 5 days. when you have 3, it'll take 3. There are obviously times when you would undermine the outcome doing this but it does make sense.

2) A company's software... - is reflective of communication within the company. Look at the suite of tools from 37signals. They look like each other. They work well together. Hell, they work! I shall resist temptation to name others, there are plenty of companies where this is not the case, and it really does show. You wanna build good software? Make sure your people talk. Lots.

3) Do what you want - as knowledge workers we are fortunate enough to work in an industry sufficiently genericised such that it makes your skills largely transferrable. If you don't like what you're doing, change it. Simply put, you will do better work doing what you love, than idling doing what you don't.

Just a few nuggets of wisdom. Now... back to work. As you were.

Does it matter where you live?

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 19:07 |

Well, apparently it does. London's Metropolitan Police force has decided to use London's crime data in a way which is tangibly beneficial to Londoners, tourists; any interested party really. But this is more than just another government website. The subject matter is crime, always a political hot-potato, and increasing visibility of badly performing areas should (and this is a good thing) increase pressure on local government to tackle localised issues, reducing their ability to hide behind the banner of London. It has been known for some time, that small pockets within a metropolis are responsible for much of its crime.

For a body such as the Met Police service, this is a refreshingly 'balls-in-the-wind' attitude to take, but one which can only serve to benefit communities, and may even improve police/community relations with the increased open-ness.

Some might consider this to be another token political gesture. I hope it's a sign of the future.

Email and the enterprise (vault)

Posted by Nigel Pepper at 03:51 |

Why do we send emails? A simple means of passing information between one another; a proven, simple, understood means of information transfer. I guess email is so good at doing what to does, we begin to extend and use it in ways it wasn't intended. File storage, file transfer, lightweight identity handle, the list is near endless. It would be nice to extend this a step further, and be able to refer to an email by way of a URI.

"Hey Joe, you remember that email i sent you?..." "...er no" "...this one http://mycorp.com/mail/2008/02/joe_at_hisdomain.com/122". That would be handy. Sure you need security wrap around that but thats not a killer.

But then, not all people think this way.

Some would have you believe, that email should never occupy more than half of your mailbox. Some would like you to take extraordinary measures to prevent losing attachments or old mails. Some would have you believe they're "helping" you by moving your mail to an archive such that you're only able to retrieve the first 256 characters of the mail, and completely losing attachments.

Some people, friends, are idiots.

I would add, a caveat to this could be a poor implementation of this product.

A free, simple solution to personal email is offered by google. As many of you will know, their Gmail service, offers 6+GB of mail storage, all indexed, optional mail tagging available, which mean you practically never have to lose your email.

So why is this such a difficult problem for the enterprise? Sure, it can be expensive to offer each employee this volume of storage, esp. if you have to host the email data on your own servers. Even still, this is a solved problem, and for the majority of businesses, utility computing makes disk almost free. Services like Amazon's awesome S3 service for example.

Lets see the enterprise take a new stance on this and figure it out.