I just rewatched Gattaca for the first time since the 90s last night. For those unaware, the premise is that in the near future children who are not genetically engineered are discriminated as such, and cannot get the same opportunities as those who are genetically engineered.
This calls to mind a concern I have had, and how it affects some minor decisions. If given the opportunity I probably would not have genetic testing done, and I probably wouldn't get screening for diseases which lack a cure, such as Alzheimers. The reason is not because I am morally or intellectually opposed to such testing. The reason is that I think it will eventually mess up my insurance.
In Gattaca, the protagonist experiences discrimination in his desired profession of astronaut because his health makes him a risk to a mission. He is instead only able to get a job cleaning offices. The plot of the movie involves how he gets around the system in his attempt to get into the space program.
I don't fear my genetics or the results of a test would eliminate me from jobs like the main character in this movie, though I am already medically eliminated from a few. I am alert to the possibility that one day such a test could cause me to be unable to get health insurance or life insurance, however.
Right now in the U.S. it is not legal for health insurance companies to refuse to sell insurance to someone based on pre-existing conditions. That may or may not be reversed in the future, as there is a lawsuit going through the federal court system which may do just that. This is something that I always need to keep in mind when getting tested.
Furthermore, the pre-existing condition limitation also does not apply to companies who sell life insurance. If I were to have a test done that showed I had a mutation that made me a bit more likely to have a stroke or get Alzheimers, I would be obligated to share this information with a company I was planning to by life insurance from, and potentially get myself priced out of the life insurance market as a result, in the case that I decided to get additional life insurance to what I currently have.
Some would jump to the insurance company's defense and say that their job is just to provide a service that sets a price based upon a calculated risk. I am not casting blame, however. I am just saying that in the current environment, there is a potential motivation to not know everything about your health and genetics.
Policy makers should keep in mind that systems which allow for filtering on pre-existing conditions or genetic conditions motivate some people like me to simply avoid pursuing that data. There has to be a better way, so that willful ignorance isn't a winning strategy.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Tuesday, December 04, 2018
texting woes
It's amazing that in the last ten years smart phones have gone from something only early-adopters use to something that basically every adult uses and understands. This has had almost as great a fundamental shift in my everyday life as gaining regular access to the Internet in the mid to late nineties. I have run up against a couple of personal limitations in using mobile devices to text that I'd like to present.
First, I've been slow to adopt emojis. This isn't because I think I'm above using emojis. I like how you can distill a much larger thought into a simple image. The problem is that I'm not always adept at identifying what emotion or idea a specific emoji is supposed to convey. I brought this up with a friend a while ago, and took a look at the emojis I have used on my personal phone at that time. As you can see from the image below, it's not a lot. I just frequently figure it's safer not to guess on what a specific emoji is supposed to mean.
Second, the combination of auto-correct and my clumsy thumbs has conspired to make me look like an illiterate dunderhead to those I am texting or messaging. I'm constantly seeing misspellings or entirely wrong words in the messages I send out after they're sent. Some of this is that I need an editor for my communications on a good day. At least some of it has to be that my phone enjoys making me look like an idiot, however.
I know a lot of people typo things on their phones. I seem to be far worse than the average, however. It's to the point where I'm sure I've lost a few notches of respect from a handful of people who have to think, "That's the wrong 'their' for the third time in a row!"
The trade-offs of emojis creating an ambiguous message and me making me sound like a toddler mashing keys on a keyboard are worth the benefits I get from my phone. It's just not all cupcakes and unicorns.
First, I've been slow to adopt emojis. This isn't because I think I'm above using emojis. I like how you can distill a much larger thought into a simple image. The problem is that I'm not always adept at identifying what emotion or idea a specific emoji is supposed to convey. I brought this up with a friend a while ago, and took a look at the emojis I have used on my personal phone at that time. As you can see from the image below, it's not a lot. I just frequently figure it's safer not to guess on what a specific emoji is supposed to mean.
Second, the combination of auto-correct and my clumsy thumbs has conspired to make me look like an illiterate dunderhead to those I am texting or messaging. I'm constantly seeing misspellings or entirely wrong words in the messages I send out after they're sent. Some of this is that I need an editor for my communications on a good day. At least some of it has to be that my phone enjoys making me look like an idiot, however.
I know a lot of people typo things on their phones. I seem to be far worse than the average, however. It's to the point where I'm sure I've lost a few notches of respect from a handful of people who have to think, "That's the wrong 'their' for the third time in a row!"
The trade-offs of emojis creating an ambiguous message and me making me sound like a toddler mashing keys on a keyboard are worth the benefits I get from my phone. It's just not all cupcakes and unicorns.
Monday, January 23, 2017
binge watching
One thing that has been difficult on me lately is that I want to take part in what is becoming a national pastime of sorts--binge watching shows on Netflix. My current life situation and responsibilities preclude this possibility, however. Most of the shows I'd want to watch are not completely kid-appropriate, and there are too many other responsibilities I need to devote my time to in a given week. This isn't to say I don't watch TV, but it is much less so than at other points in my life.
I remember earlier times in my life when people would say they didn't watch TV because they didn't have time, I would wonder how that could be. I still wonder that, because I still make time, but I understand better now. Now what I don't understand is how people who I know are as busy as I am are able to make time for a marathon of Stranger Things or The Crown. They have time management skills that I still need to master.
This being said, I actually have more time than Golden. Where I could realistically add a TV series or two to my schedule due to my willingness to give up some sleep, and her more constant responsibilities, it's a serious challenge to get small things added to her schedule.
All of this will change one day. We're in a busy stage of life. When the kids are older and some of our other responsibilities are lessened I anticipate us having more time for such pursuits. This is just an outgrowth of our time of life, and some of our life choices.
This has me asking a few questions, though. Is this a greener grass on the other side of the fence situation? Will I look back on this busier time with nostalgia because of the kids' ages, or will I look back with relief that things are slower? What percentage of adults are in a stage where they can't realistically binge watch a show without neglecting other responsibilities?
I remember earlier times in my life when people would say they didn't watch TV because they didn't have time, I would wonder how that could be. I still wonder that, because I still make time, but I understand better now. Now what I don't understand is how people who I know are as busy as I am are able to make time for a marathon of Stranger Things or The Crown. They have time management skills that I still need to master.
This being said, I actually have more time than Golden. Where I could realistically add a TV series or two to my schedule due to my willingness to give up some sleep, and her more constant responsibilities, it's a serious challenge to get small things added to her schedule.
All of this will change one day. We're in a busy stage of life. When the kids are older and some of our other responsibilities are lessened I anticipate us having more time for such pursuits. This is just an outgrowth of our time of life, and some of our life choices.
This has me asking a few questions, though. Is this a greener grass on the other side of the fence situation? Will I look back on this busier time with nostalgia because of the kids' ages, or will I look back with relief that things are slower? What percentage of adults are in a stage where they can't realistically binge watch a show without neglecting other responsibilities?
Friday, June 03, 2016
like edison
When I was a kid I dreamed of being an inventor. The idea of taking materials that weren't all that valuable on their own and assembling something valuable out of them was extremely appealing. As a result, stories like that of Thomas Edison's were very appealing.
I remember hearing about all of the things Edison created, with over 1000 patents to his name, and the underlying philosophy that was part of his persona. He is credited with the assertion, "Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." I remember visualizing him sitting in a dark room trying material after material in his light bulb until something worked. This whole ideal perfectly fit the philosophy of a nation where most would at least claim to believe in meritocracy. Intelligence is just hard work, and intelligence that doesn't work can't be called genius.
While I don't fault the focus on effort, as it is a necessary ingredient to success, this philosophy misses a ton of what made Edison successful. Because the story has historically stopped here many have been led to believe that his secret was simply trying hard, when there was a bit more to it. Edison brought a bit of intelligence and a lot of elbow grease to the job, and that's all it took to get all of those patents. So, all that is stopping you is the elbow grease.
In more recent years Edison's reputation has taken a bit of a beating due to what is viewed as his mistreatment of Nikola Tesla. While I don't know enough to know whether this new reputation is deserved, what I do know is that it shines light on where that perspiration came from. Edison was right that the genius of his success was in hard work, but it is not appreciated that he hired a lot of that work. There isn't anything wrong with this, except that the team and their work is always forgotten in order to give credit simply to the guy who hired them.
Also, this illuminates (Ha!) that sometimes one guy working really hard isn't enough. Some jobs require a team to be successful. This doesn't fit into a narrative that celebrates our individualistic ideals, so it is scrapped.
I wish I understood all of this earlier, because this is extremely helpful to understanding how the world works today. If you're fortunate you could be successful as some guy working by himself, but it's unlikely. You're certainly not going to emulate Edison levels of success that way. To be successful like Edison isn't just to work hard, but to get others to work hard as well toward that same goal.
I don't actually feel the need to be as successful in this world as Edison today, but since I did aspire to that in my youth I wish I understood what that really meant.
I remember hearing about all of the things Edison created, with over 1000 patents to his name, and the underlying philosophy that was part of his persona. He is credited with the assertion, "Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." I remember visualizing him sitting in a dark room trying material after material in his light bulb until something worked. This whole ideal perfectly fit the philosophy of a nation where most would at least claim to believe in meritocracy. Intelligence is just hard work, and intelligence that doesn't work can't be called genius.
While I don't fault the focus on effort, as it is a necessary ingredient to success, this philosophy misses a ton of what made Edison successful. Because the story has historically stopped here many have been led to believe that his secret was simply trying hard, when there was a bit more to it. Edison brought a bit of intelligence and a lot of elbow grease to the job, and that's all it took to get all of those patents. So, all that is stopping you is the elbow grease.
In more recent years Edison's reputation has taken a bit of a beating due to what is viewed as his mistreatment of Nikola Tesla. While I don't know enough to know whether this new reputation is deserved, what I do know is that it shines light on where that perspiration came from. Edison was right that the genius of his success was in hard work, but it is not appreciated that he hired a lot of that work. There isn't anything wrong with this, except that the team and their work is always forgotten in order to give credit simply to the guy who hired them.
Also, this illuminates (Ha!) that sometimes one guy working really hard isn't enough. Some jobs require a team to be successful. This doesn't fit into a narrative that celebrates our individualistic ideals, so it is scrapped.
I wish I understood all of this earlier, because this is extremely helpful to understanding how the world works today. If you're fortunate you could be successful as some guy working by himself, but it's unlikely. You're certainly not going to emulate Edison levels of success that way. To be successful like Edison isn't just to work hard, but to get others to work hard as well toward that same goal.
I don't actually feel the need to be as successful in this world as Edison today, but since I did aspire to that in my youth I wish I understood what that really meant.
Friday, April 15, 2016
feature i wish netflix had
This is very much a first world problems post, but they happen.
A little under a year ago we cut the cord on cable. Between Netflix, YouTube, and an over-the-air recorder (Tablo), Golden and I get most of what we want to watch.. However, I am sure the kids might prefer to have more ready access to the Disney and Nick channels. One thing that gets on my nerves more now that we rely on it, though, is Netflix's impossible-to-navigate interface.
At first blush, the Netflix interface looks great. It's clean and attractive. It does a decent job of recommending things we'll probably want to see. However, it is a major source of frustration for the way I want to use it.
The way I want to use Netflix is that I want to be able to go out searching for things I might like to see when I have spare time to investigate. Then, I want to tag a movie or a show as "Something only I will like" or "Something to watch with Golden and I" or "Kid's shows" or "Good for watching with the family over the holidays." What Netflix offers me instead is the ability to add the show or movie to a single list. We have decided at times not to try to find something to watch on Netflix because we couldn't easily find something that fell into one of those categories on the spot.
This idea could be expanded upon as well. As a parent it would be great if I could tag shows as "Only play once I enter a code" or take the opposite approach of disallowing everything unless I have tagged it as allowed. It would also be nice to be able to tag movies in this way that are not yet on streaming, but might be some day.
A year ago I looked into whether I could write something like this myself using the public APIs Netflix allows developers to use. I found that this may have been possible in the past, but they recently locked down what is truly accessible through their APIs to block what they viewed as competing services from using their data/system.
I also looked into submitting this request directly to Netflix because I imagine a lot of people would like a system like what I describe, and it honestly would not be very difficult to build. It turns out that Netflix does not have a support email address to send these requests to, and only has an online chat function which is never active when I have time to submit my request.
So, I post my request here. Maybe at some point someone in Netflix Product Management will be doing a Google search for desired features, run across this post, and decide that it isn't such a bad idea. That's my only real hope for getting this incredibly useful feature added to the product that I subscribe to and use with some regularity.
A little under a year ago we cut the cord on cable. Between Netflix, YouTube, and an over-the-air recorder (Tablo), Golden and I get most of what we want to watch.. However, I am sure the kids might prefer to have more ready access to the Disney and Nick channels. One thing that gets on my nerves more now that we rely on it, though, is Netflix's impossible-to-navigate interface.
At first blush, the Netflix interface looks great. It's clean and attractive. It does a decent job of recommending things we'll probably want to see. However, it is a major source of frustration for the way I want to use it.
The way I want to use Netflix is that I want to be able to go out searching for things I might like to see when I have spare time to investigate. Then, I want to tag a movie or a show as "Something only I will like" or "Something to watch with Golden and I" or "Kid's shows" or "Good for watching with the family over the holidays." What Netflix offers me instead is the ability to add the show or movie to a single list. We have decided at times not to try to find something to watch on Netflix because we couldn't easily find something that fell into one of those categories on the spot.
This idea could be expanded upon as well. As a parent it would be great if I could tag shows as "Only play once I enter a code" or take the opposite approach of disallowing everything unless I have tagged it as allowed. It would also be nice to be able to tag movies in this way that are not yet on streaming, but might be some day.
A year ago I looked into whether I could write something like this myself using the public APIs Netflix allows developers to use. I found that this may have been possible in the past, but they recently locked down what is truly accessible through their APIs to block what they viewed as competing services from using their data/system.
I also looked into submitting this request directly to Netflix because I imagine a lot of people would like a system like what I describe, and it honestly would not be very difficult to build. It turns out that Netflix does not have a support email address to send these requests to, and only has an online chat function which is never active when I have time to submit my request.
So, I post my request here. Maybe at some point someone in Netflix Product Management will be doing a Google search for desired features, run across this post, and decide that it isn't such a bad idea. That's my only real hope for getting this incredibly useful feature added to the product that I subscribe to and use with some regularity.
Friday, October 25, 2013
the real facebook temptation
Facebook is a constant siren. Not just to check everyone's statuses, though that is tempting too. No, Facebook constantly taunts me to jump into debates that will ultimately be meaningless.
It comes at me from all angles. I see absurdities in all sorts of bold positions that people take, but my fatal flaw is that I don't usually see the absurdities in my own positions. "Of course that's a ludicrous position to take," I think as I start whipping out a brilliantly witty remark at my friend's (or worse, a friend of my friend's) expense. Then, I usually (and thankfully) realize that maybe I shouldn't comment like that. At first it's usually out of concern for the obvious faux pas, but then it starts impossibly sinking in that maybe I'm also somewhat wrong. Maybe my comment isn't as bulletproof as I am imagining it to be, impossible as it seems right now.
Many times I have dialed myself back in time to avoid being, if only temporarily, yet one more idiot shouting an opinion on Facebook.* While I do not always feel in my gut it is the right decision at the time I always feel that it was a day or two later. Sometimes with my bolder friends I don't dial myself back as much as I should. The only times that I don't feel bad about that later are when I was correcting obvious and egregious doctrinal errors from a proclaiming Christian. That caveat scenario doesn't happen too often.
So, why is that temptation always there? I know better. I just don't know better in the moment.
* I'll always be an idiot shouting an opinion here.
It comes at me from all angles. I see absurdities in all sorts of bold positions that people take, but my fatal flaw is that I don't usually see the absurdities in my own positions. "Of course that's a ludicrous position to take," I think as I start whipping out a brilliantly witty remark at my friend's (or worse, a friend of my friend's) expense. Then, I usually (and thankfully) realize that maybe I shouldn't comment like that. At first it's usually out of concern for the obvious faux pas, but then it starts impossibly sinking in that maybe I'm also somewhat wrong. Maybe my comment isn't as bulletproof as I am imagining it to be, impossible as it seems right now.
Many times I have dialed myself back in time to avoid being, if only temporarily, yet one more idiot shouting an opinion on Facebook.* While I do not always feel in my gut it is the right decision at the time I always feel that it was a day or two later. Sometimes with my bolder friends I don't dial myself back as much as I should. The only times that I don't feel bad about that later are when I was correcting obvious and egregious doctrinal errors from a proclaiming Christian. That caveat scenario doesn't happen too often.
So, why is that temptation always there? I know better. I just don't know better in the moment.
* I'll always be an idiot shouting an opinion here.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
inevitable failure
One of the main topics in the news lately has been the troubled roll-out of the healthcare.gov website that is the main portal for people in the thirty-six states that did not create portals of their own. Amid all of the grandstanding, excuses, and political showmanship from both the Right and the Left on this I have one question that keeps coming up in my mind. Wasn't this to be expected with a major website roll-out?
I understand as I am reading news reports that most people have not been a part of a major IT roll-out like the healthcare.gov website. A significant minority of the population has, though, and the news reports are notably silent on the inevitability of these outages which should be obvious to anyone who has taken part in them. Simply put, large IT projects with immovable release dates, extraordinary load requirements, and multiple complex inputs do not usually roll out successfully on the first try. Many times I have seen roll-outs pushed back months due to unforeseen circumstances, and with a complex roll-out it is almost guaranteed that something unforeseen will occur.
As I have been reading over the last year about the impending go-live date for the website I was always inwardly thankful that I was not involved with what was obviously going to be a failed release. The idea that major bugs would be addressed, security and load testing completed, and all of the unforeseeable issues that plague any roll-out by a very public unchangeable date was absurd.
While there will be calls for heads to roll, and many probably will, this whole thing smacks of a misunderstanding of how major websites are rolled out. Few of the people sacked or called out publicly will have deserved it. This was a failure in the planning stages of the project, and it will be the implementers who take the heat. That is typically how the project blame game works.
If there is a lesson to be learned it is that something like this should be slowly phased in, lessons learned, then changes made based on those lessons. The website target date should have been July so that necessary changes could be made when the roll-out inevitably failed. Those running the project could have crowd-sourced the testing process and had individual volunteers try to overload and break the system, then used that feedback to know which issues needed addressing. Also, to reduce load, the thirty-six states portals could have been phased in week-by-week.
That's just me being an armchair IT guy, though.
I understand as I am reading news reports that most people have not been a part of a major IT roll-out like the healthcare.gov website. A significant minority of the population has, though, and the news reports are notably silent on the inevitability of these outages which should be obvious to anyone who has taken part in them. Simply put, large IT projects with immovable release dates, extraordinary load requirements, and multiple complex inputs do not usually roll out successfully on the first try. Many times I have seen roll-outs pushed back months due to unforeseen circumstances, and with a complex roll-out it is almost guaranteed that something unforeseen will occur.
As I have been reading over the last year about the impending go-live date for the website I was always inwardly thankful that I was not involved with what was obviously going to be a failed release. The idea that major bugs would be addressed, security and load testing completed, and all of the unforeseeable issues that plague any roll-out by a very public unchangeable date was absurd.
While there will be calls for heads to roll, and many probably will, this whole thing smacks of a misunderstanding of how major websites are rolled out. Few of the people sacked or called out publicly will have deserved it. This was a failure in the planning stages of the project, and it will be the implementers who take the heat. That is typically how the project blame game works.
If there is a lesson to be learned it is that something like this should be slowly phased in, lessons learned, then changes made based on those lessons. The website target date should have been July so that necessary changes could be made when the roll-out inevitably failed. Those running the project could have crowd-sourced the testing process and had individual volunteers try to overload and break the system, then used that feedback to know which issues needed addressing. Also, to reduce load, the thirty-six states portals could have been phased in week-by-week.
That's just me being an armchair IT guy, though.
Monday, July 15, 2013
instagram novelty
For a while now there have been two jokes about Instagram pictures that have really been circulating long enough to become very tired by this point.
I used to think the same thing in the late 90s and early 2000s when someone put too many actions in their PowerPoint presentations or used Comic Sans anywhere. It screamed, "Guess who just started using MS Office for the first time." Only this feels like people aren't distinguishing that the features and behaviors have the most value when they are used as infrequent novelties rather than the normal way of doing things.
As an example, taking a picture of your meal makes a lot of sense when your meal is novel. As "novel" implies, this is truly rare. Are you eating the face part of the food? Snap a picture and post it, because I don't see that every day! Is there a finger floating in your soup? Post that picture so that I can say I saw it before the lawsuit happened! Has this happened ten times, and you've posted pictures of the last nine? In this case it's not novel any more. Did you make a salad for yourself without anything particularly special in it and want to post a picture to brag about your salad-making skills or the fact that you're eating healthy? Honestly, it isn't a deep secret that most people simply don't care. It just comes across as a cry for help.
- Too many people use the sepia filter and crop their pictures to make them look like they came from the 60s or 70s.
- Too many people take pictures of their meals. This one isn't limited to Instagram, but it's a recurring joke.
I used to think the same thing in the late 90s and early 2000s when someone put too many actions in their PowerPoint presentations or used Comic Sans anywhere. It screamed, "Guess who just started using MS Office for the first time." Only this feels like people aren't distinguishing that the features and behaviors have the most value when they are used as infrequent novelties rather than the normal way of doing things.
As an example, taking a picture of your meal makes a lot of sense when your meal is novel. As "novel" implies, this is truly rare. Are you eating the face part of the food? Snap a picture and post it, because I don't see that every day! Is there a finger floating in your soup? Post that picture so that I can say I saw it before the lawsuit happened! Has this happened ten times, and you've posted pictures of the last nine? In this case it's not novel any more. Did you make a salad for yourself without anything particularly special in it and want to post a picture to brag about your salad-making skills or the fact that you're eating healthy? Honestly, it isn't a deep secret that most people simply don't care. It just comes across as a cry for help.
Friday, March 08, 2013
bodily privacy
I apologize in advance to anyone who is paranoid about being watched. If so, don't read the rest of this post. I'm serious. This is about a prediction I am making that might make some such people uncomfortable.
I had a shocking realization recently. I certainly hope that I am wrong, but I think that at some point in the future there are going to be unclothed pictures of pretty much everyone stored somewhere publicly accessible. This isn't because I think that everyone is going to be an exhibitionist in the future, but simply due to technological advancement.
As a minor, slightly unrelated example of how fast privacy is going away, a couple of weeks ago a picture of NJ showed up on my Facebook news feed, except it was not a picture of NJ. It was a picture of one of my Facebook friends taken and posted by someone he knows and with whom I am not friends on Facebook. He just happened to be in the same restaurant we were in earlier that day, and NJ was simply in the background of the picture. Just think of all of the people in the background of the pictures you have taken. You're probably in just as many picture backgrounds as well, so there is pretty strong documentation of most places that you have been in public if the faces in the pictures could be properly indexed and searched. Usually, that is not a big deal, but in some situations it may be.
I have long suspected that privacy as we think of it will become infeasible to maintain at some point in the future. It is also easy to see in social media that a lot of people are very comfortable exposing specific aspects of themselves that society has traditionally deemed private. Most of my contemplation to this point has centered around the privacy of thought rather than bodily privacy, however it makes sense that if we lose one we will lose the other. If there are cameras everywhere to catch conversations and facial expressions, there will be cameras everywhere to undo other sorts of privacy as well. These cameras might catch things inadvertently or intentionally, but the result is still the same that privacy will be violated.
The one thing I can think of that might strike down my predictions is that I can also consider is that anti-filming or camera detection technology will advance at the same pace, and that businesses and governments that manage public restrooms and changing areas invest in those technologies. This will means that individuals will have to be diligent, and the question is whether that level of diligence is realistic.
As an extra consequence of this prediction, I believe that any companies that currently hold patents on technology to detect and/or disable hidden cameras will probably make a killing in the not-so-horribly-distant future. Well, at least that is my paranoid prediction. Hopefully, I am wrong about all of this, or I am at least wrong about how far in the future this reality is.
I had a shocking realization recently. I certainly hope that I am wrong, but I think that at some point in the future there are going to be unclothed pictures of pretty much everyone stored somewhere publicly accessible. This isn't because I think that everyone is going to be an exhibitionist in the future, but simply due to technological advancement.
As a minor, slightly unrelated example of how fast privacy is going away, a couple of weeks ago a picture of NJ showed up on my Facebook news feed, except it was not a picture of NJ. It was a picture of one of my Facebook friends taken and posted by someone he knows and with whom I am not friends on Facebook. He just happened to be in the same restaurant we were in earlier that day, and NJ was simply in the background of the picture. Just think of all of the people in the background of the pictures you have taken. You're probably in just as many picture backgrounds as well, so there is pretty strong documentation of most places that you have been in public if the faces in the pictures could be properly indexed and searched. Usually, that is not a big deal, but in some situations it may be.
I have long suspected that privacy as we think of it will become infeasible to maintain at some point in the future. It is also easy to see in social media that a lot of people are very comfortable exposing specific aspects of themselves that society has traditionally deemed private. Most of my contemplation to this point has centered around the privacy of thought rather than bodily privacy, however it makes sense that if we lose one we will lose the other. If there are cameras everywhere to catch conversations and facial expressions, there will be cameras everywhere to undo other sorts of privacy as well. These cameras might catch things inadvertently or intentionally, but the result is still the same that privacy will be violated.
The one thing I can think of that might strike down my predictions is that I can also consider is that anti-filming or camera detection technology will advance at the same pace, and that businesses and governments that manage public restrooms and changing areas invest in those technologies. This will means that individuals will have to be diligent, and the question is whether that level of diligence is realistic.
As an extra consequence of this prediction, I believe that any companies that currently hold patents on technology to detect and/or disable hidden cameras will probably make a killing in the not-so-horribly-distant future. Well, at least that is my paranoid prediction. Hopefully, I am wrong about all of this, or I am at least wrong about how far in the future this reality is.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
a-little-too-late ads
I recently purchased some wireless headphones to use with our upstairs television with some Amazon gift cards I received for Christmas. They are working out well for their purpose, so that means that I will not need to look for wireless headphones for a while. Don't tell Amazon that, though, because now I see ads for headphones when I am on Amazon.
This is not the first time I started getting ads for a product specifically after I purchased that product. The same thing happened after I purchased a Roku this summer. For a while after I made the purchase a huge percentage of the ads I saw was for a Roku. I must have done a Google search for Roku or something like that to get those ads.
It always feels like those ads are going to waste. It should not matter to me since it is money that I am not going to spend, and I am not funding the advertising campaign anyway, but I do not like waste.
Have you noticed the same thing with any of the bigger ticket items that things that you purchased recently? Do you see ads for products that you purchased recently, so you will not be in the market for that item for a while?
This is not the first time I started getting ads for a product specifically after I purchased that product. The same thing happened after I purchased a Roku this summer. For a while after I made the purchase a huge percentage of the ads I saw was for a Roku. I must have done a Google search for Roku or something like that to get those ads.
It always feels like those ads are going to waste. It should not matter to me since it is money that I am not going to spend, and I am not funding the advertising campaign anyway, but I do not like waste.
Have you noticed the same thing with any of the bigger ticket items that things that you purchased recently? Do you see ads for products that you purchased recently, so you will not be in the market for that item for a while?
Saturday, December 01, 2012
c64 batman
When I was a kid our family had a Commodore 64 computer, and most of the games I played were on that machine. Of everything that I played, though, the game that probably had the greatest impact on me was Batman: The Caped Crusader. I was really into the old campy TV series, and the game was more advanced than most Commodore 64 games, so it made sense that I would like it. It also held some value as one of the gifts for me that my dad had picked out.
As much as I liked the game, I was never able to complete either of the two missions, one against the Penguin and one against the Joker. In both situations I was able to get right to the end, but was never able to figure out the last thing to do to complete the mission. I spent hours trying to figure it out, and never to any avail. In the years since I have often wondered if I was missing something or if the game had been broken. What I would not have given for the ability to get a game walkthrough like is available online for most games today.
In thinking about game walkthroughs recently occurred to me that I could probably get a walkthrough of completing the game online, and I quickly found some YouTube videos of someone completing each mission. That completing both missions combined lasts less than twenty minutes is not a reassurance to my gaming abilities as a sixth-grader.
I'm including the videos below of the game for my reference rather than anyone else's because there is no reason anyone who did not play the game would care. However, I still wish it would have taken the person playing this less than twenty minutes.
Joker, Part 1:
Joker, Part 2:
Penguin:
As much as I liked the game, I was never able to complete either of the two missions, one against the Penguin and one against the Joker. In both situations I was able to get right to the end, but was never able to figure out the last thing to do to complete the mission. I spent hours trying to figure it out, and never to any avail. In the years since I have often wondered if I was missing something or if the game had been broken. What I would not have given for the ability to get a game walkthrough like is available online for most games today.
In thinking about game walkthroughs recently occurred to me that I could probably get a walkthrough of completing the game online, and I quickly found some YouTube videos of someone completing each mission. That completing both missions combined lasts less than twenty minutes is not a reassurance to my gaming abilities as a sixth-grader.
I'm including the videos below of the game for my reference rather than anyone else's because there is no reason anyone who did not play the game would care. However, I still wish it would have taken the person playing this less than twenty minutes.
Joker, Part 1:
Joker, Part 2:
Penguin:
Sunday, March 25, 2012
it worker backgrounds
I have worked in technical support ten of the last eleven years, and have had significant interactions with people with all kinds of technical skill sets. This post is about one observation I have made that I have not seen anyone else make about people in general in the industry. Specifically, I think technical workers are disproportionately from poorer backgrounds.
My observation that a lot of people in IT came from poorer families could be completely wrong, and it is almost certainly partially due to the fact that my career to this point has mostly been in technical support rather than something more glamorous in the industry. I have seen a large number of technical workers who have purported to come from modest backgrounds, though. Beyond this, I have also noticed an inordinately large number of people from modest backgrounds who have taken a significant interest in tech as their key to a better life, even if they have not ultimately gotten a technical job.
In some respects this makes total sense. It seems like the industry more than most others rewards and punishes workers based on ability and intelligence. Politics applies, but to a lesser degree. If you're not cut out to be a programmer, or a systems administrator, or whatever it is going to matter less if your dad is the CTO for the company. You probably could coast in a different department, such as Marketing, where individual contributions are more difficult to quantify. On the flip side, if you are naturally skilled and someone gives a chance you can do well.
This also makes sense from the education perspective. This is a white collar profession where a bachelors degree or a graduate degree is not required. The same cannot be said for other white collar roles, from doctors to lawyers to mechanical engineers. Sure, most technical jobs claim to require at least a bachelor's degree, but most of those will also allow for "equivalent work experience." Less of an educational requirement means a lower barrier for people who don't have the money up front for a college education and/or four to eight years available to make a bet on a specific career.
I think the biggest reason for this, however, is the marketing from schools like DeVry and ITT Tech. By their nature they target students with lesser means (in either time or money) than a traditional school targets. Since the biggest bang for their buck is to target those industries where someone with an undergrad degree or less can make a decent living, they focus on the tech and healthcare industries. I have worked with a lot of DeVry graduates, and an unfortunate side-effect of their education that seems to be a universal is significant student loan debt. Since not everyone is cut out to work in technical fields, this presents a bit of a risk that the degree will not lead to a job to pay off the loan for the degree. It presents a hidden risk to those who are cut out for the industry as well, though.
Something that I learned before I had much technical experience on my resume is that, unless your degree is from a relatively prestigious school, experience matters far more than education when applying for a technical job. The places that hire straight out of school usually expect some specific ability or depth of knowledge that you don't necessarily get in the classroom. The people who do well tend to be the ones who did a lot of out-of-class learning on their own. This is a problem for any student with limited real-world experience. For-profit school students, with their higher-than-average debts that will not go away until they are paid off, are in a much tougher situation, however. A degree does not guarantee a job in the industry, and one may not ever be available for specific, individual graduates.
As a final note, I do seem to run across a lot of people who think that IT is the gateway to six-figure incomes, and I think this draws in people looking for something akin to an earned lottery payout. There are people who make that but, based on what limited information I have, they tend to fall into one or (very likely) more of the following four categories.
My foundational point is that technical jobs do offer opportunities that do not exist in other places, but they should not be pursued by people who do not have a genuine interest in the work. The payout simply is not as high as some people think it is, and there is a good chance a person looking to enter the field for the money will have to fight for opportunities just to get a position to acquire the experience employers expect. If you do like the work and have realistic expectations regarding what you will make, then entering the industry makes sense.
My observation that a lot of people in IT came from poorer families could be completely wrong, and it is almost certainly partially due to the fact that my career to this point has mostly been in technical support rather than something more glamorous in the industry. I have seen a large number of technical workers who have purported to come from modest backgrounds, though. Beyond this, I have also noticed an inordinately large number of people from modest backgrounds who have taken a significant interest in tech as their key to a better life, even if they have not ultimately gotten a technical job.
In some respects this makes total sense. It seems like the industry more than most others rewards and punishes workers based on ability and intelligence. Politics applies, but to a lesser degree. If you're not cut out to be a programmer, or a systems administrator, or whatever it is going to matter less if your dad is the CTO for the company. You probably could coast in a different department, such as Marketing, where individual contributions are more difficult to quantify. On the flip side, if you are naturally skilled and someone gives a chance you can do well.
This also makes sense from the education perspective. This is a white collar profession where a bachelors degree or a graduate degree is not required. The same cannot be said for other white collar roles, from doctors to lawyers to mechanical engineers. Sure, most technical jobs claim to require at least a bachelor's degree, but most of those will also allow for "equivalent work experience." Less of an educational requirement means a lower barrier for people who don't have the money up front for a college education and/or four to eight years available to make a bet on a specific career.
I think the biggest reason for this, however, is the marketing from schools like DeVry and ITT Tech. By their nature they target students with lesser means (in either time or money) than a traditional school targets. Since the biggest bang for their buck is to target those industries where someone with an undergrad degree or less can make a decent living, they focus on the tech and healthcare industries. I have worked with a lot of DeVry graduates, and an unfortunate side-effect of their education that seems to be a universal is significant student loan debt. Since not everyone is cut out to work in technical fields, this presents a bit of a risk that the degree will not lead to a job to pay off the loan for the degree. It presents a hidden risk to those who are cut out for the industry as well, though.
Something that I learned before I had much technical experience on my resume is that, unless your degree is from a relatively prestigious school, experience matters far more than education when applying for a technical job. The places that hire straight out of school usually expect some specific ability or depth of knowledge that you don't necessarily get in the classroom. The people who do well tend to be the ones who did a lot of out-of-class learning on their own. This is a problem for any student with limited real-world experience. For-profit school students, with their higher-than-average debts that will not go away until they are paid off, are in a much tougher situation, however. A degree does not guarantee a job in the industry, and one may not ever be available for specific, individual graduates.
As a final note, I do seem to run across a lot of people who think that IT is the gateway to six-figure incomes, and I think this draws in people looking for something akin to an earned lottery payout. There are people who make that but, based on what limited information I have, they tend to fall into one or (very likely) more of the following four categories.
- They hold a senior role.
- They live in an expensive city that necessitates high pay.
- They are a consultant and can tolerate the income variability.
- They happen to be an expert in a relatively new and highly-used technology.
My foundational point is that technical jobs do offer opportunities that do not exist in other places, but they should not be pursued by people who do not have a genuine interest in the work. The payout simply is not as high as some people think it is, and there is a good chance a person looking to enter the field for the money will have to fight for opportunities just to get a position to acquire the experience employers expect. If you do like the work and have realistic expectations regarding what you will make, then entering the industry makes sense.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
the end of privacy
This is the post where I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I generally deride the claims that the government is watching every move we make; and I am not either pro- or anti-government, but rather believe we are placed under the systems that God has ordained. I am hoping that these facts provide a little validity to some of my anti-government-sounding, paranoid views below.
I read 1984
one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.
One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.
One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.
Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.
While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.
So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.
I read 1984
one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.
One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.
Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.
While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.
So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
applosoft or micropple
I am going to take a bit of a chance here. While I do not anticipate applying to work at Microsoft or Apple any time in the near future, who really knows what types of acquisitions could occur to cause me to be employed by one of the companies by default. If either of these companies ever does acquire the company I work for expect this post to be immediately replaced by a glowing description of the company and the executives who run the company in question.
Quite a few years ago I used to have a strong dislike for Microsoft as a company. This largely stemmed from the fact that I felt like I did not have the realistic alternative to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. While I do not believe today that Microsoft is an altruistic company, I am not nearly as bothered today by it as I was in the past. For one thing, I have learned since that technical markets tend to naturally gravitate toward monopolies more than most other types of markets. Also, while Microsoft owns monopolies in two markets now, it is not doing a good job at the moment of replacing those monopolies with monopolies in different markets. This puts Microsoft in a very bad strategic position five or ten years from now if things do not change.
I now see Apple as the new Microsoft. This does not mean I have particular disdain for Apple. It just puzzles me why so many of the same people who hated Microsoft for its business practices have a love for Apple. Apple's strategy is almost exactly the same as what Microsoft's has been. Gain a monopoly in a market (iTunes, Windows) and use that monopoly to extract high margins from customers who can't reasonably go elsewhere. Again, I am not saying that Apple's strategy is immoral or anything like that, but rather I am saying that almost everything that a person could have hated about Microsoft they could hate about Apple as well.
Quite a few years ago I used to have a strong dislike for Microsoft as a company. This largely stemmed from the fact that I felt like I did not have the realistic alternative to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. While I do not believe today that Microsoft is an altruistic company, I am not nearly as bothered today by it as I was in the past. For one thing, I have learned since that technical markets tend to naturally gravitate toward monopolies more than most other types of markets. Also, while Microsoft owns monopolies in two markets now, it is not doing a good job at the moment of replacing those monopolies with monopolies in different markets. This puts Microsoft in a very bad strategic position five or ten years from now if things do not change.
I now see Apple as the new Microsoft. This does not mean I have particular disdain for Apple. It just puzzles me why so many of the same people who hated Microsoft for its business practices have a love for Apple. Apple's strategy is almost exactly the same as what Microsoft's has been. Gain a monopoly in a market (iTunes, Windows) and use that monopoly to extract high margins from customers who can't reasonably go elsewhere. Again, I am not saying that Apple's strategy is immoral or anything like that, but rather I am saying that almost everything that a person could have hated about Microsoft they could hate about Apple as well.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
cars in the future
I will warn everyone ahead of time that this post is basically my prediction for the future of transportation. I can see that interesting some people and severely boring others. If you are bored by speculation regarding the future of cars, then don't bother reading this post. Don't you wish everything I wrote came with this disclaimer?
Everyone knows that Toyota has been in the news lately for problems with breaking. For people who own a Toyota vehicle this must be a bit nerve-wracking. For some people adamantly against the idea of buying a car assembled in the United States by a non-unionized Japanese company, I think there is a bit of restrained glee (I decided not to use the word "schadenfreude" because the word seems pretentious). While a lot of people have gotten the idea that this proves the reputation of Toyota's manufacturing excellence a farce, I have to disagree.
Since the issues sound like they are due to very quirky behaviors with the software, this has very little to do with Toyota's ability to assemble a quality car. Software development is a whole different world from car development. Because of this, situations like this one with Toyota and future similar incidents are almost inevitable. As long as we rely on large amounts of software to automate functionality in our vehicles, and we will more and more in future years for economic reasons, inevitable defects will appear. Just due to random chance, some will impact important functions such as the car's ability to stop. This is just speculation, but it sounds like automotive software issues are more difficult to diagnose and fix as well because Toyota sounds to me like it is stalling until the software issue is identified and addressed.
As someone who has spent several years devoted to supporting software and interacting with the support staffs of other software companies I feel I have some qualification to compare expected standards for software compared to automotives. Software is typically held to a lower standard. For example, if a defect makes your browser crash and you have to reboot that is irritating, but it is not entirely unexpected. If your car steering fails to function one day while you are on the highway because of a defect that is much more unexpected and serious. While a Windows defect could cause Microsoft customers some pain a defect in a Prius could cost a customer his or her life.
As an example of what I am talking about, part of the reason that the things NASA builds are so expensive is that there is almost no tolerance for defects. It is very difficult to fix something that is millions of miles away, so it has to be nearly perfect. Even with these standards, NASA has had many serious failures over the years with both hardware and software, and I would argue that as stupid as many of the defects were, having them was quite nearly unavoidable. It is likewise unavoidable that some software glitch is going to cause some serious automotive issues that take lives.
I have considered this quite a bit. It only makes sense that the next big advance in automobiles will be self-driving vehicles. Technically, it is close to possible to build a car that can drive itself already. Prototypes have been made, but they are not anywhere near safe enough to use on the road. The technology simply is not mature enough, but most of the remaining research involves details rather than undeveloped technology.
I expect that the technology will start with semi trucks since the drivers can still take over the vehicle from auto-pilot if there are problems. Eventually, though, the technology will become advanced enough that no truck driver will be needed in the vehicle even as an emergency co-pilot. The day that the technology is mature enough to allow for self-driven cars unmonitored by a human will be a good day for consumers because of cheaper shipping, but it will be a very bad day for anyone who makes a living largely based on their having a CDL. On that day school buses will not have drivers, but rather just an adult who keeps order. Domestic airlines will lose a lot of business because it will be easier and cheaper to rent a car equipped with a bed overnight and sleep while the car does the driving than it will be to deal with the hassle of a flight. Hotels that are not destination hotels will be hurt as well for the same reason: That no one will need to stop for a rest midway through their trip. This should also reduce the need to expand roads and lessen our dependence on oil because an automated car uses less gas than a manually driven car does and can drive closer to other vehicles (reducing its road footprint). All of this is almost technically possible now (or at least within five years), but it will probably not happen for the next twenty because of the problems that Toyota is having now.
What I expect will happen is that small bits of automated functionality will be introduced into cars slowly, such as Lexus' automated parallel parking. Even though the current pace of adding automation to cars is relatively slow, it will get even slower because sooner or later another software issue like what Toyota is seeing will appear and another CEO will be called before Congress to get chewed out regarding his inability to fix some issue that no one entirely understands but that is causing random accidents. This will happen a handful of times and each time it does it will slow the deployment of new automated functionality to a standstill.
Eventually, though, the technology will mature and the next generation will tell their kids about the good old days when cars came with steering wheels, gas pedals, and bucket seats. Not only that, we also had to drive barefoot through the snow uphill both ways...
Everyone knows that Toyota has been in the news lately for problems with breaking. For people who own a Toyota vehicle this must be a bit nerve-wracking. For some people adamantly against the idea of buying a car assembled in the United States by a non-unionized Japanese company, I think there is a bit of restrained glee (I decided not to use the word "schadenfreude" because the word seems pretentious). While a lot of people have gotten the idea that this proves the reputation of Toyota's manufacturing excellence a farce, I have to disagree.
Since the issues sound like they are due to very quirky behaviors with the software, this has very little to do with Toyota's ability to assemble a quality car. Software development is a whole different world from car development. Because of this, situations like this one with Toyota and future similar incidents are almost inevitable. As long as we rely on large amounts of software to automate functionality in our vehicles, and we will more and more in future years for economic reasons, inevitable defects will appear. Just due to random chance, some will impact important functions such as the car's ability to stop. This is just speculation, but it sounds like automotive software issues are more difficult to diagnose and fix as well because Toyota sounds to me like it is stalling until the software issue is identified and addressed.
As someone who has spent several years devoted to supporting software and interacting with the support staffs of other software companies I feel I have some qualification to compare expected standards for software compared to automotives. Software is typically held to a lower standard. For example, if a defect makes your browser crash and you have to reboot that is irritating, but it is not entirely unexpected. If your car steering fails to function one day while you are on the highway because of a defect that is much more unexpected and serious. While a Windows defect could cause Microsoft customers some pain a defect in a Prius could cost a customer his or her life.
As an example of what I am talking about, part of the reason that the things NASA builds are so expensive is that there is almost no tolerance for defects. It is very difficult to fix something that is millions of miles away, so it has to be nearly perfect. Even with these standards, NASA has had many serious failures over the years with both hardware and software, and I would argue that as stupid as many of the defects were, having them was quite nearly unavoidable. It is likewise unavoidable that some software glitch is going to cause some serious automotive issues that take lives.
I have considered this quite a bit. It only makes sense that the next big advance in automobiles will be self-driving vehicles. Technically, it is close to possible to build a car that can drive itself already. Prototypes have been made, but they are not anywhere near safe enough to use on the road. The technology simply is not mature enough, but most of the remaining research involves details rather than undeveloped technology.
I expect that the technology will start with semi trucks since the drivers can still take over the vehicle from auto-pilot if there are problems. Eventually, though, the technology will become advanced enough that no truck driver will be needed in the vehicle even as an emergency co-pilot. The day that the technology is mature enough to allow for self-driven cars unmonitored by a human will be a good day for consumers because of cheaper shipping, but it will be a very bad day for anyone who makes a living largely based on their having a CDL. On that day school buses will not have drivers, but rather just an adult who keeps order. Domestic airlines will lose a lot of business because it will be easier and cheaper to rent a car equipped with a bed overnight and sleep while the car does the driving than it will be to deal with the hassle of a flight. Hotels that are not destination hotels will be hurt as well for the same reason: That no one will need to stop for a rest midway through their trip. This should also reduce the need to expand roads and lessen our dependence on oil because an automated car uses less gas than a manually driven car does and can drive closer to other vehicles (reducing its road footprint). All of this is almost technically possible now (or at least within five years), but it will probably not happen for the next twenty because of the problems that Toyota is having now.
What I expect will happen is that small bits of automated functionality will be introduced into cars slowly, such as Lexus' automated parallel parking. Even though the current pace of adding automation to cars is relatively slow, it will get even slower because sooner or later another software issue like what Toyota is seeing will appear and another CEO will be called before Congress to get chewed out regarding his inability to fix some issue that no one entirely understands but that is causing random accidents. This will happen a handful of times and each time it does it will slow the deployment of new automated functionality to a standstill.
Eventually, though, the technology will mature and the next generation will tell their kids about the good old days when cars came with steering wheels, gas pedals, and bucket seats. Not only that, we also had to drive barefoot through the snow uphill both ways...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
tech insecurity
I think that in economic times like the current time people tend to appreciate that they have jobs more. I don't know if this has a general impact on whether they like their jobs, but it certainly has an impact on how people value them. For my part, I definitely appreciate that I have a job, but I probably appreciated it about the same before the unemployment rate doubled.
I have been thinking about this because I think I assume something that most people do not assume. I figure that it is inevitable that I will be laid off at some point in the future. It could be tomorrow and it could be thirty years from now. It could be from my current employer or some other employer far in the future. Given the nature of modern job markets and the way I see various industries trending I do not see how I can avoid it indefinitely.
Most of the people who read this have been laid off or fired at least once. I am certainly among that number. The last place where I was laid off was especially tough because I lost a bit of trust in the experience. Against my better judgment I had been convinced by senior management that the consulting firm that I worked for would maintain enough work to employ me at least for a few years. Within a few months of that I was informed that my contract would be terminated four months later. I was one of the lucky ones who could not be immediately replaced at the customer site.
In technical fields I think it is just assumed that specific jobs will not be there forever. Certainly the required skill sets change enough that the nature of jobs today are not the same as the jobs a few years down the road. There is not as much call for a mainframe administrator or COBOL developer as there once was. Straightforward technical jobs also have a tendency to migrate offshore. Since I chose to pursue working in a technical field I should accept that this comes with the territory. It can still be a bit scary, though, because layoffs typically happen at times when few other companies are hiring. Also my skill set is broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep. This is good in my current position but it is the opposite of the ideal in a job search for anything other than an entry-level job.
My expectation causes me to approach things a little different than many other people. As an example, a coworker was talking to me about how a specific new vehicle would only cost a certain amount of money a month with a good-sized down payment and I noted that I was not comfortable having another monthly financial obligation. "Oh yeah," he replied, "You think you're going to be fired." I explained that this was not true, because I do not think that I am going to be let go in the near future. Since I figure it will happen some day, though, why get buried in even just a little debt?
While I think job insecurity is inevitable going forward, I do not think it should have to be. I think that most layoffs can be traced back to one of two things. The first is poor forecasting. During good times some companies probably grow a little too irrationally fast. The second is the myopic view on Wall Street that ignores that statistical variance for revenues and profits is unavoidable. Eventually, even the best companies are going to have bad quarters. It's only the Enrons and the Madoffs that don't. The street should not expect layoffs any time a company misses on earnings. Unless the market as a whole addresses two issues most industries will continue to be insecure places to maintain a career. I hope they get to work on that soon.
I have been thinking about this because I think I assume something that most people do not assume. I figure that it is inevitable that I will be laid off at some point in the future. It could be tomorrow and it could be thirty years from now. It could be from my current employer or some other employer far in the future. Given the nature of modern job markets and the way I see various industries trending I do not see how I can avoid it indefinitely.
Most of the people who read this have been laid off or fired at least once. I am certainly among that number. The last place where I was laid off was especially tough because I lost a bit of trust in the experience. Against my better judgment I had been convinced by senior management that the consulting firm that I worked for would maintain enough work to employ me at least for a few years. Within a few months of that I was informed that my contract would be terminated four months later. I was one of the lucky ones who could not be immediately replaced at the customer site.
In technical fields I think it is just assumed that specific jobs will not be there forever. Certainly the required skill sets change enough that the nature of jobs today are not the same as the jobs a few years down the road. There is not as much call for a mainframe administrator or COBOL developer as there once was. Straightforward technical jobs also have a tendency to migrate offshore. Since I chose to pursue working in a technical field I should accept that this comes with the territory. It can still be a bit scary, though, because layoffs typically happen at times when few other companies are hiring. Also my skill set is broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep. This is good in my current position but it is the opposite of the ideal in a job search for anything other than an entry-level job.
My expectation causes me to approach things a little different than many other people. As an example, a coworker was talking to me about how a specific new vehicle would only cost a certain amount of money a month with a good-sized down payment and I noted that I was not comfortable having another monthly financial obligation. "Oh yeah," he replied, "You think you're going to be fired." I explained that this was not true, because I do not think that I am going to be let go in the near future. Since I figure it will happen some day, though, why get buried in even just a little debt?
While I think job insecurity is inevitable going forward, I do not think it should have to be. I think that most layoffs can be traced back to one of two things. The first is poor forecasting. During good times some companies probably grow a little too irrationally fast. The second is the myopic view on Wall Street that ignores that statistical variance for revenues and profits is unavoidable. Eventually, even the best companies are going to have bad quarters. It's only the Enrons and the Madoffs that don't. The street should not expect layoffs any time a company misses on earnings. Unless the market as a whole addresses two issues most industries will continue to be insecure places to maintain a career. I hope they get to work on that soon.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
education
The value of education and the means of improving it has been on my mind quite a bit recently. The two biggest reasons are that NJ is approaching the age where we have to start planning for pre-school and kindergarten and the other is that I have been getting a bit jaded about higher education over the last few years. As is my wont, I am approaching this through a series of disjointed observations and opinions.
Choice
I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.
Improving Education
Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.
The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.
Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.
Classism and an Inefficient Economy
I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.
First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.
Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.
Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.
Future of Education
The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.
I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.
Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.
Conclusion
Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.
Choice
I don't think that there is a right choice for all kids regarding whether they do public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, or online learning. They all have very distinct advantages and disadvantages, and so that makes the choice a situational thing more than anything else. A lot of people seem to judge others based on the educational choices that they make for their kids. I am not looking forward to that.
Improving Education
Many Republicans want testing in schools and performance-based pay for teachers. Many Democrats want higher wages for teachers and longer school years. Honestly, I think that all of these are red herring options that only make it look like the politicians are fixing something. They all sound great at first blush but every one of the options introduces perverse incentives, solves the wrong problem, or both.
The way I see it none of the traditional steps that politicians take to fix school systems addresses the main problem, which is that people who do not want to learn will not learn. By my observation, the greatest failure of the American educational system is that it drives kids to apathy of the world around them rather than to a love of learning. Going into too much more depth is beyond the scope of this post, but I have identified three causes that drive kids to apathy. The first is that most people do not learn the best in a classroom structure, so forcing kids to sit in a classroom environment every day for hours makes something that is already boring feel futile as well. The second is that kids who have a love of learning are tagged as nerds, so it is actually cooler to not try to learn and to be educationally deficient. The third is that kids who don't feel safe in school are not likely to enjoy being there, so things like social bullying should be taken much more seriously than they generally are.
Another thought regarding improving the educational system is that maybe personal finance should be a required course. I know, it's not like we are going through a horrific recession fueled by excessive debt accrued by people who should not have been approved for the debt in the first place.
Classism and an Inefficient Economy
I really do understand the value of education. I should. I have nearly twenty solid years of education under my belt. That being said, I believe that the focus on education over other forms of learning and knowledge in today's society serves both to re-enforce the class structure and as a drag on the economy. Let me explain.
First, the requirement of a degree to work in, or be taken seriously in, a business environment favors those people who come from families with means. Someone from a below-median wage-earning family who is not awarded many scholarships will probably graduate with significant student loan debt. I can attest from my own experience that few things are more destructive to building a strong financial foundation in a person's twenties, when doing so is the most important, than paying hundreds of dollars every month to Sallie Mae for years on end. The median student loan debt for graduates with BA degrees in 2007-2008 was $17,700. This is significant because the median is not a measure that weights people extremely high levels of student loan debt like the mean would. So, while education itself is not withheld from the poorer masses, the requirement of an education forces those without means into a debt trap that will be destructive to many graduates' net earning power for many years to come. For many, this will also damage their ability to retire since they were paying off debt rather than saving for retirement.
Second, I believe that the focus our culture places on the time spent in education is a drag on the economy as a whole because it leads to inefficient uses of capital that could be better improving the work force. There is a concept called Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allowed for completion of that work. Likewise, if those who establish the rules for the educational system decide that four years of schooling is a good time requirement for a bachelor's degree then the degree programs will backfill to meet that arbitrary length of time. Greater thought should be put into making degree programs more efficient and not just require a certain number of classes for the sake of having a certain number of classes. The only reason this system is allowed to exist in this state is that those who make the decisions regarding how the system should be structured also benefit from requiring students to take more classes.
Frankly, I believe that the best way to improve the American work force is, for the types of jobs where this makes sense, focus many more educational resources on apprenticeships and consider restructuring many degree programs to heavily focus on internships/apprenticeships over other elective work. On-the-job training is almost always better than in-the-class training.
Future of Education
The future in nearly every industry is some sort of automation and increased economy of scale. I have said as much already (prediction #10). The same will be true for education as well, though I think it will take a different face. This isn't much of a prediction since it is already starting, but a very serious shift to online schooling at all levels is inevitable. If an online class can cut overhead by allowing thousands of students to attend the same class and assignments automatically graded or graded by lowly-paid TAs, then that school can theoretically offer the same education that a traditional institution does at a lower price. None of this requires technology that does not exist right now, either. Because of this, I actually suspect that the ever-increasing cost of higher education will drop below the level of inflation some time in the near future.
I do not think that traditional elementary and high schools will go the way of the dinosaur and completely disappear. I do believe that they will go the way of the condor, though, and be thinned out. Simply out of necessity one of the main purposes of schools today is to have somewhere for kids to be while parents are working. Most parents are not going to have the choice of keeping the kids at home if they have to work to put food on the table. I think, however, that school districts will learn that teaching kids online is cheaper than teaching them in the classroom and so they will start offering parents incentives keep the kids at home and learn online. This will encourage many of those who have the flexibility to either work from home or quit their jobs and stay at home while the kids do their learning online.
Ultimately, the strongest attacks against online schooling, at least for the elementary through high school level, will be the same that are leveled against home schooling. The argument will be that kids need social time. What will probably happen to keep that from being an issue is that most kids will go through some sort of hybrid program where they learn online certain days of the week and they come into class certain days of the week. Like everything here, though, this is speculation.
Conclusion
Wherever the bright young minds are today is going to be where the innovative adult minds are in a few years. The school system's main goal should be, then, to keep those who have a love of learning from dimming into apathy. This will have to be done in a changing environment where people will learn as much through an Internet connection as they do in a classroom. It's a challenging proposition to say the least, but I am actually optimistic that it will go mostly well.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
a silent living room
I am currently typing this on my laptop from a silent and dark living room. This is because a few months ago NJ decided that he wanted to sleep in the living room. At first we resisted this, but we decided that it was better to let him sleep on the couch than have him wake up crying in the middle of the night and waking up CD. It was a question of picking our battles.
As a consequence of NJ being on the couch throughout the evening, this is the first time in my life that I have watched more television on my a computer than on the TV. Golden and I had one guilty pleasure show for the summer, Here Come the Newlyweds, which just so happened to be posted online on a weekly basis. Golden has one or two other shows she catches online, and I have been watching episodes of the old series Sliders online since I didn't catch it when it was actually broadcast.
Since television has always had a significant role in my routine, it is a little odd for the TV to be off so much. It doesn't feel instinctive to turn on the television any more. It even feels a bit like a special occasion as of late to turn on the TV and flip the channel to something that is not produced for preschoolers.
Like everything, this is just a phase and before long I expect to be back to watching the television regularly again. I expect that the meantime will continue to feel surreal as I sit in the dark, however.
As a consequence of NJ being on the couch throughout the evening, this is the first time in my life that I have watched more television on my a computer than on the TV. Golden and I had one guilty pleasure show for the summer, Here Come the Newlyweds, which just so happened to be posted online on a weekly basis. Golden has one or two other shows she catches online, and I have been watching episodes of the old series Sliders online since I didn't catch it when it was actually broadcast.
Since television has always had a significant role in my routine, it is a little odd for the TV to be off so much. It doesn't feel instinctive to turn on the television any more. It even feels a bit like a special occasion as of late to turn on the TV and flip the channel to something that is not produced for preschoolers.
Like everything, this is just a phase and before long I expect to be back to watching the television regularly again. I expect that the meantime will continue to feel surreal as I sit in the dark, however.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
pop-ups
Something that has perplexed me is what the point of pop-up advertisements are. I know that I am at least more put off by them than anything else, so I cannot imagine that many legitimate companies would be successful in using pop-ups. Also, most browsers block a large percentage of pop-ups, so even if they would have been successful many of those advertisements are not seen by most users. My assessments about this must somehow be wrong because pop-ups still exist in large quantities.
I can understand that some websites that do not have to maintain a highly professional reputation might be able to use pop-ups because they do not have an image to tarnish with the type of advertising that they accept. Websites that bank on professionalism of some sort or on reputation have too much to lose, in my opinion, to play that game.
One website that confounds me in its use of pop-up advertising is Snopes. Psychologically, if I get a pop-up when I go to a website, my trust of what I find on that website takes a hit. Since Snopes is founded on its audience's trust and since it probably has a more technically experienced audience that is less likely to click on a pop-up, I don't know for the life of me why the website has so many pop-ups. Do they really get more advertising dollars by popping up a couple of windows every time someone visits the site than they would by avoiding the practice? If it were not for the fact that the website has very compelling content that I cannot reliably get elsewhere I probably would have decided to stop going to the site long ago. I know at least one person who has sworn off the site for the same reason.
So, if you happen to be reading this and you are considering building a website and making money on advertising, please consider forgoing the pop-ups and pop-under ads.
I can understand that some websites that do not have to maintain a highly professional reputation might be able to use pop-ups because they do not have an image to tarnish with the type of advertising that they accept. Websites that bank on professionalism of some sort or on reputation have too much to lose, in my opinion, to play that game.
One website that confounds me in its use of pop-up advertising is Snopes. Psychologically, if I get a pop-up when I go to a website, my trust of what I find on that website takes a hit. Since Snopes is founded on its audience's trust and since it probably has a more technically experienced audience that is less likely to click on a pop-up, I don't know for the life of me why the website has so many pop-ups. Do they really get more advertising dollars by popping up a couple of windows every time someone visits the site than they would by avoiding the practice? If it were not for the fact that the website has very compelling content that I cannot reliably get elsewhere I probably would have decided to stop going to the site long ago. I know at least one person who has sworn off the site for the same reason.
So, if you happen to be reading this and you are considering building a website and making money on advertising, please consider forgoing the pop-ups and pop-under ads.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
past performance
As part of the process of setting up my laptop I have reorganized many of the documents on our main computer so that I can properly copy what I need onto the laptop. While I was going through the documents I came across some folders containing homework and various papers that I wrote for some of my undergrad courses. Looking back on that work now, it is amazing to me how much time I spent on such a small amount of work and how mediocre my writing was.
I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.
The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?
I remember well the very first paper I had to write when I was in school. The paper was a simple four-page research paper on a composer. I remember spending way more time than I should have for a four-page paper, and looking back on the paper, it is a little embarrassing the level of effort it required for as lousy as the final result was. My papers from when I was a senior were better, but that is not saying much.
The one good thing about all of this is that I know that I am still learning years after graduating, and I know I still have a way to go. My question to everyone else is, how do you feel you are growing as a person. Are there areas in your life where you look back at where you were five, ten, or twenty years ago and see that where you were and where you are are completely different?
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