For a bit over a month now I've been trying to get my head and heart around the situation of a former mobile industry heavyweight finally exiting the business by selling "substantially all" of its operations related to its core business. Retrospection is fine and dandy and everyone has a theory and nobody has the data to back it up, but sufficient to say, I think it has to do with the decline in culture and general confusion which took hold of people. But, more interestingly I've been thinking about why I feel so bad about the future as well.
With my background in technology, I'm of course biased to view things from that angle. And technology has, for better and for worse, over the course of history allowed people to improve things by harnessing natural phenomenons and exploiting them to achieve different goals and solve different problems. Tool building at its core. The sad thing when looking around is to notice that these days people who have formal education in engineering have gone far from their roots and are no longer building useful things. Instead a type of cargo cult behavior has taken over and some have even forgot what it is like to do things with ones hands. That's also evident by looking at higher education statistics, where young people are more often than not avoiding "hard" subjects and the natural sciences.
But ok, what has this to do with the subject at hand? Well, for years I've been frustrated as the company I've seen fall has, to an extent, been plagued by confusion where people think that success comes from optimizing the bill of materials and squeezing your suppliers, from clever marketing tricks, or worse yet, from strategizing and other similar things, while in the end at the core is the product. Technology, which is packaged and produced in a way that it solves real problems, is elegant, and has a certain amount of artisan spirit forged into it. And with the product divisions sold away, what little culture in product creation was left is now finally sold away and what remains is an empty shell of people who shovel paper and Powerpoint in an illusion that they are doing something productive. But with the product culture finally extinguished, how can one of an engineering background be happy in such a brave new world?
Saturday, October 05, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Training strength
Over the past 14 and a half months I've been putting an increased emphasis on learning about strength training and trying to apply the things I've read to my training. Initially I started with the heureka moment that what I'd been doing was, to a great extent, just wasting time at the gym without any clue of what should be done and how stuff should be programmed. So, as appears to be the fairly common story online, I ran across Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, and spent time learning the lifts, learning the program and learning the ideas behind building strength. At the same time I also started to increase the granularity of the data I was tracking from my exercises, and strength training is very nice as it allows you to follow with a relatively high granularity what your strength with respect to different exercises are and accumulating the data was relatively easy.
I recently also wrote some scripts to programmatically extract my training data from Fitocracy, which otherwise would have been a relatively tedious task (for those interested, the key words here are phantomjs and scraping the site). Having automated this, the next task is to start building up some dashboards for displaying the data to help give a more intuitive feeling for what has been going on. For now there is no neat interactive widget yet for that, but I did try out some rather rudimentary tests in Excel.
First off, the first diagram below represents the maximum weight used for an exercise at a given date in time and the 30 days prior to it. I should have filtered based on maximum weights for certain rep counts, but because there is a bit of flakiness and certain periods of not following the program exactly, I opted instead to use the maximum weight observed. This is a relatively good proxy as I don't progress to higher weights prior to being able to achieve five reps with the lower weight first. An additional thing to note is that the initial steep climb with the barbell squats isn't really as steep; having barely hit 120, I used a belt to get up to 130, so the first two peaks for the squats should in reality be lower. Asides from that all of the reps have been done raw with no belt or other weight lifting gear.
It should, I guess, be mentioned that adhering to the program turned out to be too much at times and hence the best I can say is that a followed the spirit of the program. :) To a certain degree, however, one can see the waves emerging as patterns in the training, which demonstrate the deloads at certain points and then the pursuit for newer records. The deadlifts illustrate this the best way.
I also ran across an interesting article on T-Nation, in which the author outlined some strength standards he had observed over the duration of his career. The standards had been structured as relative comparisons to a certain baseline. For instance, with a deadlift of X, his empirical observations would suggest that the person should be able to back squat 71.4% of the deadlift. So, taking the deadlift as a baseline and using that as a predictor for the other lifts and using that to scale the actual lifts, we're able to draw a picture of which lifts are relatively higher than they should and which lower.
Of course every individual is different, so strong conclusions can't really be drawn from these types of analyses. What they are, however, somewhat useful for are identifying if you have significant imbalances between lifts, which perhaps should be addressed to achieve a somewhat stable system. Imbalances tend to often be associated with decreased progress later on as well as potentially causing injuries or other problems.
What is apparent in my case is that the lifts where the main components stems from pushing, namely the press and the bench press, my long arms give me an inherent disadvantage, which is also apparent in that they are relatively speaking the weakest lifts at the moment out of the five lifts. That is mainly due to the recent advances made in deadlifting, which in turn mainly stem from some a-ha moments with my deadlifting technique. Also, the disproportionately strong squat as visible in the left part of the diagram wasn't in fact as strong, mainly because of the aforementioned use of the belt, which inflated the results a bit.
Going forward from this, I think that the current "fuckarounditis" of a program that I have at the moment, which is a very much bastardized Starting Strength routine has served its purpose of getting me acquainted with training with weights and the next thing is to move onto some other program. At the moment I have a feeling I'll be giving Bill Starr's intermediate 5x5 program a try for some cycles. But we'll see.
I recently also wrote some scripts to programmatically extract my training data from Fitocracy, which otherwise would have been a relatively tedious task (for those interested, the key words here are phantomjs and scraping the site). Having automated this, the next task is to start building up some dashboards for displaying the data to help give a more intuitive feeling for what has been going on. For now there is no neat interactive widget yet for that, but I did try out some rather rudimentary tests in Excel.
First off, the first diagram below represents the maximum weight used for an exercise at a given date in time and the 30 days prior to it. I should have filtered based on maximum weights for certain rep counts, but because there is a bit of flakiness and certain periods of not following the program exactly, I opted instead to use the maximum weight observed. This is a relatively good proxy as I don't progress to higher weights prior to being able to achieve five reps with the lower weight first. An additional thing to note is that the initial steep climb with the barbell squats isn't really as steep; having barely hit 120, I used a belt to get up to 130, so the first two peaks for the squats should in reality be lower. Asides from that all of the reps have been done raw with no belt or other weight lifting gear.
It should, I guess, be mentioned that adhering to the program turned out to be too much at times and hence the best I can say is that a followed the spirit of the program. :) To a certain degree, however, one can see the waves emerging as patterns in the training, which demonstrate the deloads at certain points and then the pursuit for newer records. The deadlifts illustrate this the best way.
I also ran across an interesting article on T-Nation, in which the author outlined some strength standards he had observed over the duration of his career. The standards had been structured as relative comparisons to a certain baseline. For instance, with a deadlift of X, his empirical observations would suggest that the person should be able to back squat 71.4% of the deadlift. So, taking the deadlift as a baseline and using that as a predictor for the other lifts and using that to scale the actual lifts, we're able to draw a picture of which lifts are relatively higher than they should and which lower.
Of course every individual is different, so strong conclusions can't really be drawn from these types of analyses. What they are, however, somewhat useful for are identifying if you have significant imbalances between lifts, which perhaps should be addressed to achieve a somewhat stable system. Imbalances tend to often be associated with decreased progress later on as well as potentially causing injuries or other problems.
What is apparent in my case is that the lifts where the main components stems from pushing, namely the press and the bench press, my long arms give me an inherent disadvantage, which is also apparent in that they are relatively speaking the weakest lifts at the moment out of the five lifts. That is mainly due to the recent advances made in deadlifting, which in turn mainly stem from some a-ha moments with my deadlifting technique. Also, the disproportionately strong squat as visible in the left part of the diagram wasn't in fact as strong, mainly because of the aforementioned use of the belt, which inflated the results a bit.
Going forward from this, I think that the current "fuckarounditis" of a program that I have at the moment, which is a very much bastardized Starting Strength routine has served its purpose of getting me acquainted with training with weights and the next thing is to move onto some other program. At the moment I have a feeling I'll be giving Bill Starr's intermediate 5x5 program a try for some cycles. But we'll see.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Ideas and execution...
This may be a bit of a beating-the-dead-horse thing, but one which again reared its ugly head today when I ran across my old boss, who had heard that I'd been hacking away at various products and services and forging my own interpretation of Quantified Self and whatnot. I'm one of the easiest people to get to engage in all forms of discussions on various different topics, and even more so when you hit some of the topics that I happen to be interested at the moment.
The problem with the brief discussion today was that it was not really a discussion. It was more of a "tell me what you are doing with these things", which itself wouldn't be too bad either as it's something that I actually like talking about. However, it is not a discussion if the other party does not contribute anything meaningful. In this case the main contribution was that "I have a great idea how to change this fitness/wellness field, but I won't tell it to you." Which sort of leads me to a second pet peeve of mine: ideas without execution are hallusinations (apologies for ripping that off, can't recall who said it)...
Over the years I've been involved in various things in the corporate world, the common thing I've observed is the completely misguided notion that it's the idea, or the strategy, or the whatever that is valuable and then when this intangible brainfart is reared, the job is done. Which sort of aptly explains why certain companies are in the situations that they are in. What I keep wondering is whether this is because of a fault in the thought process or because in fact it appears that not many people can or will bother to execute the idea. It's truly a pity, because the corporate world seems to kill the will to do something and in turn appears to incentivize people to not even try but to instead spend their time on more philosophical things, the merit of which is harder to assess without bringing them into the real world.
The problem with the brief discussion today was that it was not really a discussion. It was more of a "tell me what you are doing with these things", which itself wouldn't be too bad either as it's something that I actually like talking about. However, it is not a discussion if the other party does not contribute anything meaningful. In this case the main contribution was that "I have a great idea how to change this fitness/wellness field, but I won't tell it to you." Which sort of leads me to a second pet peeve of mine: ideas without execution are hallusinations (apologies for ripping that off, can't recall who said it)...
Over the years I've been involved in various things in the corporate world, the common thing I've observed is the completely misguided notion that it's the idea, or the strategy, or the whatever that is valuable and then when this intangible brainfart is reared, the job is done. Which sort of aptly explains why certain companies are in the situations that they are in. What I keep wondering is whether this is because of a fault in the thought process or because in fact it appears that not many people can or will bother to execute the idea. It's truly a pity, because the corporate world seems to kill the will to do something and in turn appears to incentivize people to not even try but to instead spend their time on more philosophical things, the merit of which is harder to assess without bringing them into the real world.
Thursday, August 08, 2013
Genetic testing
Having casually followed the quantified self movement and admitting a general tendency common for engineers to be interested in measuring stuff, I decided to pull the trigger and order a laboratory tube for my saliva from 23andMe. Even despite the hight shipping and handling costs to Finland. Maybe more on that later, but one interesting thing arose already after talking about genetic testing and sequencing of DNA with various colleagues and friends: people, at least in my circle of acquaintances, seem to be very much against these types of things. Which is interesting, because on average the data set consists of relatively highly educated and seemingly intelligent people.
The most common argument, based on limited empirical evidence, appears to be that people do not want to know about potential genetic diseases. Fair enough, I suppose, but personally I don't think there can be too much harm in at least having a cursory overview of what the most common pitfalls may be. At least then I'll know which research areas to donate money to, if nothing else. But regardless, the probabilities are there whether or not I sequence a bit of DNA, and forewarned is forearmed. But I guess if a person is prone to anxiety, these things may cause elevated stress. Amusingly enough it seems that ingesting excess amounts of calories, avoiding any forms of exercise, etc., don't seem to cause stress. Who knows how to interpret all of this.
Anyway, I think there is a much more fundamental argument for giving some organic material for the researchers to sequence: for the first time in history we are getting to the point where genetic testing is becoming so cheap that theoretically everyone will soon have a chance for genetic testing. The possibilities that these could provide for scientific research are huge, and in a sense I perceive this to be one of the biggest drivers for why I should take part in these types of exercises: what I get out of these may be, at least for now, of limited significance, but contributing to what has a very high probability of being a significant breakthrough for humanity and what will very likely down the road improve life for all, I think I just have to do it.
Oh, and in 23andMe's case they offer nifty APIs against which to write code. Who could resist that.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Clutter
If last year was the year of cleaning up my life financially as a part of the brief pro-bono stint to the non profit world of NGOs, the theme of this year has undoubtedly bean expanding that exercise to the realm of physical possessions. The housing co-op I've been living in from 2004 has finally pulled its act together and managed to begin the renovation of all the pipes and whatnot in the apartments. For me this in practice means vacating the premises for a good three months at least and packing my entire apartment up for the duration of the renovations.
The opportunity afforded by this change has naturally been to make a radical cleanup of most things. This, for me, has basically consisted mainly of getting rid of a ton of stuff. My wardrobe has, more or less, been reduced to a half of what it was. Most of the older electronic gizmos, laptops, etc. are out, along with a bulk of whatever happened to be in drawers and closets. The more stuff I've thrown out or given away, the better all of this is starting to feel. The counterpoint that some older people have raised has been that they would've in retrospect wanted to preserve some artefacts from their earlier lives. Sure, a nostalgic memorabilia are nice and everything, but more often than not it just adds to all the clutter. At least now for me preserving certain digital artefacts is more than enough; hard drive space is cheap, square meters are not.
Overall I think that this exercise has also highlighted what is important and what is not. In practice I've kept my books, some of my clothes, basic stuff needed for cooking and eating, sports gear (boxing stuff, clothes, kettlebell, ...), laptop (and phone, tablet, ...), hygiene gear, and that's more or less it. Now the real challenge will be to make the appropriate routines to try to preserve this type of lean approach, similar to the way how I've been keeping my financial footprint relatively small after getting things sorted out earlier. We'll see how this exercise will go.
The opportunity afforded by this change has naturally been to make a radical cleanup of most things. This, for me, has basically consisted mainly of getting rid of a ton of stuff. My wardrobe has, more or less, been reduced to a half of what it was. Most of the older electronic gizmos, laptops, etc. are out, along with a bulk of whatever happened to be in drawers and closets. The more stuff I've thrown out or given away, the better all of this is starting to feel. The counterpoint that some older people have raised has been that they would've in retrospect wanted to preserve some artefacts from their earlier lives. Sure, a nostalgic memorabilia are nice and everything, but more often than not it just adds to all the clutter. At least now for me preserving certain digital artefacts is more than enough; hard drive space is cheap, square meters are not.
Overall I think that this exercise has also highlighted what is important and what is not. In practice I've kept my books, some of my clothes, basic stuff needed for cooking and eating, sports gear (boxing stuff, clothes, kettlebell, ...), laptop (and phone, tablet, ...), hygiene gear, and that's more or less it. Now the real challenge will be to make the appropriate routines to try to preserve this type of lean approach, similar to the way how I've been keeping my financial footprint relatively small after getting things sorted out earlier. We'll see how this exercise will go.
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
Driving licenses in Finland
Starting last month the process for obtaining a driving license in Finland was changed again. The previous process consisted of two phases with the initial phase containing a bulk of the education and teaching. The second phase of the license consisted of some extra lessons and had to be attended within two years of getting the first phase license. Starting this year the amount of phases has been raised to three and the practicalities of all this are still fairly vague to me.
The multiphase systems have been always motivated by the desire to decrease the probability of young drivers to get into accidents. Proponents argue that more lessons will get young drivers to be more responsible and drive more safely. Perhaps so, but the flip side of the coin is that, well, this costs many more coins. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, ran a story today where they had found that costs for the end customer obtaining a driving license had gone up by as much as 1 000 euros with the entire driving license costing at most around 3 000 euros.
At the same time we can take a look at the statistics provided by Statistics Finland. The chart in question visualizes the deaths in road accidents from 1970 to 2011, with the black line being total deaths, green line being age group of 25-64 years, yellow 15-24 years, and red 0-14 years.
What, then, is the financial impact? Helsingin Sanomat mentions that on average the total cost for a license has gone up by around 600 euros. Over the past five years the yearly licenses granted have been quite steady at around 70 000, so with this single change the driving license industry has increased its revenues by a rather nice 42 million euros. Not too shabby when the current discourse is on how youngsters in cities are less likely to drive licenses these days as public transport coverage combined with limited parking spaces, high fuel costs, and whatnot make car ownership and operation not too attractive in the urban environment.
Only time will tell how the accident statistics evolve, but one thing is certain: the government has managed to quite nicely prop up an industry by bringing in added bureaucracy and legislation. I do not have statistics at hand, but a gut feeling would be that if road safety is something we want to improve, things like road design and maintenance, quality of cars, even speed limits would bring significant improvements to it. Of course maintenance of a road network is costly, but quality of cars can easily be improved by decreasing taxation of newer cars and offset by shifting taxation to fuels and speed limits can be changed by changing the sign on the side of the road.
The multiphase systems have been always motivated by the desire to decrease the probability of young drivers to get into accidents. Proponents argue that more lessons will get young drivers to be more responsible and drive more safely. Perhaps so, but the flip side of the coin is that, well, this costs many more coins. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, ran a story today where they had found that costs for the end customer obtaining a driving license had gone up by as much as 1 000 euros with the entire driving license costing at most around 3 000 euros.
At the same time we can take a look at the statistics provided by Statistics Finland. The chart in question visualizes the deaths in road accidents from 1970 to 2011, with the black line being total deaths, green line being age group of 25-64 years, yellow 15-24 years, and red 0-14 years.
So, to be honest, at least the mortality statistics do not really paint a very grim picture. The two-phase system was introduced in Finland in 1989 and the three-phase system now in 2013. However, I would venture a guess that a bulk of the decline in accidents can in fact be attributed to the improvement of car technology as well as the fact that Finns are finally buying newer cars with better safety equipment. Regardless, the trend is quite clear.
What, then, is the financial impact? Helsingin Sanomat mentions that on average the total cost for a license has gone up by around 600 euros. Over the past five years the yearly licenses granted have been quite steady at around 70 000, so with this single change the driving license industry has increased its revenues by a rather nice 42 million euros. Not too shabby when the current discourse is on how youngsters in cities are less likely to drive licenses these days as public transport coverage combined with limited parking spaces, high fuel costs, and whatnot make car ownership and operation not too attractive in the urban environment.
Only time will tell how the accident statistics evolve, but one thing is certain: the government has managed to quite nicely prop up an industry by bringing in added bureaucracy and legislation. I do not have statistics at hand, but a gut feeling would be that if road safety is something we want to improve, things like road design and maintenance, quality of cars, even speed limits would bring significant improvements to it. Of course maintenance of a road network is costly, but quality of cars can easily be improved by decreasing taxation of newer cars and offset by shifting taxation to fuels and speed limits can be changed by changing the sign on the side of the road.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Household taxation
The question of how much is enough has been a recurring thing recently in the Finnish press with different parts of society chipping in their two cents worth via comment sections in prominent local papers. On one hand better off individuals have shown up with statements that over 100k per year is enough for anyone while members of six person households have voiced their concerns that aggregate post-tax disposable household income of 9-10k per month is barely something that they can live on. Of course one of the key parameters here is the overall cost structure of your life, which I did not really care to get into here. However, one thing that does merit some comments is how to carry out the taxation.
Both in the aforementioned comment sections as well as in the sphere of people I know, there has been a somewhat interesting trend in people wishing to change from taxing individuals to taxing households. Supposedly this would be farer as it is not entirely uncommon in some families for one partner to earn very well with the other carrying a less well compensated occupation, which would result in the overall tax load of the family unit to be lower. The argument is precisely that: the family functions as a unit, so why not tax it as one.
The obvious reason why not to tax the family as a single unit is obviously precisely that: very many of the good and functioning parts of the Nordic systems have spawned from accepting individuals as the primary component in the equation. Think of it this way: taxing the family as a single unit will drop the tax for the high earner, but will on an individual level increase the barrier to do more work for the low earner as they would be subject to the same higher tax rate. Would this matter? If we accept the assumption of using the family as the unit of analysis, perhaps not, but families do tend to break apart and actively designing a system which demotivates one person from working will be problematic if the family breaks apart.
Moving away from the individual level, household taxation would also introduce problematic things in the context of income equality. I am personally not entirely convinced that income equality in itself is a very crucial or key component in assessing the health of society, but many people do. If we hold income equality important, we also do not want to introduce mechanisms to grow inequality, which would undoubtedly happen if the above is assumed to hold true.
On a slightly unrelated thought, I was recently talking with a friend of mine, and he was saying that one reason given for the relatively well functioning Nordic system is related to the family unit being relatively small. Without the need of maintaining a large direct and indirect family system to ensure survival, the flexibility afforded by a small core family will bring benefits on the level of the entire economy where people are able to move more freely without having to consider safety nets and similar. Of course all of this is afforded by the ability of the state to provide the safety net in an economically efficient way. It is yet to see how economically efficient we will be in the long run, but this idea certainly sounds quite interesting.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
More pendulums
While it's perhaps a bit of an undeveloped idea for me right now, one thing that just occurred to me recently was the pendulum between computing and communication in computers. Take the initial personal computers and they were standalone boxes for which the primary value stemmed from the ability to perform computing tasks quite handily. With the spread of internet and the web, the utility started transforming from compute-driven value to communication, which has recently pinnacled recently with the whole social media scene. But parallel to this, the networkedness of computers combined with the communication aspect we now have another interesting possibility to create utility from even more massive compute resources than back when computers were more isolated and standalone devices. And of course thanks to the pendulum having swung to the communication direction, we also have a ton of very interesting data to compute with our newly refound compute power.
This stream of thinking actually spun off from a separate question I was wondering, which revolved around whether or not there is perhaps a generational gap where numerical methods or analysis has, thanks to the advent of cheap computing, become a very viable tool for solving difficult problems but for some reason the slightly older people who I've been talking to, be it about my work with coevolution of technology and industry structures or other things, don't seem to intuitively see the power of numerical methods and simulations.
This stream of thinking actually spun off from a separate question I was wondering, which revolved around whether or not there is perhaps a generational gap where numerical methods or analysis has, thanks to the advent of cheap computing, become a very viable tool for solving difficult problems but for some reason the slightly older people who I've been talking to, be it about my work with coevolution of technology and industry structures or other things, don't seem to intuitively see the power of numerical methods and simulations.
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