Expectation management

The application processes for Finnish schools has swung into gear recently, as evident from the number of advertisements pasted in buses, trams and metros. This got me thinking about the expectation management aspect, which links directly to the dissatisfaction of e.g. the Occupy movements. Most of the advertisements suggest that the degrees offer a very good first step in a career and go around spurting words like finance and business. Yet, if I do a bit of reflection on the courses I've studied at TKK around business and management, to be honest I've been left a bit wanting. Of course they're fun and fairly light in weight, but I'm not entirely certain that they've significantly contributed to my knowledge or ability to succeed in my career.

The problem, how I see it, in these cases revolves around the fact that only once you've actually started doing real work do you gain enough insights about the real life to be able to ask the right questions and understand the substance of the courses. It's of course fun to talk about innovation management and do case analyses where you get to write general comments on how to tackle a 400 million per year budget of technology development, but let's face it, citing some academics and writing very shallow and general suggestions won't get you too far. Of course they teach you something, but to be honest, if that is the level of post-grad courses in universities, I'm somewhat worried about what they are teaching in vocational institutes or the ammattikorkeakoulu.

I may be repeating myself but I think that prior to having any real experience, the most useful things that students can learn are practical tools that they can apply in different situations. And I'm not talking about innovation funnels and frameworks, but simple things like mathematics, languages, programming, and so on. A certain amount of common sense wouldn't also hurt. Looking back at my degree so far the most useful things I've learned, in no specific order, include:

• The attitude of not getting frightened when encountering a problem. Many of the exercises done during advanced mathematics courses looked very scary, but instead of freezing, just start taking tools and hitting the problem with it.
• The ability to search for tools and concepts to hit problems with, linked with the reading skills to be able to go through even large bodies of literature and try to organize and make sense of the publications to get a grasp of a field.
• Understanding that in many cases when trying to figure out things and solve problems, exact solutions may be irrelevant and more often than not figuring out magnitudes is more than enough. And if more is wanted, you can always dig deeper and narrow down your approximation.
• Programming skill are always beneficial. They teach you a certain type of thinking and approach to problem solving as well as offer you very concrete tools with which to attack larger masses of data, perform simulations, etc. Everyone should know at least a bit of programming, in my opinion.

There are certainly many other things as well, but those were the first to come to mind. Having also worked during most of my degree, school may not have in fact taught me all of those things, but a combination of working and studying has been a very helpful combination. But interestingly enough most of the things I've listed above have not been learned as a result of any specific course. And it is entirely possible to go through a degree program without worrying too much about learning any of the above skills, but this will undoubtedly lead to a situation where the expectations that were created with the degree marketing aren't really met and reality hits in at some point, causing huge dissatisfaction in the people who neither automatically got the career they thought was promised to them nor did they end up learning any of the core skills to increase their competitiveness in the job market.

But naturally school want to market their offerings and attempt to attract as many students to maximize quantity and quality because the incentives for the schools have been set to encourage pushing as many students through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Is this the most optimal situation in the long run for the economy, the students themselves, or the schools? Hardly, but short-term optimization of hastily created and incorrect metrics is often a lot easier than trying to figure out what the optimum situation would be in the long run and how that could be achieved... So, expect more disgruntled students when the batch of this year's accepted students graduate in the next 4-6 years.

Combat fatigue

Combat fatigue is setting in on multiple fronts. My one-year venture into the non-profit sector is almost over and while it very likely will in the longer run be a very useful experience, for now the main theme has been disillusionment. On the other hand my thesis has barely progressed and that annoys me immensely; there's too much data and the algorithms need to be tweaked and at the end of the day it feels as if I have nothing too interesting to say about it anymore. But I would still need to sugarcoat that with a bunch of references to credible sounding articles...

The markets also seem to be getting tired. Greece will eventually fall because it cannot reduce the inertia it has built up. And the European Union cannot increase Greece's competitiveness because that's not what politicians do. Politicians redistribute wealth in a seemingly arbitrary fashion and devise grandiose plans despite the fact that at best they accomplish very little compared to just letting self-organization and emergent designs do the job and at worst they are very counterproductive and create perverse incentives. The bigger they are the harder they fall seems like the most appropriate adage here. But something must be done because something is better than nothing and doing nothing also then spawns the question concerning what these people are actually paid to do.

Kickboxing is one of the more productive things I spend on time these days. If nothing else, at least my physical health is more or less decent. But even this area is problematic: with increased levels of exercise the level of food intake should also rise, but for some reason that's been very difficult. I'm not saying that I eat unhealthily, I'm saying that I just don't eat enough, which is strange. I know I should eat more but I'm just not hungry. Here's an obvious business opportunity for someone: provide a service which allows the customer to specify certain boundary conditions on the food (amount of energy, protein, etc.) and produce and deliver meals which satisfy the conditions. It's too much of a hassle to figure out what to eat.

Fortunately there's a one-month vacation coming up and then it's back to the real world again. Perhaps take up weight training to complement the kickboxing, assuming that the issue with food is sorted out, and then begin advancing on other fronts again...

Housing prices

On even week numbers there is a housing price bubble in Helsinki and on odd week numbers the prices are going to skyrocket in the future as there is no bubble and housing is undervalued. By applying some common sense, the world has seriously gone insane. Or at least Finland has gone insane. With two-room apartments (that is two rooms, not two bedrooms, mind you) running in the region of quarter of a million euros in Helsinki, how can there not be a bubble. If you want an apartment for less than that, it's off to the suburbs for you and even then it might be difficult.

Consider this... If you would like to pay off an annuity loan of a quarter of a million euros with a 2.5% interest rate and about 1000 euros per month, this would take roughly 30 years. That's quite hefty, considering the average income levels, degree of taxation, and other related factors in Finland. How can there not be a bubble?

Furthermore, factor in the shitty economic situation and the fact that the traditional footholds of the Finnish economy, from mobile device driven high-tech to the forest industry, are crumbling. Job security is decreasing, government debt is rising along with budget sizes and nobody seems to be able to tackle the problem in a sustained fashion (increasing the already hefty level of taxes for middle classes will end up kicking the nation in the ass...), how is it possible that regular people feel comfortable taking out loans of said sizes?

There was another genius analyst this week in a local newspaper stating that housing prices are under pressure to go even higher up. His rationale? Because rents are rising and this means that housing prices must also rise. How does this make sense? Could it be that rents are rising as people are getting laid off and must adjust their stance into a more flexible one, driving demand for rentals up? If so, why would the house prices go further up? The only way for the prices to rise would be if consumer confidence in the future is high and cheap credit is available. Confidence shouldn't be too high precisely because of the fact that competitiveness is down (both national and Euro-zone), job security is down (thanks to structural shakeups in the industries) and income levels in relation to current housing prices are seriously low. And availability of cheap credit? That worked out so well the last time around...

Fragility

"If you design systems top-down, they're going to be fragile. If you let systems develop on their own, they're going to be anti-fragile. This is how mother nature works. This is how evolution works."

Some random thoughts on leadership

• If I ever lead any type of project related to "strategies" or whatnots in the future, I'll force everyone in the team to read through the US Marine Corps' MCDP-1 Warfighting document. The thing I really like about the military blokes is that they have a very clear and concise, well focused way of thinking about issues. Clear definitions and clarity of thought. The problem I encounter these days more often than not is that people can't answer simple questions such as what the objective of a project is.
• Related to the above, I think a certain degree of martial arts also supports with clarity and teaches the dynamics of competition really well. Additionally it also teaches that blocking hits with your head hurts and losing isn't too fun.

Something to think about...

If the foreign aid that Finland pays out yearly would be cut altogether along with the funding that goes towards aiding unemployed people find jobs, every unemployed person could be paid about 500 euros more per month. When you consider the impact that the country is making with both of the previously mentioned budgets, I'm starting to think that this would be a very smart move.

IT

Corporate IT has had me scratching my head for years. For some odd reason it seems that just about everywhere I look corporate IT is fumbling and dropping the ball, leading to the obvious question of why is it so difficult to implement a rational and functional IT setup in an organization. There are so many dimensions to this, but if we scope the discussion to a tool perspective and put the end-user in the center, we can try to paint some type of a picture.

The common thing about all of the jobs I've ever held is that my main tool is my computer, which in my case has always been a laptop. A common policy in organizations is typically that the computer can be replaced once every three years (some more enlightened organizations may even allow cycles of only two years). But somehow it is not at all uncommon for organizations to provide their employees with laptops which are the cheapest money can buy. Or actually not. For instance I recently received a new laptop from work, which is an HP ProBook 4320s. It weighs very much, sports a relatively sluggish processor, a relatively bad battery life and worst of all it freezes more often than not. Apparently it costs somewhere in the region of 500 euros, give or take a bit. My personal preference at the moment is the new 13" MacBook Air, which I bought recently for about 1200 euros. Assuming that the machine is held for the typical three years, that means an extra cost of 233 euros per year, or about 19.44 euros per month. Of course that may sound a lot for the bean counters, but the device is better in every way I can measure: it is lighter, it is more powerful, it has a better resolution, it has an SSD drive (=it boots up faster, loads programs faster, ...), it has better battery life, it has OS X, and so on.

If we look at the boot up times, the MacBook Air boots up in, oh, 15 seconds. The HP boots up and runs through all of the associated startup procedures to get the system working in 3-5 minutes or so. Assume I work on 21 days in a month, with 3 minutes that's 63 minutes of boot time per month, with 5 minutes that's 105 minutes. With 15 seconds that's 5.25 minutes. So even with the low end estimate of 63 minutes for boot ups per month, if I cost more than 19.44 euros per hour or more to my employer, the rational option would be to go for the MBA. In fact, I would gladly pay 20e per month to my employer to be able to opt for an MBA over the HP.

The argument against high-specced machines has traditionally been that the average employee does not need the high specs because they only need to be able to use basic MS Office tools and such. But even in that case, it would be much more rational to look at e.g. netbooks or these days the new Chromebook-type computers. Acer's Chromebook is selling for about 300 USD, meaning that it significantly reduces the price when compared to the HP I was given. And I will venture a guess that that is a better machine than the HP. Of course in the Chromebook's case one could argue that it is more limited in functionality than a full-fledged PC. I haven't used one so I don't know, but I do know that the laptops leased by the NGO I'm working with are locked down so strictly that it is impossible for employees to install anything on them. And in that respect I think the Chromebooks would be more than comparable.

Now, the big question is why this sort of stuff is still going on in IT organizations and it's nearly 2012. This is just one part of the bigger puzzle of WTF. Other parts include "Why the heck is someone paying large amounts of money for email systems that don't work when GMail is free?"

Degree lengths

Continuing on the theme of education, unfortunately it seems that the politicians are also very much clueless in regards to education. A big problem that is often cited as the reason for stricter control over students is that the time it takes the average student to graduate from university has been apparently growing. So obviously the logic goes that this must be bad because if students are in school longer they must cost society more directly and also if they are in school, that must mean that they are not working and hence are also causing losses for the society in terms of lost tax income. That may be slightly simplified, but my understanding is that that's the crux of it.

But, if you actually think about it, coming from an IT background we've often been criticized for taking jobs during our studying and then forgetting to graduate. For some reason it seems that competent software people tend to be dragged out of school very quickly after they enter school. So if you think about the case where a student de facto drops out of school to get full-time employment writing software, you in fact have a situation where the student isn't causing costs for the school (s/he's not taking up the time of the teaching staff, no need for expending material resources, no subsidies, ...). And most likely ending up in software means that the person will be making a decent living, at least in the region of the median income in the country. So a productive part of society. Of course one could argue that the lack of degree may come back to kick the person in the ass later down the line because for some odd reason having a piece of paper makes you a better person. But again the world has changed so that in technology, for instance, the time horizons have shortened to such an extent that because I dropped off the bleeding edge of web development in about 2005-2006, I'm already an ancient dinosaur, degree or no degree.

One angle to think about this might be the per student costs. The current academic system relies still too heavily on mass lectures, which cost a fixed amount to produce regardless of the number of attendants. So if people drop out of school and aren't replaced with new students, the average cost of producing the lecture for a smaller amount of students goes up, despite the cost remaining constant in absolute terms. But again this can be tackled either by shifting away from mass lectures (which I never liked anyway) or then opening up the application process and enabling more students to enroll thus mitigating the effect of the disappearing students.

However, this still does not really explain why everyone is so grumpy about students taking long to graduate. One of the most central reasons, I believe, is that there is a constant game of resource allocation going on. The government runs the universities in Finland and despite recent attempts to change the system to set up universities as foundations and attract funding from the industry and other sources the raw truth is that to a great extent universities get funded based on the amount of graduates they are able to produce. So there we go, there may not be any concrete benefit for anyone in getting students to graduate quicker, but there is a very clear link to resource allocation. So if the resource allocation mechanism would be changed, I think schools would also change their attitudes and not care too much about the invisible and costless students hanging around as an entry in a student database.

Now, looking at the situation from the other perspective, there might actually be very many benefits for students and the universities to keep a link between each other for as long as possible. Reflecting on my own career and studies so far, it's quite clear that taking a job at a multinational was quite possibly one of the best decisions I've made during my studies. It gave a fairly solid and concrete link to the otherwise somewhat disconnected subjects from school. How do you expect a person to truly understand about strategy based on lectures and articles without actually providing the individual with an opportunity to be a part of a strategy process and see for themselves what these things are about. And on the other hand being in a company but also hanging around on campus enables the student-employee to actually go to professors to discuss about potential problems that the student is working on in his career and actually brings potential work to the university and may help in applied research.

This subject could of course be discussed at greater lengths and deepened a lot, but even at a fairly shallow level it's quite clear that the whole perceived problem of students not graduating fast enough is just silly.

Income inequality

It seems that an underlying driver in the dissatisfaction that the Occupy movement has stems from a certain level of inequality in regards to income and wealth. Hence the resentment towards the top 1% (which in the US nowadays means a yearly income of roughly 300-400k or total assets of 5-10M dollars).  There is actually a fairly interesting podcast which was published recently by EconTalk on the inequality and the top 1%, although one should bear in mind potentially biases considering its a fairly libertarian publication.

But that got me thinking in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. I was recently lectured to by some people who wished to save the world that inequalities are bad and they showed some very convincing-looking diagrams which apparently prove that social problems stem from financial inequality. Or at least that there is a significant correlation if not a causality link. Can't really argue with the data, but I think there may be more going on than a single snapshot in time can capture.

Anyway, if we accept at face value that inequality is bad per se, then obviously we should try to decrease inequality. I'm always slightly hesitant of taxing the hell out of people since that gives the politicians too much money to do silly things with. So if there is a natural way of decreasing inequality, it would be nice. And it turns out that there is. It's called the recession. We now have data from the last credit crunch and the years following which shows that inequality has decreased, which must be good. And apparently the recession and all the fuss is driving it. The conclusion then must be that to make the world a better place for everyone (by making it a more equal place), we must create a sustained state of recession whereby the financial inequality would sort itself out.

Now, the sharper sticks in the crowd will no doubt already start thinking about different types of scarcity effects which may emerge as well as innovation and its links to crisis situations. And of course there is a very real risk that something very innovative might come out of this. Unfortunately, however, innovations tend to get productized and someone may get very wealthy from creating something useful. This in turn will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and this time the recession might have created this. So what the politicians could do is ensure that none of these heroes who might innovate themselves out of the recession can actually do so. And considering the track record of politicians in general, I feel very confident that they would be able to kill off all innovation.

So, there we go. Instead of worrying too much about reducing GDP numbers, prolonged recession or the fall of the euro, we should instead embrace all the chaos as it will reduce inequality and let's face it, inequality is supposedly the result of all evil. Ergo, the world will become a better place.

Tongue still in cheek.

Student subsidies follow-up

Since my latest blog entry, the Facebook group demanding the demolishing of income thresholds tied to student subsidies has more than doubled in size to about 60 000 members, which is increasingly worrying due to the blatant greed and self-centeredness which is obvious from the statements being thrown around. Anyway, my viewpoint was already presented in the previous blog entry and the entry from September 2010 where I did the math with a few example cases, so let's not get stuck on that anymore.

At the same time SYL, the National Union of University Students in Finland has also posted their stance in a blog entry. It is fairly encouraging that they also essentially say that while they to an extent understand why the discussion has erupted in this way, they view the student subsidies in a similar fashion as other social benefits: they should be aimed at the people who in fact need support and shouldn't be treated as "reward".

Another interesting point in their post were the costs they had calculated which will arise from various types of changes to the system. You can find the details from the post, but to give some perspective to the discussion, the overall costs arising from supporting students run in the range of 800 million per year. The demands that the students are now putting forth would cost an additional 300 million per year. To contrast this, more targeted changes to e.g. support students with children by increasing their allowance by 145 euros per month would cost in the region of 23 million per year. This type of change I can agree with as I can imagine that supporting a family with children during your studies is something which demands not only time, but also resources in a completely different way than being single.

A friend of mine also linked an interesting article from Canada, where some people had talked to the local Occupy movement. Combine this article with another one on how college has been oversold and a picture starts emerging. I recall I've previously blogged about how the education system will be in turmoil and how essentially inefficient it is to run a system to highly educate people who end up doing routine tasks which don't essentially need high education only to provide businesses with one criteria with which to filter applicants with. Of course it's nice to give everyone a university education, but ultimately I think people should put into perspective what the education actually is and what the impacts realistically will be on their lives. It's completely ridiculous to assume that merely obtaining a university degree will automatically guarantee bliss. There's always a certain amount of shoveling excrement involved in establishing yourself and your career and, let's face it, with the increased amount of uncertainty on every level in the world, chances of failing a couple of times are fairly high.

This in fact links back to the original discussion on income thresholds in respect to student allowances. The system is a social welfare system meant to ensure that people are able to survive. Think of it as an air bag. The intention of the system isn't to provide you with a comfortable setup with which you can cruise through life without having to compete and create value. The purpose is to ensure that if you crash, you stay alive and can get back up again. If air bags in cars provided a near 100% survival rate and also provided a very comfortable pillow, there wouldn't be much of an incentive to be too careful in traffic as the worst-case scenario would involve a comfortable nap after and collecting insurance money...

In fact, amusingly enough in Finland students are very risk averse and tend not to even finance their studies with debt or if they do, it is only to a very limited extent. This means that unlike the people in the Occupy protests, graduating Finns very often have little or no debt to speak of, so from that perspective as well I think what will happen is that the demands will not be met with on any level and that the silly movement of greedy students will gradually deflate when people hopefully realize how silly the bitching and moaning actually is. But that still leaves the question of what exactly is the value and use of university education today and how will it be repositioned as it is increasingly clear that the landscape has changed in such a drastic way that the old system is very much ill-positioned and the drift must be addressed in some way. Hopefully it will be done intelligently, but I'm not putting my money on the politicians being able to do anything good with it.

Here we go again... Finnish students feel that they are treated unjustly...

Oh dear lord, it's that time of the year again when the liberal arts students get their undies in a knot and decide that they're being treated very unfairly because they only get free education, free money, free healthcare, and to a fair degree the freedom to earn some money before the benefits begin to gradually get decreased as a function of income. A year or few back the cry was to adjust the allowance and housing subsidies upwards, and yes, to an extent there was a point in that: over a course of a decade or two the other social benefits given to poor had gone up but the students had been neglected. But that wrong was set right and the allowances were raised.

Now in the time of austerity measures and hell in the labor market the free-money loving (ok, who doesn't love free money...) students have decided that it is unfair that in some circumstances if they've earned too much, they are asked to return a part of the payouts handed to them in the form of allowances and housing subsidies (check out my post from September 2010 on financing studies for detailed calculations on how wealthy students actually can be before getting slowly cut off...). So a virtual mob of irrational (in a systemic sense, but on a personal level they are of course very rational for being greedy) students has showed up demanding various things. In fact the demands are not quite clear and in the good nature of Occupy Wall Street, it may have something to do with the fact that they are grumpy because they feel entitled to something and the universe has given them the middle finger. But unlike in the case of the Americans, in Finland the situation is ridiculously good for the students.

Apparently the demands are two-folded. Firstly the students feel that the limits for how much they can earn before they start losing benefits need to be raised. In practice the current situation is that you can live off of about 20k or so per year of income and benefits before you are cut completely off. To be honest, with that amount of money I don't frankly think that you should be subsidized. You're already given free healthcare from a dedicated foundation which focuses only on students and what is in practice a free university education. I think that after you are making 20k a year as a student, you can stand on your own two feet without the need for extra subsidies.

The second point which seems even more outrageous, and this seems to divide the students, is that they feel they are unjustly being punished in the form of taxes for working during the semester. I don't know who came up with this mind fart, but I don't think it needs any more countering. Of course it would be quite nice for me to abuse my unlimited (time-wise) student status and get my income tax-free for the rest of my life in Finland. Yeah...

Of course the Finnish student support system isn't bad, as can be easily proven by just looking at the amount of support and comparing it with other countries. That isn't to say that there aren't problems in the system. One valid point is that in certain cases students need to optimize their earnings so they don't go over certain threshold limits. In practice it is possible that by going over a limit by 200 euros on a yearly level will result in you having to pay back 500 euros. But again, this problem has nothing to do with the demands the students are making. This is merely a matter of having threshold levels instead of merely implementing a linear model of decreasing benefits, which I guess could be rather easily implemented.

Another problem is that the argument that life on merely the student allowance and housing subsidies is impossible in certain regions of Finland, e.g. Helsinki, where the housing costs are so high that only a small portion of the allowances are left to be disposed to non-housing related costs. If students actually take out a loan and/or do even a minimum amount of work on the side, the situation, however, isn't all that bad as can be seen from the calculations I referred to earlier. But if something must be done, I think it would potentially be ok to adjust the benefits at the lower end of the spectrum, i.e. give support to those who need it the most. But again, this is not what the students are demanding. They are demanding that they be rewarded for performing their studies.

Think about the logic of the demand a bit. It is essentially the same as saying that it is ok to cut social benefits from the lowest classes based on arbitrary criteria such as them having an alcohol problem and failing to show up for meetings but at the same time arguing that people who make, say 100k or more a year contribute in such great fashion to the economy and society that they should be given free money in the form of allowances and housing subsidies. That makes no sense at all and considering that people who are being educated at university levels in e.g. social sciences fail to see this flaw just begs the question of whether free education and all student subsidies should be cut altogether as apparently the years and years of state-subsidized education has still kept people at a, shall we say, intellectually handicapped level despite all efforts.

Sorry, I may have been quite harsh, but honestly I am disgusted by the blatant greed behind this.

Some more things to point out

• Stock markets aren't the economy. Getting the indices to go up slightly does not mean that it's clear sailing for politicians and that the problems have been solved. They shouldn't be used as proxies for that type of speculation.
• Regarding speculation, however, basically all of the trade done on stock exchanges is one form of speculation or another. There is plenty of discussion about whether investors are rational or not, but it is sufficient to say that when investing money, the investor must at least personally feel that the trade is good for him to proceed and ergo the equity is mis-priced. Due to the uncertainty in valuation, however, the positions are speculative by nature, regardless of the duration that the equity is held. Hence it is silly for politicians to think that "speculative" trading on exchanges should be curbed. And besides, short-term trading brings volume into the market and provides liquidity...
• ... however! There are certain things that should be kept an eye out for. When one leaves the realm of the real and tangible world and heads into the abstract world of derivatives, these are the more dangerous waters. It may be wise to look at derivatives trading where the derivatives aren't used to hedge real-world situations but are instead used as lottery tickets. Hence naked positions and complex chaining of derivatives may be something to look at regulating a bit more, at least until more about that world is understood.
• I'm also becoming more skeptical towards people whose jobs cannot be supposedly measured. Sure, we all live in a complex world, but you need to measure things to understand whether you're going in the right direction or not. Or whether you're even moving. Metrics can always be devised but creating good metrics may be difficult. But that should not mean that anyone should be allowed to hide behind the argument of "my job can't be measured because it is such a complex thing". If someone says that, then most likely they don't understand what it is that they are even doing.

Random thoughts

• We haven't even seen globalization yet; expats are still a minority and the inertia people face in relocating is still very large and a major part of international trade is done under the umbrella of big companies moving materials around and in accounts.
• What are often bemoaned as the failures of capitalism are in fact symptoms of corporatism and corruption, not capitalism itself.
• Capitalism shouldn't be unbounded and companies should be trusted to self-regulate; there are too many conflicts in interests, and besides, even in sports you always need someone to set and enforce the rules. I don't think there's an inconsistency here.

Evolution of technology

As technology builds on technology, an interesting proxy for seeing how different technological inventions relate to each other comes from looking at patents and their citations. The image above contains a visualization of all patents in USPTO patent classes 370, 375, 379 and 455 which have been cited more than 100 and have been granted between 1976 and 2006. So in essence that is the structure of the most central patents related to mobile phones. The coloring is arbitrary clustering of the patents, but what is interesting is that the green, blue, and brown clusters are in fact the 375, 455 and 379 classes respectively. The clusters at the bottom of the graph are essentially the patents from class 370.

Another interesting thing to do would be to create a time-lapse of the network's evolution over time as well as to dig deeper into the substance and see why the clusters exactly emerge. Also, using this data it will be interesting to see how exactly different companies fit into the picture.

Einaudi: Nuvole Bianche

Party in the CIA

VR: Redux

Ok, this is getting somewhat embarrassing already. Turns out I need to go to Kuopio in early November, so naturally I start figuring out what the best way to get there would be. And just to be fair, let's look at VR as an option. I punch in the trip details and I get the offers below. VR's ticket system does indeed seem to be very interesting as I understood that they have tried to imitate the airlines. One tip: if you imitate the airlines, at least do it properly so you'd maximize the profits. Screenshot below.

So, what we can see here is that VR has implemented three types of tickets. The "Perus" ticket, unlike the name might imply, is not only for the Perus Suomalaiset folk, but is the old 2nd class ticket, i.e. the regular train ticket. The "Joustava" ticket is the former business class ticket with added flexibility. And the new arrival is the "Ennakko" ticket for the early booker who can buy what is essentially a "Perus" ticket but with more limited options when it comes to making changes to the ticket. Now, why is the flexible economy ticket the most expensive? What's going on?

Additionally an interesting bit is in the trains themselves. I can leave Helsinki at 16:30 and arrive to Kuopio at 21:38 with the Pendolino and no need to switch trains. Or I can leave Helsinki at 17:12, make two train switches and arrive at Kuopio at the same 21:38 with the same Pendolino. The first two legs, however, are travelled with an InterCity 2 train and a regular, old train. So someone please tell me what the point of the Pendolino exercise was when the train that was supposed to improve travel times is actually operated at slower speeds than the older equipment.

Seriously, someone please put an end to this non-sense. Privatize the whole company as it appears that the government is impotent when it comes to making what is fundamentally a for-profit company work.

Edit: As a funny additional thing to notice is that the prices above are student prices. Blue1, a Finnish airline, is offering to fly me to Kuopio and back again for roughly the same amount of money that it would cost to get the Joustava student tickets. Oh, and the Blue1 tickets aren't student discounted...

Something wrong in the land of VR

Anyone who's been a customer of VR (Valtion Rautatiet, the Finnish nationalized railway monopoly) in the past few years can fairly easily attest to the fact that the company has gone to hell. The most recent episode has been their failure in implementing a new IT system that has reached epic proportions as of late. But let's start at the beginning...

Operating a railway company isn't really rocket science. There are multiple facets to it, but let's stick to the transportation of people from point A to point B as that is the service that I mainly use. From my perspective I pay the company a certain amount of money so that it gets me from one geographic location to another in a specific temporal window. I don't care what the method is exactly, but I imagine that teleportation would revolutionize this business thanks to the radical reduction of time of travel. But anyway, my train trips consist of essentially two fundamental components: ticket procurement and the actual transport. On both dimensions VR has been fumbling with the ball.

Starting with the actual transport, to my recollection VR was decently good at operating its trains within the schedules that they had a decade or so ago. But over the past few winters, the quality has deteriorated. I mainly use the Helsinki-Turku track and more often then not jump off at the Salo station roughly three fourths from Helsinki to Turku. The travel time is typically around an hour and 25 minutes. It is not uncommon for the train to be 50 minutes behind schedule on a trip like that, which already brings it closer to 60% behind schedule. And that is when the train actually materializes and gets on its way. It's not also entirely uncommon for trains to not even show up, which leads us to another problem directly related to the business of transporting me from A to B...

Communication is in essence very much irrelevant as long as you provide me exactly the service that you promised and I can trust you to perform. If I can look at the schedule and platform information and trust that it is true, I don't really need other forms of communication with the operator. But when a train fails to materialize, there is a problem. VR has been getting the stick as of late for its inability to transparently communicate situations to the customers. It's normal that every once in a while something happens and causes problems. But then you should openly communicate what the situation is, what is being done about it and most importantly what is the impact that I have to endure. If you tell me that the train broke down and it will take 45 minutes to arrange another train, that is fine. I can then use the time to go do something else; purchase a magazine or get a beer at the station. But when you don't tell me what is going on, I have to work with the assumption that a train might materialize at any moment of time and hence I can't do anything else asides from waiting next to the track. More annoyingly there have been some occasions in which they have communicated a delay of e.g. 20 minutes. In one case I decided to pop by a store at the station and get a soft drink, only to return less than 10 minutes later to barely catch the train which had indeed showed up and was about to leave only 10 minutes into the 20 minutes given. I understand that these two demands of communication, if interpreted at face value, lead to a situation where the company will tell you every three minutes that the train will be three more minutes late ad infinitum. But if you actually think about it, VR should be an expert on operating a train network and hence one would assume that they would have the ability to give educated estimates on how long it will take to fix something. I've lived in Helsinki now for eight or so years and I'm able to give fairly good estimates on how long it will take to get from A to B with public transport at a certain time of day, assuming that A and B are within the areas I often go to. So VR shouldn't have a problem assessing how long it will realistically take to rectify the situation.

Related to the operation of the train network, VR has also fumbled with the procurement of new vehicles. They purchased a number of Pendolino trains, but those have been nothing but a source of grief ever since they started operating them. On the Helsinki-Salo route the Pendolino is only 5 minutes faster than the regular trains, and even that is only due to the fact that the Pendolino skips one stop on the way. Which raises the question of why even operate the Pendolino on that segment, since the Helsinki-Turku journey is not any faster with it. It has its uses on the longer trips to up north which actually do receive a fair amount of time savings due to the increased speeds... That is when the Pendolino is working. It appears that the train is unable to function properly when it sees snow. Also, it appears that VR is having its fair share of trouble in general from the weather phenomenon known as winter. Winters in Finland aren't anything new, so it is somewhat amazing that a "wrong" type of snow can severe the operations of a company that was founded in 1862 and most likely does know that winters occasionally happen.

Then onto the procurement of tickets. I absolutely hate to interface with humans in simple transactions such as purchasing tickets. Airlines have done a brilliant job of ensuring that these days I can even check in via a kiosk or even online with my phone at best and not have to endure the impotence of humans behind the counter. VR has, amazingly enough, had a fairly functional online ticket system from which I could send tickets to my phone or print them out and not have to endure additional pain. Unfortunately as of late I've been put into a situation where I receive free (as in beer) train tickets. Unfortunately I can only get the tickets by queueing at the station and talking to the lady behind the plexiglass. Standing in the queue today got me somewhat annoyed and I started measuring times. The five people on front of me in line took over 35 minutes to be served. That is 7 minutes per person, on average. There is no reason why it should take this long. If you use the kiosks (which aren't, by the way, working as of now due to VR botching up its IT system) buying a ticket typically takes you 30-60 seconds. It shouldn't take much more to tell a person behind a plexiglass to do the same. So that leads me to think that a) the system that the lady behind the plexiglass uses is too complicated or slow or b) the lady behind the plexiglass is too incompetent and slow. That normally wouldn't really bother me as I would never interact with her, but due to these "free" tickets I now must interact with her. Ultimately the problem should sort itself out as companies tend to make things more efficient over time to save money and increase revenue and it appears that the lady behind the plexiglass is a severe bottleneck. So you either automate her or lay her off and replace her with a more productive individual, who might be able to reduce the transaction time from 7 minutes to something a bit more decent. But, in the case of VR this won't happen because...

... VR is in fact a state-owned monopoly. Because of this status, VR will of course be a responsible employer and instead of having to be accountable to its private shareholders and make as much profit as possible, it will attempt to serve the "public interest" (see previous blog entry) better and offer safe employment and whatnot. And because of the monopoly, there is not competitive pressure to keep VR improving itself. In fact, the only pressure comes from VR's incompetence and the fact that at some point people will just decide that it's a better idea to use a car rather than a train to go from A to B. In fact, factoring in the delays and incompetent people, airplanes may actually start being significantly faster on domestic trips... And at best they are also cheaper already when going to e.g. Lapland.

Recently VR has decided that it wants to be an airline. Or at least use similar pricing systems. That should be a relatively positive note for anyone who has a degree in applied mathematics as you've just received another potential employer who will now employ you to tweak the algorithms ad infinitum. The rationale for this is of course quite clear: certain trains are especially popular. Like the 5 PM train out of Helsinki to Turku. This is always very full and unless you've reserved a ticket in advance, chances are that you'll get to stand or sit in the corridors. At the same time there are routes which are operated with half-empty trains, possibly due to the fact that VR needs to perform a function that is in the public interest and hence operate routes at times which may at best be uneconomical. So naturally VR wants a system to encourage people who can travel at off-peak times to use those trains and then charge significantly more from people who want to travel at peak times. Nothing wrong with that per se. The issue I have with this is that because it is a state-owned company and technically looks to do the whole "public good" thing, then I have an issue with the pricing scheme. People who are willing to pay more do not get preferential treatment in Finnish public healthcare and neither should that be the case with VR, if we strictly interpret it. If you want to act like a profit-seeking entity and leverage these types of approaches, then I feel that we should inflict some competitive pressure on VR as well by opening the railway system up for other companies as well. You shouldn't be able to cherry-pick in this way.

However, this brilliant plan to switch over to dynamic pricing models and new IT systems in fact failed very visibly. The system VR bought turned out to not scale, meaning that the whole ticket system has been in a state of havoc as of late with the primary companion, our old friend Accenture, coming out into the public media and giving statements along the lines of "We have no idea what is going on." So, again the plague of the public sector, i.e. the incompetence of playing the role of customer in IT projects, has hit again. To be fair, many private sector companies also fail in these types of large operations, but fortunately then they feel the whole impact themselves. With the case of government-owned monopolies, it's the tax-payer who ultimately foots the bill for this type of ass-hattery. I wouldn't say it's so much a problem with Accenture as it is with VR. Accenture is a profit-seeking company which of course lies and cheats in the offers it makes and ultimately churns out endless amounts of billable hours. That is precisely why you want to be very much on top of things and keep your consultants on a very tight leash if you're the customer. Otherwise they will bend you over the table and let you have it. Additionally, what kind of moron doesn't stress-test a system thoroughly, and more importantly what kind of moron does a complete roll-out of a new system all at the same time? If there's one thing I've learned about IT systems, it's that you want to do rolling launches where you start with updates to certain parts and see how it goes from there. At any point of time if things go wrong, you immediately revert to the old system to contain and mitigate the impact of your incompetence. But how does the super-team of VR and Accenture go about it? Yes, in the same way as our other old friend, Danske Bank... Hilarity ensues.

I guess I could continue onwards with this, but as one final note, I truly enjoy the pain that the lady behind the plexiglass inflicts on me. After waiting for over 35 minutes, she tells me that the ticket voucher I have from the Ministry of Labor is not valid. It has been made invalid overnight with no type of grace period. Then when I decide to pay with actual money, she is unable to comprehend a simple statement such as "1 student ticket to the 7 AM train on next Monday from Salo to Helsinki". Then when she finally is able to produce the ticket and I tell her to just give it to me, she insists on printing receipts and then placing everything in a paper sleeve before giving the pile of paper to me. Which is rather interesting as VR brands itself as a green company. I merely want the ticket and nothing else: why do you insist on throwing so much paper at me which I anyway will throw away...

The Corporation and The Public Good

Just a quick note. I put the documentary film named The Corporation on and have been watching it out of the corner of my eye. I've seen it before, so essentially I'm just passing time and know that it is very much anti-corporation in its agenda. But one thing that jumped up was in the first part of the film how they clearly articulate that the primary purpose and responsibility of a company is to create profit for its shareholders. The continue by contrasting this to the public good by stating that profits surpass even public good in the priorities of a corporation.

But, what is public good? Can it be quantified or measured? What generates more public good and what less? If Finland supports the bailout of Greece, does that create public good for the Greek and does it reduce the public good for the Finns? Is it a net positive or net negative change? With a brief amount of thinking, I tend to feel that defining public good is very problematic. If public good as a concept was clear and everyone could subscribe to it, very many problems would be solved. So in this context I think contrasting the profit-driven nature of companies with something as hazy as the "public good" is somewhat problematic. Especially when you consider at the core what companies do.

Companies are profit-driven by nature and by legal requirements and obligations to its shareholders. Of course companies can engage in many nasty red ocean strategy tricks and be very cutthroat. But at the end of the day the company must provide a good or a service to a person or group who is willing to pay money for it. If a company is unable to perform this, it will soon go out of business. So, if a company produces a good or a service for an individual who buys it and which results in the decrease of "public good", is it the company's fault or the customer's? I don't think it's the TV network's fault that TV is full of reality shows: I think it's us as the consumers who are to blame since we (or at least some of you) seem to want to watch them. But maybe the customer is tricked and doesn't know better. Maybe the state should look out for the "public good" and tell the individual that reality TV in fact decreases "public good"? But I'm not sure that it does. The concept of "public good" is most likely very much tied to the context, the values of the perceiver, and whatnot. So more often than not an elite, typically a political one, is imposing their concept of "public good" upon me. Fortunately, at least in Finland, it is often enough the case that the results aren't significantly net negative and occasionally they might be net positive so that I don't have to storm to the streets.

The environment is often considered important. It is argued that it is in the interest of everyone to reduce pollution and save the environment. I guess at the end of the day the planet itself doesn't really care what happens to it as it will always survive in one form or another. Humans, however, may not if we pollute the planet we inhabit to an extent where life becomes impossible. So from the perspective of humanity, preserving the environment in a state that allows us to survive is very much net positive. I think nobody contests that. But how to get there? Recently nuclear power has been decided to be opposed to the "public good". The people who want to further "public good" have instead seemed to decide that fossil fuel based energy production methods are a better way to go, or at least less net negative than nuclear power. But strangely enough there is also a healthy amount of literature suggesting that nuclear is in fact much better than coal, oil, or gas. In this case, again, putting some metrics down and trying to assess via those which route produces more "public good" might offer some more support on decisions. Perhaps a structured way of defining "public good" in this context would be warranted. Unfortunately I haven't seen this being done (then again, I haven't looked that much, so please send me links to articles if you know of anything interesting). So far my limited understanding is based on following the research of a friend of mine who seems to take a relative engineering view of the problem and writes pieces which appear quite transparent and coherent. And based on that I think that while nuclear may not be the ideal way to produce power, it creates more "public good" than the alternative of fossil fuels (based on direct deaths, CO2 emissions, cost, ...).

Linking back to the original point, as it's very much unclear in the power discourse what is in the interest of the public, declaring that companies are bad for putting profits ahead of the "public good" seems somewhat childish, especially when it seems that very often these two in fact appear to correlate. Especially when you consider the alternative proposed, i.e. public ownership. For some strange reason a strong government tends to historically lead to increased centralization of power and hey, let's face it, nothing bad has ever come out of that. No government has ever oppressed its citizens. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's look at the shades of gray a bit more, shall we?

Stockholm Half Marathon 2011

Well, the first and most likely last half marathon of this season is over and what can I say... The Swedes definitely know how to arrange an event. The half marathon in Stockholm was in just about every way better than its Finnish counterparts, and not least because I've managed to run my best times there. Everything just seems to work there and the overall atmosphere was amazing.

Related to my last entry about measurements, I guess it's only good to present some measurements from this exercise as well. My target time was 2h00m00s (my previous time from Stockholm was 2h00m21s, or something thereabout). This means 7200 seconds or 341.26 seconds per kilometer (or 5m41.26s) for 21.098 kilometers. And the result? 1h57m36s according to my measurements (the official time was 2s better, but as I took measurements with my own watch and the kilometer times are based on those, I'll just use the 36s one for the review of the run).

The chart below is probably the most relevant one, considering that I wasn't able to get my heart rates due to some technical glitches. The diagram shows the per kilometer deviations from the target time and the red line shows the average deviation from the target per kilometer over the entire run. The biggest thing to note is the profile of the diagram, which I think has slightly improved when compared to previous events. My main sin, as shared with so many other runners as well, is starting too fast and then  tiring out when the going gets real. The positive bit is that I was able to keep the initial pace fairly well intact and at no point did I entirely collapse.

This time I was able to find the two hour pace runner and tagged along for the first eight kilometers. This resulted in the fairly accurate times for the first four kilometers after which the pace runners in fact sped up a bit. The seven kilometer blip is due to a drinking station hassle. The pace keepers started slowing down a bit at around eight kilometers to apparently adjust the pace back to the two hour target, but considering the relatively good feeling I continued going at my own pace and decided that as long as the pace runners don't catch me, I'll be very well off in respect to my target.

One thing that separates Stockholm from Helsinki is that the amount of entertainment along the course is significantly higher. I didn't keep exact count, but I think there were five or so DJs spread along the course and two or three live orchestras playing music. This was in fact very helpful in keeping up the pace and positive mood during the mid part of the event. During the 18th kilometer my run started dragging a bit as can be seen from the diagram. It turns out, however, that Prodigy's latest album is a very decent approach to keeping the pace at least somewhat reasonable after switching to defensive running and changing the focus from running as quickly as possible to ensuring that the original target is at least met. And of course the fact that the last kilometer or two of the track were surrounded by people cheering you on helped as well. Overall the run was surprisingly enjoyable, especially when compared to the HCR'10 and Espoo Rantamaraton fiascos of last year.

Finally, here are some of the official statistics from the organizers for my run:

Split	time	diff	min/km	km/h	place
5K	0.28.17	28.17	05.40	10.61	5869
10K	0.55.18	27.01	05.25	11.10	5280
15K	1.21.42	26.24	05.17	11.37	4843
20K	1.51.06	29.24	05.53	10.20	4937
Finish	1.57.34	06.28	05.54	10.18	5086

Overall there were about 10500 or so runners, so in that respect I'm also relatively satisfied that I finished in good mid-range territory ranking-wise. The next steps from here will be to try to solidify my running and try to be able to consistently run sub-2 hour times. I don't hold any serious expectations of being able to improve my time too drastically and don't really even hold that as a priority. For the rest of the winter I think my focus will be on learning how to swim. Additionally a classmate of mine also suggested taking up Savate, which I at least tentatively agreed to. So, essentially the goals for next year will most likely be to run at least one half-marathon with a target time of less than two hours (ideally matching 1h57m34s or faster) and to complete a sprint triathlon with no specific other target (if I'm not able to find a suitable triathlon from Finland to try, then I'll just test out the triathlon by myself to see how that feels). It may be also reasonable to revisit these targets early next year to see what the feeling then is and possibly revise them as needed, depending on e.g. how the swimming goes.

But for now I'm just going to kick back for a moment and try to get my legs back into shape again.