Only slightly bent

Over here at the 60th latitude degree, light is in short supply during the winter months. The sun has now made a comeback to this corner of the world, something it luckily does every year around these times.

Now it’s up there from 6:45am to a little after 8pm – by June, we’ll get almost three additional hours at each end and the near-endless day. (I would trade the endless day to a steady year-round supply of sunshine any day, but it’s not bad either)

The following quote from Sam Moon comes to mind:

We are the souls who see beneath the surface of this rough sea called life and even though we are continuously battered by big waves and swirling surf, we always find the beauty and tranquility when all is still and the sun graces us with it’s warmth

Welcome back, Sun! I missed you.

Every now and then one comes across to additional stories on how we – we being the human race – are really damn good at destroying our planet. I know the subject isn’t exactly new and what do you know, the human race is still alive. But looking at the big picture, we’re not on a good road.

Let’s see. Thanks to global warming, we’re losing the ice caps and it’s going to be pretty darn warm in general also. The sea is already turning into a huge dumpster for non-degradeable waste like plastics and now we’re gonna lose the coral reefs too, huh? Of course, the fate of crucial fish stocks around the planet hangs on by a thin thread, too – and in some places they’re already gone, possibly irreversably. The list of humankinds destructive effect on the environment is a depressingly long one.

And we haven’t taken too much time to “accomplish” all of this either. It took some hundreds of years to deforest most of Europe, but thanks to industralization, the pace of destruction has been much greater in the past hundred or so years. Do we as a species even deserve to survive? I think there is enough good in the human race for us to deserve survival. At this rate, the chances of that don’t look so great. Possibly luckily (or then not, if we turn to coal) for the environment, we’re fast reaching the point of peak oil production, which should force us to rethink quite a few things – renewable energy sources, among other things. I can recommend one book on this subject: The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg; it will give you a good idea of the role oil plays in the modern world and all the current and forthcoming ugly implications. I think this has a very fitting cover image.

Now the latest large-scale warning comes from Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. It states that two thirds of the worlds ecosystems have been polluted overexploited in the past 50 years alone. The bottom line comes from this quote:

Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

If we already had the technology to terraform other planets, we would already be close to living like swarms of locusts – consuming natural resources of a planet and then moving on to the next one. Which would not exactly be a great thing.

For now, however, we’re destroying our only home. Pretty smart, huh?

Why can’t [new] technology just work?

Take my Series 60 phone, for example. When it was new, it worked mostly fine. Then slowly over time I’ve been getting weird errors that are not critical but just annoying. And it’s not even about installing software; I haven’t installed anything new for months. It is just sort of degenerating. Examples:

• The sound in the boot-up animation works properly perhaps once in every 30 boots. Thus the phone reminds me of its imperfections every time I turn it on. Nice.
• Sometimes the personalized ringtones I’ve set for some people work. Sometimes they don’t.
• The phone might have been sitting on the desk for hours, doing nothing. Or so I think. Then when I pick it up, I notice it has been busy rebooting itself and all my useful applications have been closed.
• At completely random times, it says “Error! App closed Main” even without any applications open. No operations are affected by this seemingly serious error message.
• Sometimes I get alarms from already-deleted calendar events. Sometimes I don’t.

The older I get, the more I find out that the majority of the world is constructed in a quite haphazard manner. It’s kind of scary and one of the major reasons why I have serious doubts about ever getting into the airline, nuclear or other really critical systems business. I may not want to find out what kind of systems make these run. Complexity beyond what we can understand can lead to some disastrous consequences, as pointed out by James Chiles in his book Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology. (Highly recommended reading, btw. I might write a review of this one of these days even if it’s been years since I read it.)

But back to the phone – despite the shortcomings and bugs, I would not change back to my old phone. It works well enough and the new features it offers are great. But I would like it if it, along with many other technological innovations, worked really well. Along with, say, my toaster. Although I suppose for my Windows OS to be working well is hoping for too much

Somebody’s been satisficing. Again.

Another bedside book finished: Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. The goal of the book, as I understood it, was to bring some sense to the way we think about security. It does this job quite well. So well that this should be mandatory reading for everyone and, in particular, some post-9/11 security “experts”.

Schneier introduces a simple five-step process in analyzing the effectiveness and value of any security measure:

• Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect?
• Step 2: What are the risks against these threats?
• Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate the risks?
• Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause?
• Step 5: What trade-offs does the security solution require?

Answering these simple questions requires some knowledge about the system, attacks and countermeasures, but can provide extremely useful results. Several examples from a wide range of subjects – such as military action against terrorism, home burglar alarms, face scanning systems and credit card profiling systems – are analyzed in the book using this five-step process with sometimes surprising results.

Being a post-9/11 book, terrorism is naturally one major subject. Schneier criticizes openly many of the “security” measures undertaken and providers solid reasoning to back up the critizism. While I guess we all know that many security measures are theater more than a real security-enhancing measure, it’s enlightening to see how horrible some solutions really are. Schneier also states out loud the fact about terrorism which many people (especially Americans) are extremely reluctant to acknowledge:

The best way to reduce terrorism is to solve the underlying socioeconomic and geopolitical problems that cause it to arise in the first place.

Besides terrorism, there are many practical examples about security trade-offs, including a good reminder: while security is always a trade-off, the counterpart being traded off is not always privacy or liberty as some people would like us to believe. Another thing that I found interesting is that satisficing is also at work in the security field: people stop the process of finding good security measures as soon as they find one system that works. No time or effort is spent to find the best systems.

So how good is the book? Overall, I would give it 4 out of 5. For (true) experts in security, it probably does not contain any significant new information. For the rest of us, it provides a very good foundation of analyzing security in various arenas.

First we had IQ for measuring your intelligence. Then came EQ for emotional intelligence. Some people also talk about SQ for spiritual intelligence, although that was really stretching it if you ask me. Now the newest member makes a little bit more sense again – CQ or Cultural Intelligence. This was, AFAIK, first described/suggested first by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski. I discovered it in the October 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review. (As an overall disclaimer, I do think reducing any aspect of intelligence – be it intellectual, emotional, spiritual or cultural – to a single number or a few roles & profiles is oversimplifying things greatly, but that’s sometimes unavoidable. As even oversimplification can still be useful, we’ll leave that discussion aside.)

The article starts off with a description of an HSBC ad where they show a grasshopper and the message “USA – Pest. China – Pet. Northern Thailand – Appetizer”, which drives the point of cultural differences home in a simple way.

I’m not going to explain all the points here (for that, go read the article or click on the link above for a brief explanation), but Earley and Mosakowski define cultural intelligence as follows:

Cultural intelligence: an outsider’s seemingly naturaly ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures the way that person’s compatriots would.

Sounds nice and probably correct enough. But then later in the article they have a questionnaire for diagnosing your cultural intelligence. It provides some good points to think about, but I think there is no way an ability like this to be diagnosed with a written test. No way. Also listed are some CQ profiles where most managers supposedly fit (to one or more profile). I could definately recognize myself in more than one profile.

When talking about enhancing your CQ abilities, which the authors think is possible (and I agree), they state something weird: “Unlike other aspects of personality, cultural intelligence can be developed …”. Umm, excuse me? You’re saying other personality aspects cannot be developed? That is where I strongly disagree. Is it easy to develop an aspect of your personality? Of course not. But is it possible? You bet it is. The process of developing ones CQ also sounds too easy in a sense. The authors twice use this example: when one masters simple activities like a greeting or getting a coffee from the local shopkeeper, they can move to more demanding activities such as giving an employee a performance appraisal. Oh really? Just like that, huh? Heck, by those standards I would be ready to give performance appraisals to, for example, Italians. Which I most certainly am not ready to do. There is a pretty darn big gap between the mentioned activities.

Overall, I would still call this “cultural intelligence” just tacit or explicit cultural knowledge with proper application. So while I agree that the subject is extremely important, I’m not so sure I would have branded another xQ-term for it. But who knows, maybe it helps in raising awareness of cultural differences, which would certainly be a good thing. Too many people still equate different to dangerous or at least weird and “wrong”, whereas different could be just that – different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

Despite some shortcomings, this was a very interesting article. If you have access to HBR (like via EBSCO, for example), make sure you check it out. There also seems to be a book by one of the authors, Christopher Earley, from 2003 called Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions across Cultures, which I have not yet read. I hope this issue of cultural differences and acting accordingly is kept/taken into active discussions in corporations around the world. But I also hope the “CQ” and the related scoring mechanisms get dropped. Finally, I wholeheartedly agree with the authors’ following statement:

Those who fully embody the habits and norms of their native culture may be the most alien when they enter a culture not their own. Sometimes, people who are somewhat detached from their own culture can more easily adopt the mores and even the body language of an unfamiliar host. They’re used to being observers and making a conscious effort to fit in.

By the way, properly prepared, crickets and grasshoppers are actually quite tasty. As are Zophobas morio (aka superworms).

Photo by freefoto.com

Every now and then someone is saying that through advances in m-commerce and related things, mobile phones will soon replace our wallets. The reality is that the field is developing relatively slowly and good, usable solutions are few and far between.

Right now, and for the foreseeable future, m-commerce is not about replacing wallets, it’s about a more convenient payment method. And maybe a bus ticket. But think about everything that you may have in your wallet:

• Bank credit and debit cards
• Public transportation card/tickets
• Driver’s license
• Company, student and other ID cards
• Company access card
• Store loyalty & discount cards
• Store credit cards
• Organ donation / blood group info cards
• Frequent flier cards
• Hotel, car rental, gym and other chain membership cards
• Health and other insurance cards
• Business cards
• Receipts
• Discount coupons
• … and so on

Now what are the chances you’ll get all that crammed into a phone anytime soon? Pretty slim. Given all the technological challenges and perhaps more importantly, (un)co-operative tactics of all the stakeholders, I don’t see a viable solution emerging in the next 10 years or so. In theory the potential for one-device-for-all-this-and-more is there, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. So in the interest of sticking with what’s relevant now, let’s change the conversation. Let’s stop all this talk about replacing our wallets and start talking about the real benefits of m-commerce.

Photo by freefoto.com