LED flashlights: Lessons learn from an early adopter

I've been buying LED flashlights for a couple of years now. I made a mistake or two along the way and thought you might be able to benefit by my experience.

First: it doesn't make any difference how many lumens you have if you can't afford the batteries to generate them. I bought my lovely wife a Frontgate "500 lumen" model that came with free imprinting of one's name ("Kate!") Maybe it really was putting out 500 lumens (one of our neighbors said that they thought it was a motorcycle coming down the street), but the original 4 CR123A photo lithium lasted probably 10 days or two weeks, used probably 30-40 minutes per day.

The price to replace them: $6.49 each, retail, and it takes 4 to run the thing. You can get them for $1 each or so, online, but, I thought, why not use rechargeable ones?

I tried this, but the only 'RCR123A' batteries I could find are made by Tenergy, and they have some unfortunate characteristics for use in flashlights. They go out without warning. I found this out being 40 minutes away from home on a walk one night, and the flashlight just went dark with 2 seconds warning.

It turns out that 131 lumens is plenty. I ordered a Maglite rated at this that uses 3 D cells and it's fine for our dark nights. The instructions say "don't use rechargeable batteries" and to that I say "bah!"

I tried our eneloops, which are AA batteries that come with a D-sized shell. This didn't work to start with, but I looked at the cap end of the flashlight that connects to the bottom of the battery. It was too wide for the little AA eneloop, so I stuck in a square of aluminum foil and voila! These batteries work fine in this flashlight, and get dim slowly rather than cutting off quickly and leaving you in the dark.

Evidence cited in support of open offices ... but is it true?

I just today read a University of Michigan Study from 2000 that concludes that "radical collocation" type open offices show significant productivity benefits over more private workspaces.

Maybe, but I have some questions about this study that may require another look at the results:

1. There was no control group. There were six groups studied, but none of the study groups were using "closed" offices. The study groups' results were scored against an existing corporate baseline of productivity.
2. The productivity gain, while impressive, is within range of the 10 to 1 difference that's been measured in the literature repeatedly. This means that the 4x improvement could easily have been due to the particular programmers chosen rather than the office environment's effects as cited.
3. Finally, there's the Hawthorne effect! All groups knew they were being studied, which has been shown repeatedly to increase productivity no matter what details of changes in the environment are made!

Does anyone know of a controlled study of both kinds of offices compared against each other with no change other than the office space styles between groups? Or of a similar study of 'closed' offices against baseline data collected from 'open' offices?

Maybe 'radical collaboration' does work better, but the Michigan study does not prove the point to my satisfaction. 

You thought your interview schedule was a challenge?

A couple of coworkers have been doing enough interviews of prospective candidates to be getting a bit burned out on the process. Here's one that might put their challenges in perspective:

I, uh, LOLed at this one. This is, of course, Pearls Before Swine. It's even available in daily newspapers for us Old People. :-)

Why do we allow a storm to bring the market down?

Since the rise of electronic trading, the stock and related markets seem to me to be nearly identical to other network services. Amazon.com and Google do not allow a single weather event or earthquake or whatever to disrupt normal operations.

The standard way of doing this is to set up distributed data centers in geographically stable but widely separated places. Why can't we have this for our markets as well?

 I speculate that it may be the illusion that the fading market makers have that their personal involvement is required for the functioning of the markets. One official was quoted "we could have opened the electronic trading markets but didn't want to endanger our employees who have to be present to run it." Clearly if you have one data center in New Jersey, one in Chicago, one in Seattle and one in Hawaii this won't happen.

Yes, you will lose the femtosecond response you're getting from being right next to the New York data center, but so will everyone else. Until power is restored, anyway. (I enjoyed Scott Patterson's book Dark Pools on the rise of electronic trading, which got me thinking about this.)

Comments please!

Tamiflu apparently doesn't work after all ...

Here's a disturbing video on selection bias in the publication of medical results. The economic incentive to publish only positive results has clearly overwhelmed the regulatory and public outrage response up to this point, but clearly we're better off as a society if we cease to fool ourselves about drugs or anything else. Comments?

Favorite Recent Fiction: Charles Stross

I promised a while ago now to add recommended fiction in the wake of the nonfiction list I posted. I couldn't bring myself to mash all my favorites together so I am going to take them author by author.

First up is Charles Stross, who's produced three of my favorite recent titles:

Singularity Sky: This one is a space opera with an unusual blend: a clashing of cultures (libertarian from Earth vs. neo-Soviet style New Republic), a clash of nature vs humans, nature having produced the Eschaton, which has distributed humans across the cosmos and left an obelisk on each world warning humans not to mess with the timeline ... and of course a love story. This one just floored me, even my second time through it. But some people I've recommended it to put it down, probably too soon. If you have trouble with the early sections please do hang with it until Rachel appears and you'll be rewarded.

Iron Sunrise is the sequel to Singularity Sky and enjoyable, but didn't grab me as intensely as the others I mention here.

Halting State: since I'm an (often) contract computer programmer, the prologue captured me. It's a fake email to 'Nigel McDonald' about a job offer for him and purports to be from an AI that knows "you'll never be promoted because your slimy boss is boffing that cute colleague of yours" etc., etc.

After that it tells the story of a very strange crime that occurs inside a computer game. Somebody at the game company calls the local (Edinburgh) cops and Sue, the local 'heterosexually challenged' sergeant responds. Elaine is a fraud investigator for the insurance company, Jack a ... contract computer programmer hired by Elaine's company for technical assistance in getting to the bottom of things.

The story is told in second person from the point of these three characters, and I found it just riveting! It's a mystery/thriller with extra plot elements (a game called Spooks that turns out to be not really just a game, backstories for all three characters that resonate ..) ... I "couldn't put it down" (though I experienced it as an audiobook, described elsewhere in this blog ...)

Rule 34: This is the sequel to Halting State, bringing back Sue and her boss Liz and some other minor characters from that book. Also added is Anwar, a petty criminal and schemer whose schemes go consistently awry, and the Toymaker, a psychopathic employee of a global shadowy corporation who has discovered ... that psychopaths make good operatives. This one is darker, more violent, sick in places ... and I just loved it! Not for the squeamish, though.

I have read one other of Stross's books, Accelerando, which tells me that I should stick with the audiobook format for fiction. I first read this book, since there was no audiobook yet ... and it didn't much grab me. In fact I didn't really remember much of it after a year. But recently the audiobook was released and I tried it and wow! It's still not quite as compelling for me as the three favorites liste above, but I just skim so much in reading and get to / have to sit and pay attention to the audiobook that I got so much more out of in this format!

Once again, audible.com is the place for audiobooks!

Next up: Lois McMaster Bujold (and Miles Vorkosigan!)

Outstanding Nonfiction 2012 (and a few older)

Here are a batch of the best nonfiction I've read recently (as well as a few from previous years).

Five stars = 'stunning, not to be missed'; four stars = 'excellent.'

Enjoy!

Title	Author	Stars	Comment
The Wild Life Of Our Bodies	Rob Dunn	*****	Therapeutic use of hookworms, vertical farming, much more
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion	Johnathan Haidt	*****	Genetic differences in Liberals and Conservatives, much more
Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahnemann	*****	How we mostly use heuristics for thinking and what to do when they don't work
Predictably Irrational	Dan Ariely	****	The power of Free to befuddle us, among many other things
Too Big to Fail	Andrew Ross Sorkin	*****	The Financial Crisis as a page-turner (and later an HBO movie)
Debunking Economics	Steve Keen	*****	See my full post on this one here.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World	Liaquat Ahamed	****	The guys in charge the last time this happened (they didn't do as well)
All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis	Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera	*****	Smart guys (Goldman Sachs) and dumb guys (Merrill Lynch) during the financial meltdown
The Smartest Guys in the Room	Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind	*****	Enron and its amazing hubris and wild cast of characters
Paper Promises: Debt, Money and the New World Order	Philip Coggan	****	The history of financial crises past, and it's a long one
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	*****	If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	*****	... like a decline in housing prices ...
Fringeology	Steve Vulk	****	If we can't explain it, what do we say to ourselves?

A call for young computer scientists to help fix economics

I read this astonishing book a couple of weeks ago:

Steve Keen is a "post-Keynesian" (i.e. dissident) economist; the world is mostly run by economists who  promote the "neoclassical" model.

The problems with the neoclassical model are several:

• It does not represent such fundamentals as money, debt or banks
• It doesn't use sophisticated enough math to represent the forces in play in the actual economy
• It assumes reversion to "equilibrium" which of course the actual economy does not

The neoclassical economists control most academic departments and serve in most high government positions. (U.S chairman of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both advocates of the neoclassical theory, for example).

Dr. Keen and his dissident colleagues are working to overthrow the neoclassical model with representations of the economy that better represent the actual world economy. They've made a good start on this; the graph of the model in this book against the graph of the actual economy is a close match.

But to continue the work they need young Ph.D students who understand math and computer science well enough to extend these software-based models to even better accuracy and usefulness.

I emailed Dr. Keen a couple of days ago; he responded that he and his colleagues are accepting applications for students. Dr. Keen lives in Australia, but there's a U.S. conference coming up the end of September with all the relevant players:

http://www.internationalpostkeynesianconference.org/

Unfortunately I didn't find out about the conference until the registration deadline of September 1 was already here. But if this post or the book at all light you up the way they did me, you could get in touch with Dr. Keen at "debunking at gmail dot com" and/or get ahold of the conference proceedings when they are published and track down other post-Keynesians from that source.

You can also download and try a version of the model.

Think about it! We don't tolerate 19th-century physics or 19th-century biology; especially after its abject failure the last 5 years why do we tolerate 19th-century economics? 

Recruiting costs of an open office plan: an anecdote

Since Facebook emerged to take over the world, many startups have emulated its open office plan, looking something like this:

However this trend got started, a little reflection can show some costs associated with it. How does a knowledge worker concentrate in a wide-open room like this, especially when conversations are going on? Doesn't productivity have to suffer?

I am normally an extrovert, but I do strongly prefer at least a modicum of privacy in my workspace. I don't know how prevalent my view is, but an experience I had last night makes me think some introverts may agree with me.

I attended a networking event at the fascinating startup climate.com, whose Seattle office is lovely but wide open with apparently no private space except a conference room. I mentioned my concern to the hosts. They responded respectfully, but obviously aren't in a position to rearrange the office after just getting it set up in February. Especially if I'm the only one whining about the issue.

I had a conversation with a fellow potential recruit who shares my view of this office layout saying, "it's lovely but our [less attractive] office is a quieter and nicer place to work." I suggested that he join me in emphasizing this to our hosts but he declined, not wanting to "come in and tell them how to arrange their office." Instead he left quietly and will probably stay at his current job rather than considering climate.com.

Maybe there are a lot of introverts who feel the same way; how would we know? Is there any measurement being done of the effectiveness of these recruiting events? I thought the company looked very attractive and interesting place to work, but ...

What would I do if I were in charge at climate.com? For starts, I'd allow/encourage any sort of shogi screen or other barrier between workspaces. I'd also allow anybody sensitive to the issue to work remotely up to about 1/2 the time, and in the meantime be looking for a longer term strategy of moving to or transforming the current space into one giving workers more privacy.

I don't think the definitive study on office space has yet been done, but I tend to think that in 20 years the open plan for knowledge workers may be considered as we now consider smoking in restaurants. What were we thinking letting this go on for so long?

The Economic Advantage of Being Bald

I was starting to go bald pretty seriously by the early 1990's, and by the time I bought this bottle of shampoo in 2002 I had very little hair left. 

The cost: $1.78. That's 17.8 cents per year for all the shampoo I needed for the small amount of hair I have.

This one is now empty; maybe I'll go to Whole Foods and get a $12 bottle of shampoo this time!

Income trade thanks to Dan Sheridan

I watched a webinar on options trading last week from which I learned a valuable trade:

Use out-of-the money calls or puts, depending on the chart direction of the underlying ... choose calls for a falling stock, puts for a rising one (use 20-day moving average, maybe adding 50 as a tiebreak) ... with about 30 days to go, find the strike with a delta of 12 to 15%, making that the middle of the 3-leg butterfly ratio trade. Thinkorswim calls it an unbalanced butterfly.

(Unfortunately, OptionsXpress calls it "sorry, you can't do this in a single trade". *grumble* Makes me wish I hadn't just consolidated my wife's IRA with OX ...)

For example, if the RUT June strike showing the right delta is 800, make that the middle leg. The lower leg is $10 below, the upper leg is $10 above. The trade was as of Monday the 21st:

Buy to open 3 June 2012 810 calls

Sell to open 4 June 2012 800 calls

Buy to open 1 June 2012 790 call

... with RUT around 753.

This trade produces about a 10% return! Better yet, the risk graph shows that 10% return all the way down to 0 (for calls). Terror attack, Euro dissolves, whatever -- you still make 10%.

There is a simple and not too expensive adjustment you can make if your trade goes haywire (in this case, if RUT rallies toward 800). The adjustment is:

Sell to close 1 of the 810 calls

Buy to open 1 of the 790 calls

... thus making the trade into a 2-4-2 butterfly with the typical limited risk and high reward spike in the middle of the graph.

So one can (for example) in a $50K account, risk $45000 of margin (saving $5K for adjustments) and make $4500 most months (only occasionally losing 7% or so, about $3000). Not bad!

Thanks again to Dan Sheridan for putting on his webinar on this.

I could fall in love with Julia!

The new programming language, that is. Take a look! Fewer lines of code than even Python, but almost as fast as C++! Built-in support for multicore (looks like -- I haven't verified this yet.)

Looks pretty exciting to me!

Pandora's Star

I came across this book via a recommendation from Audible and enjoyed it greatly. My Lovely Wife even liked it, and our tastes in media are generally orthogonal so I think most readers/listeners will find it worthwhile.

The sequel, Judas Unchained, isn't quite as good IMHO, but you'll probably have to stick with it to see how the story comes out!

• Author's website

Paul Graham at Pycon 2012

I had planned to see this talk in person, but Pycon filled up before I had the chance to register!

Anyway, this guy is part of the inspiration for my attending grad school. Here's his talk. Here are the essay that hooked me on his book and the one that I responded to most forcefully as it matched my (less well developed) conclusions on the differences in programming languages.

Enjoy!

Backup Power Request for Quote!

I give up! I wanted a fuel cell (supposedly $5K in 2001 but $56K recently) but the recent ice storm is one multi-day power outage too many for us.

What I really want: backup power as a service! The agreement:

       * You keep our power on
       * no more noise than 65 dB at 7 meters
       * no more pollution than allowed by California CARB
       * you own the equipment & do all maintenance (oil changes, etc.)
       * Fuel is (probably) propane as we have a 500 gal tank, but if you
          have some exotic technology?
       * I pay you $X per month forever

If you don't want to do that, I want a generator and transfer switch meeting the above noise/emissions parameters installed ASAP. Please send a quote!

Heuristics and irrationality

Choose quickly: a free $10 Amazon gift card or a $20 gift card for $7?

And: a ball and a bat together cost $1.10, and the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The first example is from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and the second from Daniel Kahneman's  Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I thoroughly enjoyed both of these but found the latter a deeper, richer book. Kahneman has a different, more humane take on 'irrationality' and describes it more as a set of heuristics that work well most of the time and in most situations ... but not for all examples.

Anyone interested in how his or her mind works ... or how the mind of the boss or your spouse or your child's mind works ... will get a bang out of both of these, I think. Happy and rational reading!