We have a friend who keeps coming to visit, despite the lockdown…
He does maintain appropriate social distancing while here, though.
Helps himself to food…
Always politely interested in the conversation.
“What’s the time, Mr Wolf?”
Generally a very pleasant companion.
You can learn a lot from the wisdom of Hobbits.
I’ve discovered, for example, that it’s important not to neglect Second Breakfast, because to do so can lead to increased snacking between meals.
Kevin Kelly, on his 68th birthday, offers 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice. And they’re good. Or amusing. Or both.
You don’t need to read the whole thing. Just scroll to a random point and read something. Then repeat for the next 67 days 🙂
I’ve talked before about some of the nice statistics the Financial Times is gathering about the epidemic, and the clear dispassionate way it’s presenting them.
Their latest tool gets more interactive, and lets you compare, in various ways, how your country is doing against others. I like three things about this in particular.
Firstly, you can choose a linear scale. Log scales are handy for scientific visualisation but are harder to grasp intuitively.
Secondly, you can get the numbers per capita, which I think is much more useful than absolute figures, though it doesn’t of course take into account population density, which is also important.
Thirdly, when you get the analysis in a form you like, you can capture that in the URL and send it to others: the inability to do that is a common problem in today’s over-Javascripty pages!
So you can do your own investigation and see that by some measures, your country is doing fairly well (cumulative cases compared to Spain):
And by other measures not so well (daily new cases compared to France):
You don’t have to switch countries to get different viewpoints, though. Suppose you wanted to make the case that the UK and France were pretty much neck-and-neck, you’d plot the absolute cumulative deaths on a log scale:
(Neither of these capture the fact that France has less than half the population density of the UK, but they’re still useful illustrations.)
Here’s another example:
Let’s display the same data about the UK and Italy in two different ways.
Do you want to make the UK (or its government, healthcare system, population, whatever) look reasonably good? Plot the cumulative cases.
Does your editorial policy or personal preference dictate that you want to make the UK government, healthcare system or population look bad? Then plot the same data as a daily rate (roughly the gradient of the above graph).
That’s the same data over the same period on the same kind of axes.
All of which illustrates why it’s good to have a tool where you can explore the data yourself. As long as you really do explore it and don’t just stop when you get the conclusion you want!
In the above examples, the images are links to larger versions: the links in the text take to the FT site where you can experiment to your heart’s content.
Today I was applying, on behalf of my department at the University of Cambridge, for an educational discount on some software.
The form on the website asked various questions, and included an obligatory upload section: “Please provide documentation supporting your institution’s accreditation status”.
So I sent them this:
It is, apparently — for I must confess I didn’t read it carefully — “a charter in the form of letters patent of inspeximus and confirmation by Edward I to the Chancellor and Masters of the University of Cambridge confirming the privileges of the University granted by Henry III, and an agreement between the Scholars and Burgesses for the punishment of disturbers of the peace by a representative group from both sides”. It dates from 6 Feb 1291, and it’s worth looking at it on the University Library’s web site, where you can zoom right in and see the lovely illustration in the top-left corner.
Anyway, the company granted us the academic discount. Probably wise. You wouldn’t want to upset Edward I. Remember what he did to the Scots.
Question 1. Which of the following are indicated by having a ‘Knowledge Base’ on your company’s ‘support’ pages?
(a) A lack of the discipline needed to write proper documentation.
(b) Insufficient staff to provide proper support.
(c) Inadequate engineers to provide a reliable product.
(d) A poor user-interface experience in your product.
(e) All of the above.
The best thing about creating a website in blog format, I’ve always thought, is that you don’t need to maintain it to nearly the same degree as you would most other sites. Why? Because everything has a date, and that date is paramount; it is clearly marked. This makes it obvious to the reader that a post was written in a particular context, and, while the content may still be useful some years later, you can’t blame the author for not being able to predict the future if it’s no longer accurate or relevant now! As an author, therefore, you don’t need to be constantly re-reading, deleting, updating, clarifying, as you would with most other forms of documentation.
The appeal of the so-called ‘Knowledge Base’ — a searchable database of support articles on a company website — is that it also promises an alternative solution to this challenge of maintaining structured documentation, but instead of using old Father Time to winnow out inaccurate material, it uses a search engine to help you ignore it.
If you force your customers to type things into the Knowledge Base search box before you let them get anywhere near the page with your phone numbers or email addresses, there’s even a chance they may find out the answer to their question and not bother you! Bliss!
Search engines are wonderful things, of course, and this isn’t a bad idea in theory, but if your experience is anything like mine, these knowledge bases are chiefly a source of frustration for customers.
Why is this?
Users don’t know what to search for. They may not know the phrases you use internally to categorise certain issues. A human support person would know that when you said you had an issue with your mouse, you might be referring to a problem labelled ‘trackpad’ or ‘cursor’ in the docs.
The articles aren’t well-indexed. Do you, for example, make sure that the error message the user actually sees appears in plain text in the articles, so the search engine has a chance of finding it? Do your articles have extensive tagging with relevant keywords which may not be in the text? If the error is slightly different because they used a different filename, will it still be found?
The search engines aren’t good enough. We’ve been spoiled by Google. Does your search engine understand synonyms? Does it rank pages well? Does it show a good summary so your users don’t have to read all 26 articles returned by their query?
The content is outdated. If the user actually succeeds in finding a relevant article, is it clear that it only refers to version 4.2 of the product running on Android, and not version 5.0 running on iOS, because the latter didn’t exist at the time it was written? Will they know that the solution it proposes can’t possibly work for them? Because this advice is buried in a database, it may be harder for your support staff to know this is a problem.
I have four pieces of advice for anyone who has, or is considering implementing, a Knowledge Base on their website:
Make sure the full text of your knowledge base is searchable by Google. They will do a better job than you do.
Allocate more, not less, in the way of resources, if you want your documentation in this form. Knowledge Bases are not like blogs. You can’t dump things in there and forget them. Articles need to be reviewed, re-written, re-indexed, re-keyworded and regularly purged if the contents are to remain useful. You need to do this in addition to writing the actually text itself. Customers will not thank you for anything which suggests you believe that their time is much less important than yours. If they have to search through dozens of articles to try and find an answer, it probably indicates you aren’t doing your job. There may be good reasons for using this format for your documentation. Cheapness isn’t one of them.
If you insist on putting your users through this and they still contact you, you should provide better support once they do. For heaven’s sake, don’t just connect them to somebody in a remote location who only has access to the same information! Don’t offer a chat link to somebody who is ‘Very sorry to hear about your problem’ but knows less about it than they do. Connect them to the engineers who produced the flawed product, or the writers who produced the inadequate documentation.
This is the key one: The bigger your Knowledge Base, the worse job you are doing. In most situations, an entry in your Knowledge Base indicates a failure in communication elsewhere. Insufficient documentation, unhelpful errors, unreliable products. Your users won’t generally be consulting a Knowledge Base if everything is going well for them. Treat it as an issue-ticketing system, and reward those whose work means that articles can be removed from it. And make sure you have the processes in place that this actually happens!
My family are a constant source of useful information. My nephew James tells me he’s just discovered that it’s ‘World Design Day’. (He’s a designer and nobody had mentioned it to him before now. Shocking, eh?)
Anyway, this is another nice episode in what is rapidly becoming a theme on Status-Q. We started with The International Year of Planet Earth, then moved on to the discovery of Earth Day, but World Design Day surely has to be the most ambitious. I mean, where do you start?
Well, I guess you might begin with ‘Let there be light…’?
This is just brilliant…
In a slightly-related follow-up to my recent repost from the archives…
Yesterday, apparently, was ‘Earth Day’. I missed this fact — you may have done so too — but, unlike my brother, I had actually heard of it before, so I knew it wasn’t a marketing ploy by vendors of topsoil and compost. But I thought it was some one-off hippy jamboree back in the 90s.
However, it turns out to be a regular and international thing, which has been going on about as long as we have! He only found out about it because it was included in his Apple Calendar. He went and Googled it, and sent me a link.
Gosh, the ways we find out about things these days, eh? Other people put them in your calendar, and you have to go and look them up to find out what they are. Whatever next?
Anyway happy (belated) Earth Day, everybody! You’ll know for next year…
Sometimes, I find, it’s worth looking back into my blog archives to ponder how the great events of the past have affected the world since.
Do you remember, for example, when we declared 2009 to be TIYOIY?
Around Christmas and New Year, I was in Scotland in my campervan. I took lots of video footage. Far too much, in fact, so I’ve been gradually working my way through it, on and off, for several months. This evening, I came across this rather pleasing scene. It’s just a still frame captured from video, and on a GoPro too, so the quality’s not great, but I hope you enjoy the view!
This is a dawn dog-walk at Uig on the Isle of Lewis, on New Year’s Eve. Not only was I up at dawn, I had already breakfasted and was setting off for a hike! However, this sounds a bit less impressive when I point out that sunrise in mid-winter up there is after 9am.
The small black blur on the right-hand side, which you may be able to see if you click for a larger version, is Tilly romping in the heather.
I am constantly bemused by the number of naïve people who want to blame politicians for all the evils of the world, and especially those medical evils that are besetting us at the moment. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this is happening in many, if not most, countries — which should immediately give any critical thinkers pause for thought — but let’s focus for the moment on the UK.
The NHS is, as the Guardian so nicely put it recently, “the UK’s unofficial religion”, so to question any aspect of its operation is blasphemy. If the health service were given free rein, clearly everything would be fine and sunny, so, as Epicurus would have wondered, “whence cometh evil?” Other religions usually deal with this problem by inventing the idea of devils, who exist to take the blame for the difficult problems raised by the belief system. Also to blame are heretics, who consort with them, don’t pay sufficient tithes to the gods, and should therefore be burned at the stake. In the modern world, we group these problematic actors together and call them politicians. (Oh, not the ones you voted for, of course. They are the priests.)
Anyway, since we don’t just have a two-party system, and not everybody votes, the majority of the population will probably disapprove of whichever party is currently in power. That party is therefore always an easy scapegoat for significant frustration. And the minister in charge of the particular challenge du jour is probably Beelzebub himself in human form. Certainly, any media outlet suggesting that is going to get higher advertising revenues than one that suggests the opposite, so it’s a meme that propagates by simple Darwinian processes.
But is that really fair?
Now, just to set the scene, let me emphasise that I’m no particular fan of our current government, and I didn’t vote for them. And yes, with hindsight, there are some things that they could have been done better. It’s easy to say that now. We must never forget that they are fallible humans, after all, with fallible advisors, and voted for by fallible people.
But if, like me, you didn’t vote for them, then try assuming, as a thought experiment, that the people you did vote for came to power in the election just a few weeks ago, and had this dumped on them. They would, I hope, if they were smart, have taken broadly the same decisions. Yes, they would. They would have had the same health service, the same civil servants, the same scientific advice from the same scientific advisors and, hopefully, would have followed it roughly as the current government have done. So they would have had the same outcomes.
There might have been variations — the advice they’re given by the experts isn’t unanimous, after all — which might have moved the infection curve forward or back by a week or two. But it probably wouldn’t have been a significant change (unless your politicians chose to ignore the scientific advice completely like a certain transatlantic President I could mention!)
This graph from the FT is a good way to see that most comparable countries to the UK are following a pretty similar trajectory; the UK peak is higher than most, but our numbers are dominated by London’s population size & density, and its transport infrastructure; neither of which are replicated in many otherwise comparable places. If you restrict your view to urban centres, Paris followed a pretty similar curve to London. France, however, has half the population density of the UK overall, and that’s probably a significant factor in limiting the spread on a national scale. And so on.
Anyway, let’s assume that your favourite party is in power and hasn’t done a significantly worse or better job, because they don’t have that many parameters to tweak. Where they might have made different decisions, these would have had other costs of their own: damage to the economy, significantly higher future taxes, closure of businesses leading to higher unemployment, etc. The best choice wasn’t necessarily obvious back then; managing this is almost always about having to choose the lesser of two evils. And now they’re being blamed by the media and everyone on Twitter for the shortage of PPE, tests, and ventilators.
I assume that those who are complaining have never actually set up a vast manufacturing and supply chain combined with an instant nationwide distribution network. You have? OK, well done. But let’s imagine, instead, that you’re a young guy — we’ll call you Matt — and you have no particular expertise in this area but have been put in charge of everything and suddenly had the world’s most difficult supply-chain problem for some time dropped in your lap. You have to try and sort out in days and weeks what would normally take those who do have lots of experience weeks and months.
Assuming you’re up to this superhuman task, let’s compound it with a few problems:
You work for a large, bureaucratic, inefficient and slow-moving organisation. You’re trying to organise this on behalf of and with the help of another large, bureaucratic, inefficient and slow-moving organisation.
Many of your key decision-makers are not in the office. Some of them are sick. Some are in intensive care. Including your boss.
Many of your lower-level staff are also off sick or have child-care issues to deal with because all the schools are closed. It’s a bit like trying to organise this during a Bank Holiday.
This is true of every single organisation you’re dealing with. And there are hundreds.
There’s a global shortage of materials needed to make your products. Many of those suppliers are just not operating at the moment. Sometimes their governments wouldn’t even let them sell it to you if they could.
There’s a global demand for the product itself. Everybody else is trying to buy it, as well as you. Not just everybody nearby. Everybody in the world.
You don’t actually work for or have any real authority in most of the companies concerned.
All of this is costing you way, way more than it normally would.
If you do manage to manufacture this product, then all the delivery drivers who might eventually distribute it for you are busy delivering other things.
Sorry, did I say this product? You’re actually trying to do this many times over, for a whole range of different products.
And every day, journalists are badgering you with questions about why you haven’t finished it yet – don’t you know people are dying out there?
Now, given all that, I don’t know about you, but I’m not 100% certain that, even if I were Secretary of State for Health, I’d actually be able to sort this out in the next couple of weeks so we can all go back to work.
Would you? OK, make sure you stand for parliament next time around, so we can elect you before the next crisis hits, and it can then be your name in the papers. Personally, I fancy that role even less than I fancy being a health worker with insufficient PPE!
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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