Jinn of Quality and Risk

Guardian: The [UK] government is to launch an investigation into the BBC's online services in January to establish if the £100m it spends annually on its websites is justified. ... According to the BBC annual report, the corporation spent £100.4m [US$ 155 million] on the internet in the last financial year, compared with £54.2m the year before. Ooh, ooh, I know the answer: it's not justified. The BBC is a government-supported entity that "competes" with private corporations. It supports its activities with a compulsory, annual fee on all television owners in the UK (the "license" costs £112 per year for a colour TV [i.e. about $170]).

In the UK, people watch TV by permission, and the money taken from them is used to finance a government-backed media empire that directly attacks private ventures. This could be why British media are of such poor quality — they position themselves where the BBC cannot or will not go (scandals, rumours, gossip, etc.). I like many things produced by the BBC, but I want them to compete fair and square, so others have a competitive incentive to produce quality in the media. 

Mark Bernstein criticizes Jakob Nielsen: conforming to 'expected behavior' is not the mark of a varied, rich, and sophisticated intellectual life. The urge to insist that expressive media conform to the imperatives of expectation and efficiency has had a sorry history in the past century or so. Usability is nice, but conformity is conformity. 

Dave Winer: I think I finally figured out how the Weblog conference, version 1.0, would work. Sign me up! 

Brad DeLong: Suppose that you are a bomber pilot flying a B-17 in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. You know that 4% of bombers get shot down on average on each mission. You want to calculate the chance that you would successfully fly all the missions of your tour of duty--to make things simple, let's say 50 (a larger number than was actually asked of air crews)--without getting shot down. 

A practical illustration in the IT field of the law of comparative advantage, the most misunderstood concept in economics. It rests on the insight that values are relative to personal preferences, productivity, and other values, i.e. they are neither inherent in nor proportional to quantity of labour; and trade is for mutual profit, nurturing the division of labour.

CNET: Reasons for the shift start with lower wages. HP pegs the cost of a talented programmer in India at about $20,000 a year, a fraction of the cost of a top U.S. tech worker. Other factors fueling the shift offshore, according to Forrester, include the emergence of low-cost high-bandwidth telecommunications links, standardized business applications and Internet-based collaborative tools. IBM and EDS call it "best shore" not "offshore"... A former employer of mine called it "Global Distributed Development" although they hired cheaper labour in India only, not all over the globe, unlike what IBM et al. already do. Quality often suffers under such models, due to the lack of universal, measurable quality definitions in IT, and the need for regular interactions with the end-users/clients (requirements change!). 

The Guardian offers key lessons on disgrace, deserved and undeserved, that fate routinely heaps on public figures... advice for future victims yet unknown.

1. It's never the crime, it's always the cover-up.
2. Get all the facts out in one go.
3. Context and timing is all.
4. Hypocrisy is always a killer.
5. Know thine enemy.
6. Don't shaft your friends.
7. Scandals are not legal, they're political.
8. Guilt by association may not be fair, but it's real.
9. When all else fails, make a personal statement.