Jinn of Quality and Risk

The cuneiform inscription to the right is the earliest-known written appearance of the word "freedom" (amagi), or "liberty." It appears on a clay document written in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, around 2300 B.C. 

Computerworld interviews John Kopcke, who has been in the decision-support systems business -- now we call it business intelligence -- for about 26 years. He's seen it all, from the early days of executive information systems and online analytical processing, to today's data analytics. He is CTO at Hyperion in Sunnyvale, CA.

Executive dashboards: What's the level of adoption? The first executive dashboards actually went into organizations around 1985. We called them executive information systems at the time. And they had limited success because they were executive systems -- the chairman of Merck would have it on his desk -- but then that was it. What we're seeing today are management dashboards, which have been pushed down through the organization, providing relevant information to a particular manager. At Southwest Airlines, they call them cockpits, and they're specialized, so that the guy in charge of putting peanuts on airplanes gets a different view than the guy who's in charge of purchasing jet fuel. But they all see what planes are flying where. So I'd say dashboards are leaving the early-adopter phase and becoming more mainstream. 

Computerworld has an interesting grab bag of quotes/predictions about the future of business intelligence. Food for thought. Here is how the first one starts: In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis...

It's not restricted to the needs of business. A more personal possibility is in preventive medicine: regular visual feedback on one's health parameters (heart rhythm, cholesterol level, etc.). Imagine if you could easily measure and watch daily the effect of coffee, tea, fish, chocolate, sleep-deprivation, regular jogging, and fondue on your body! 

Visual presentations help to sell to C-level executives. Executive dashboards are primarily tools to give an intuitive, perceptual-level grasp of some very complex facts. A good dashboard will illustrate a proper, conceptual analysis for immediate understanding -- a bad one will show a bunch of misleading colours, possibly pretty. For instance, showing the current risk level (e.g. alarming/red, high/amber, normal/blue, low/green) is useless unless one also gets a sense of the trend (getting better, or worse?) both current and over a recent period, as well as a projection of mitigative actions into the future (planned? in execution? effective? by when?). Effective visualization requires solid abstractions, i.e. thinking in fundamentals and essentials. A good executive dashboard is a sign of good epistemology. 

Sad news. E.G. Ross, editor of The Objective American Daily, recently passed away, three weeks after undergoing emergency surgery to repair a cerebral aneurism. E.G. Ross was an impressive man, amazingly productive, a dynamo of positive thinking, a believer in man and the future. His writing was energetic, optimistic, inspiring, and common-sensical. I used to read his daily essays every morning, with great pleasure. In Memoriam page.

Here is a quote which I believe illustrates his spirit very well: The thing to realize about optimism is that it is a way of embracing life — not a way of ignoring life's difficulties or challenges. It's an orientation toward opportunity, not a commitment to evade or sidestep problems. It's a filter for achievement. It's a can-do approach that regards problems as learning events, as steps toward further accomplishment and self-improvement. ... Objective optimism helps you to generate courage and confidence in yourself and in your ability to survive and thrive. Toward this end, it uses simple, specific thinking techniques. They are mainly techniques for self-focus on solution- and learning-oriented outlooks. Some examples: What can go right in this context? What about the positive? To give perspective to bad news, I'm going to consciously search for good news. Are there any counter-balancing facts available here? What's the possible unseen value in this seeming negative? I'm going to hunt for hidden, up-beat nuggets of wisdom in this situation. How might I turn this setback into an accomplishment? What successful person could help me? What can I glean from this apparently depressing event? Where might I look for other, positive answers? This thing is probably not nearly as catastrophic as it appears at the moment, so I'll reserve judgment until more facts come in. If it sounds too bad to be true, it probably is. And so on. See also his excellent Self-Help: Positive Resolutions for The New Year. 

Forbes: Surgical masks have quickly become the must-have accessory for the SARS-obsessed... N95 masks are the gold standard of protection... Though it looks like a modest dust mask, the N95 is a triumph of materials science. It consists of a mesh of polypropylene ... sandwiched between layers of nonwoven polyester. The N95 blocks 95% of particles bigger than 0.3 microns, [that is anything bigger than 1/300th] the width of a human hair. Cost about $1-2 (USD) each. Often sold in box of 20. Currently sold out in many locations. 

Japanese scientists have discovered a new vitamin. Vitamins are organic substances needed in small quantities for health and growth that must be obtained from food as they cannot be produced by the body. Pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ), a substance discovered in 1979, is now categorized as a vitamin. There are 13 other types of vitamin already known, and PQQ is believed to belong to the vitamin B group. It is the first new vitamin to be discovered since 1948.

Mice deprived of PQQ suffer reduced fertility and roughened fur. The best source of PQQ discovered so far is "natto," a Japanese dish of fermented soybeans. Other rich sources include parsley, green tea, green pepper, kiwi fruit, and papaya.