Brian Clegg's Blog, page 130

Should you go back? OR revisited

Long ago, in an airport far, far awayMy first job was in Operational Research. If this doesn't mean much to you, it was a discipline that originated in the Second World War to provide mathematical problem solving for challenges like what was the best pattern to drop depth charges to be most likely to hit a submarine. After the war it became popular in nationalised industries and when I joined the soon-to-be-privatised British Airways in 1977 it was going strong there.

Last Friday was a 60th anniversary reunion of people who had worked in OR at British Airways over the years. I must admit I had mixed feelings about going. My general principle is 'never go back.' I really can't understand people from Oxbridge, for instance, who return to their college to make use of their 'dining rights'. Why go all that way to have a so-so meal in uncomfortably formal surroundings with a bunch of academics you don't know? But this was rather different - a chance to see a whole bunch of people many of whom I haven't come across for 20 years or more, and I'm glad I went.

When I first worked at BA I was trained in an office in a building called Comet House (now demolished), and of the circa 8 other people working there 6 were present, which was wonderful. Of maybe 150 people present, I knew at least half, and it was a constant, pleasant stream of 'Oh, what are you doing now?'s and even the occasional 'I've read one of your books!' or 'How do you keep putting so much rubbish in your blog?' (or words to that effect).

There was one of those inevitable Powerpoint shows with a panoply of events of the years - I was honoured to get a mention, though with the bizarre twist of memory, I had totally forgotten the event I was mentioned for. I had championed a new PC software environment, something called 'Microsoft Windows' in the company. According to the slide, the IT department decided it would never catch on...

There is still a thriving Operational Research department at BA - what I don't understand is why OR isn't more common in large companies. The ability to do flexible decision making and problem solving using mathematical and hi-tech solutions is surely of demand everywhere, but OR still seems to be largely limited in the UK to a very small range of industries. (If you want to find out a bit more about OR, take a look at the OR Society's 'learn about OR' website.)

All in all, though, an excellent evening - and a good example of when 'never go back' does not apply.

Kindling in the UK

Yes, I'm on Amazon.comThere's a lot about ebooks that is still a mystery - never more so than when we're dealing with Amazon's Kindle. As an Amazon Prime customer I was interested to see they've added the ability to 'borrow' Kindle books... but was then rapidly let down to find out that you can only do so on Kindle devices, not my trust iPad or my desktop computer. (Not really the topic here, but I am also still very peeved that US Prime customers get free movie streaming and we don't in the UK.)

But the thing that made me write this post was the complications of books and territories. When, as an author, you sell a book to a publisher you sell various rights. You might, for instance, sell world rights, or English language rights, or just UK and Commonwealth rights. And the publisher can then sell the book in those territories. But the internet potentially makes a nonsense of this. I have long been able to buy a book from Amazon.com that only has US rights to be shipped to the UK. However, once you get ebooks in the mix, things get even more complicated.

Take my books with the US publisher St Martin's Press. They have world rights, so no issues here. But for a long time the Kindle versions were only available in the US. Why? No one knows. You couldn't even see them on Amazon.com from the UK. After I moaned about this, they have now made some available on Amazon.co.uk (huzzah!)... but there's still an oddity.

My last two books with St Martin's were published in the UK by the British publisher Duckworth. Rather than export their own copies, St Martin's sold Duckworth the UK rights, just as they would to a German publisher, say, for a translation. The question then is, whose ebook gets published? Because Amazon only does one Kindle edition. Well, surely the St Martin's Press version, as they have world rights? Nope. Bizarrely, even if you buy the ebook of Build Your Own Time Machine from Amazon.com it's Duckworth's edition. The are even using the UK title - the US paper book is called How to Build a Time Machine. Puzzled? I certainly am.

If you are either of my UK fans and have been waiting patiently for Kindle editions, you can now get the following on Kindle:

The God EffectBefore the Big BangArmageddon ScienceBuild Your Own Time Machineand you have always been able to get:Inflight ScienceThe Universe Inside YouLight YearsUpgrade Me

The science they didn't teach at school

I have recently added a new website to the family - sciextra.com. The idea is to provide bite sized bits of the most interesting bits of science, the science they didn't teach at school. The stuff that makes you go 'Wow!'

It's early days on content, but the idea is to have short videos and articles/blog posts on the bits that make science so interesting.

Please do take a look and give me any feedback. Realizing I can't exactly do super-slick videos I decided to go for a very informal (ok, amateurish) approach - I am hoping this will come across as endearing, rather than than incompetent.

To give a taster, if you can't be bothered to click through (but please do!) here's the first video produced for the site, explaining why, given time travel is possible, we haven't be inundated with time travellers from the future:

Graphic novels get heavy - Anomaly review

Anomaly in its rather smart cardboard caseWhen I was a kid, you read comics until you were around 11, then you moved on to real books. I know things have been rather different in the US, where comics always had an older audience - and of course the term 'comic' has to be quite broad when it takes in both The Beano and Batman - but the thing that really changed attitudes of (at least some) readers in the UK was the graphic novel. This was the comic form taken to novel length and treated as serious material for grown ups.

Personally I have never quite got into graphic novels. In part it is a slight embarrassment - I wouldn't read one in public because it gives the impression, like it or not, that you struggle with reading. The other problem I have is that I'm more a word person than a visual person - so when I do read one I have to force myself to slow down and look at the pictures, or I just hurtle through the relatively limited text. However, I'm always interested in a new reading challenge, so when the publisher offered to send me a copy of the indubitably remarkable graphic novel Anomaly I jumped at the chance.

What we have here is an epic story in graphic novel form. It's huge, literally a heavy piece of work and has an impressive dramatic span. Set in the 28th century we have a fairly conventional post industrial wreck of an Earth, run by a corporate conspiracy theorist's delight called the Conglomerate. Traditionally their attitude to other planets is to conquer them, wiping out life if necessary. Some ethical types propose instead taking a more friendly approach. They are sent to a planet, not realizing that this is actually a plan to get rid of them and take over their shares in the Conglomerate, as no one has ever returned alive from this planet.

On their arrival all their technology is destroyed. They find a wide range of humanoid life forms, mostly as separate tribes, but with a major organized force of bad guys. There's the usual swordplay with a touch of magic stuff, a uniting of the various tribes to take on the baddies - you know the kind of thing.

Open in all its glory - drink can for scale



In one sense this is a very impressive work. You've got hundreds of pages of well-drawn artwork. It is like working your way through a very detailed storyboard of a visually impressive movie. There are one or two nice twists, like the technology destroying goo, but if I'm honest the story isn't very original. The uniting of the tribes to take on the baddies is hugely reminiscent of the defence of Minas Tirith segment of The Lord of the Rings (the baddies even resemble the orcs in the movie version of LoTR).

Tell me that doesn't remind you of Lord of the RingsFor the rest, there's a lot that seems derivative of Rider Haggard Martian adventures with a modern gloss. It's entertaining, I did want to read on and finish it, but I'm not sure the originality of the storyline lives up to the presentation. There are some interesting loose ends, both in terms of what happens to the Conglomerate when our heroes return and why the names, as someone in the novel points out, are all Celtic or Greek. But it's a shame the story wasn't as original as the presentation.

It's also worth mentioning the app-based extension. With a free app for tablets and smartphones, some pages open up with extra detail, including 3D images and extra information. This augmented reality stuff is fun, but it's a bit like the extras on a DVD. Many people will ignore it altogether, and it really doesn't make a huge difference to the product.

I have two other problems with Anomaly. One is the sheer weight of the thing. You can get an idea of this in that it cost £9 for the publisher to post it to me. I usually get a feel for the weight of heavy books by putting them on the kitchen scales, but Anomaly left them reeling, and they give up at 2.3 kilograms. To illustrate why this is a bad thing, I need to take you back to my university days.

I used to sing in a Cambridge college chapel choir, and at one choir practice the junior organ scholar turned up and told us that the senior organ scholar would not be joining us. Apparently he had sprained his wrist in bed, so couldn't play. It was at least five minutes before the choir could be pulled together sufficiently to continue. (This did happen.) You really don't want to read this book in bed, in case of suffering a similar fate. And I found it was getting uncomfortable holding it to read wherever I sat with it, resulting in various mechanisms being adopted to prop it up.

Funky! Let's warp...The other issue is the price. This is a very big book, with over 300 glossy full colour pages. That's not cheap to make and it is reflected in a massive cover price of £45 ($75). Okay, you can probably get a 40 to 50 per cent discount if you buy it in the right place, but it's not cheap. I compared the experience of reading the book to that of watching a movie, and I'd be happy to pay as much as I would for a DVD, but that feels about the limit for me. The augmented reality app is a bit of fun, but more gimmick than anything.

I can't help feel the pricing will limit the audience. But if this is your kind of thing it's likely to be well worth the pennies. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Equality works both ways

I don't know if it's because of the Jimmy Savile case, but I've heard several pieces on the radio recently about sexual harassment at work. (I know what Savile is alleged to have done is far worse than harassment, but it seems to have triggered the discussion.) I think it's important we recognize that sexual harassment exists and needs dealing with, and also that it exists in both directions.

I had to deal with three cases that could be classed as sexual harassment when I was a manager. One was by a male - a very simple one. This was in the early days of being able to display a photo on a Windows background and an employee had chosen a picture of a topless woman. It was inappropriate, caused offence and he was asked to remove it. The other two incidents were by females. One was a classic case - standing too close, inappropriate touching and suggestions - and was dealt with firmly. The other was more subtle. The offender was either very knowing or naive. Early on I had to suggest to her that a body stocking with a jacket over the top was not appropriate workwear. And later I had to point out that it wasn't ideal for her to speak to a male colleague while sitting on her desk, wearing a skirt, with her legs wide open pointing in his direction.

The reason I bring this up is that I think we do tend to treat harassment of men by women differently from the other way round. We are rightly shocked and offended when a man harasses a woman, but if a woman harasses a man it tends to be laughed off. 'What kind of a man is he?' I heard commented when someone once complained.

An extreme example of this asymmetry came up in an interview with a film star that was on the TV the other day. It turned out said (male) star lost his virginity age 15 to a woman in her forties. The response of the audience and the interviewer was not shock (for the victim) and disgust (for the predator) but rather big smiles, nudge-nudge, wink-wink - who's a lucky boy, then? Yet this is an exact parallel of the sort of thing Savile is being accused of (if on a smaller scale).

I don't think we will take any kind of sexual harassment and predation seriously enough - from the small scale comments to assault - until there is no sexual discrimination in the way such behaviour is treated. Perhaps this attitude has changed now. It's a while since I worked in an office. But I suspect it hasn't.

The nails are out

It's strange when you come to think of it that despite human beings being living creatures of flesh and blood, the aspects that define our outward appearance - hair, skin, nails - are all dead. They have something else in common. They are all based on the wonderfully versatile compound, keratin.

And that's the subject of my latest Royal Society of Chemistry compounds podcast. So if you've 5 minutes to spare take a listen and discover the wonder of keratin.

Muted impact

I've kindly been sent a review copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's The Impact Equation by those nice people at Penguin (henceforth Random Penguins).

I used to write business books (this kind of thing), but I always find it strange coming back to them after being so immersed in popular science, because a popular science book is usually so packed with fascinating information, where the actual content of business books is often incredibly sparse, with about a page's worth of useful information packaged in a whole load of woffle. Interestingly, a while ago, a company did try to do business books on two sides of a sheet of laminated A4. They genuinely did get everything in, but even though people are supposed to want bite sized chunks these days, they wouldn't pay a book price for something so slim. We are victims of our own greed.

The Impact Equation doesn't entirely escape the limitation of having a lot of padding between gems, but it definitely does have some good content. It describes using modern communication channels, essentially the internet, in order to get noticed and achieve things rather than, as the subtitle says, 'just making noise.' The authors point out that just setting up a blog, say, and expecting it to make you widely noticed is a bit like running a seminar and only advertising it inside the venue. You won't get many people turning up.

The equation in the title is the rather corny one that Impact = C x (R+E+A+T+E), where C is contrast and the others are reach, exposure, articulation, trust and echo. You'll have to read the book for the detail of what these are, but they do mostly make sense, though there's the inevitable feeling that the categories have been stretched a little to fit the acronym. Along the way the authors make some very good points that may not be original, but that so many people get wrong. So, for instance, you don't get impact from constantly blogging about what you are trying to sell or tweeting your products 24/7. You need to create content that works with the relevant medium and that people actually want to consume.

There was a really interesting programme on the radio the other day about the slender man phenomenon on the internet. I confess I had never heard of this, but it's basically a story that has gone rogue, taking on a life of its own and becoming a kind of internet myth. One of the contributors made the point that we have gone through what he calls the Gutenberg Parenthesis. This is grandeous-academic-speak for the simple but powerful observation that for all of human history we have had individuals communicating stuff (stories or whatever) directly to other people or groups of people. The printing press took us into a side world where the stuff communicated was set in concrete (or at least paper), without the directness of communication. But now the internet has brought us back into the historical mainstream of direct links. Brogan and Smith don't mention this but I think it underlines everything they say. All their wisdom on good ways to enhance impact is about being aware of this different, more personal type of communication - even if you are tweeting to several million followers.

I did have a few issues with the book. The authors are constantly referring to 'Chris did that' or 'Julien once did this'. I know they are trying to connect with their audience, but as a reader I really don't care about them or want to know about them. I just want the good stuff to make my online impact better. I got really fed up of this self-referential approach. They also clearly haven't read (or at least haven't absorbed) the message of the Black Swan, apparently thinking that you can somehow learn to be another Richard Branson (say). I don't agree with a lot that Taleb says in that book, but his central point that you can only achieve mediocrity as a result of ability in fields like this, and the rest is down to uncontrollable luck (I crudely paraphrase) is incredibly important. You can't learn how to be another Branson by emulating him, nor can you learn how to be another internet sensation by emulating an existing one. Black Swans aren't like that.

There's also one point the authors miss, which is that the internet is international, and it is very easy to assume that your world view (typically a US one) will work everywhere. They unintentionally demonstrate this very well with this blooper: 'BBC viewers may become upset if something interrupts Coronation Street.' This misses the point anyone in the UK could have corrected that Coronation Street (the UK's most popular soap opera) is not broadcast by the BBC, but by its commercial rival ITV.

Overall, then, if you are struggling to know how to go about improving your impact through the internet this is a good place to start. But like practically every other business book, do expect to have to wade through a lot of padding to find a collection of nuggets that would probably fit on two sides of a sheet of paper.

See The Impact Equation at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com or go for Kindle at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

And enjoy the authors talking about it in this video:


... for me this illustrates neatly why the modern multimedia approach is a mixed blessing. I was quite happy to take their advice from a book, but now I've seen them in person, I'm not so sure...

What's our Belisha Beacon?

A Belisha beaconI was crossing the road (the way you do) on a zebra crossing and enjoying the mellifluous name of the flashing orange ball-on-a-stick that alerts drivers to its presence: a Belisha beacon. It is named, of course, after Leslie Hore-Belisha, who introduced both the driving test and these handy crossings when a transport minister in the 1930s.

When you think about it, it's rather sweet, naming something after the minister responsible in this way. I think it is something we ought to see more of. Forget 'free schools' which sounds like something Victorians set up for the deserving poor. Let's have Gove schools. Or Blair wars, Brown gaffes, Osborne cock-ups and Cameron u-turns. Actually, with the exception of the schools, they're a bit vague - we need specific, detailed objects like the Belisha beacon. Perhaps a Grayling commissioner for police commissioners.

They don't have to be named after politicians, of course. We might speak of a Dyson cleaner, for instance (though in practice we tend to call it a hoover, something that really irritated them when I kept doing it while touring the Dyson R&D department). Or a Branson stunt. (Not cockney rhyming slang.)

What are your suggestions for the new equivalent of a Belisha beacon? Who, for instance, introduced dog poo bins? I'd love to know.

Image from Canthusus at the English language Wikipedia

Phoney Phun

I had interesting time last week trying to get my phone line back.

I received a phone call which was irritatingly dead. But for once there was a caller ID number, so I called them back. At least I tried to. But I couldn't dial out because the line was blocked. Their autodialler had called me up but it hadn't released the line. Not everyone knows this, but it's the caller that 'owns' the line. If you hang up on someone who calls you and they don't hang up too, the line is still held. So no matter what I did at my end - unplugging the phone, whatever - I couldn't get my line back.

I called the caller ID number on another line. A recorded message told me it was research call from a respectable market research company I've dealt with in the past. if I wanted to confirm they were legit I could call the Market Research Society. But it gave no way to contact them. So I called the MRS, who gave me the market research organization's number.

Cue rambling conversation with receptionist there who didn't know, for instance, that you can't hang up on a number if the dialler doesn't release the line. Eventually, after several sequences of them muttering to their IT people, 35 minutes later the line was freed up. Apparently this was a result of a frantic check around their call centre, checking all the lines.

It just goes to show - autodiallers are dangerous things in the wrong hands.

Playing the writer

My Starbucks 'office'As I type I'm sitting in our local chain coffee shop (what the hell, it's Starbucks). I've a fairly quiet day, so I thought I'd play the writer for once and have breakfast and work here a while, as I'm told this is what real writers do.

On the whole, though, I'm not sure it works for me.

Don't get me wrong. It's great having the sort of job where you can decide to have a leisurely breakfast and a quick peruse of the paper, but when it comes down to real work, I'd rather be sitting at my desk at home. Here there's background music, chatter, barista rattle... how is this supposed to help me concentrate? I brought with me the copy edit of my next book to check over, as I thought this might be the sort of thing I could do in a coffee shop, because it doesn't require the same level of concentration as writing, but even that I'd prefer to do in a comfy chair at home.

I can only think that those who do get all excited about working in a coffee shop miss the hustle and bustle of people around them. They want to be with people. And I can understand that. It's why I so enjoy giving talks and the like. But for writing I want peace and comfort. I only have music playing if I'm doing something brainless like the accounts - otherwise I work in silence.

So this isn't for me. But I'll still enjoy a read of the excellent i newspaper and finish my coffee before getting back to the grindstone.