Nosema Ceranae

A team led by Jeff Pettis of the USDA's Bee Research Laboratory has published a detailed study with the latest information about Colony Collapse Disorder: Crop Pollination Exposes Honey Bees to Pesticides Which Alters Their Susceptibility to the Gut Pathogen Nosema ceranae. My field biology skills are nowhere near developed enough to follow their paper, but their work has already been picked up by several science magazines:

• Insecticides Spreading to Wildflowers Poisons Bees

  Bees brought home 35 types of insecticides and fungicides after foraging in almond, apple, blueberry, cranberry, cucumber, pumpkin, and watermelon fields.

  Bees that were exposed to the chemical cocktail didn’t necessarily die immediately, but instead became less resistant to a deadly single-celled parasite, called Nosema ceranae. In addition to the agricultural chemicals in pollen, a mite-killing chemical used to control a pest that attacks the bees also made the honeybees more susceptible to Nosema.

• Who’s killing the bees? New study implicates virtually every facet of modern farming

  Rather than keep bees year round, most farmers now pay a bee farm to cart a hungry hive over and let the bees loose in their fields only when specifically needed for pollination. However, these bee farms tend to keep only one type of insect, usually the Asiatic honey bee. They’re good pets, and their honey provides a secondary source of revenue. The problem is that not every bee collects pollen equally well from every type of plant. So when you let a honey bee loose in a field full of, say, blueberry plants, they can collect far less pollen than a more specialized pollinator like a bumble bee, and they’re forced to hunt further afield.

  This study found that some of the most damaging chemicals were not being collected from food crops, which have their dangers but are ultimately fairly well regulated. Rather, bees are increasingly picking up chemicals from weeds and other pest plants in the fields surrounding the crops they are supposed to be pollinating. This is a problem since, for obvious reasons, we have far fewer regulations on what farmers can spray on weeds.

The problems are known, the solutions are even known.

Unfortunately, the solutions are not easy.

I fear that Nosema Ceranae is going to claim many more corpses before this problem is resolved.

The new retail life

I suppose that whether you consider these to be Signs That The Apocalypse Is Here or Evidence That The Recovery Is Not Jobless depends on your point of view. At any rate:

• Condoms, iPads, and Toilet Paper: A Day In The Life Of An eBay Now Deliveryman

  The concept behind eBay Now is simple: Order goods online to have them delivered to your door in about an hour. The company has partnered with a growing list of big-box retailers, such as Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot, where customers can purchase everything from tablets to vacuums to laundry detergent. For a $5 fee (not including tip) and $25 minimum order, eBay Now's "valets," which include couriers traveling by foot, bicycle, and in some instances car and taxi, will personally deliver the items to you.

• I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

  Anyhow, regardless of whether the retailer itself or a 3PL contractor houses and processes the stuff you buy, the actual stuff is often handled by people working for yet another company—a temporary-staffing agency. The agency to which I apply is hiring 4,000 drones for this single Amalgamated warehouse between October and December. Four thousand.

• Amazon unpacked: The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?

  People in Rugeley, Staffordshire, felt exactly the same way in the summer of 2011 when they heard Amazon was going to occupy the empty blue warehouse on the site of the old coal mine. It seemed like this was the town’s chance to reinvent itself after decades of economic decline. But as they have had a taste of its “jobs of the future”, their excitement has died down. Most people are still glad Amazon has come, believing that any sort of work is better than no work at all, but many have been taken aback by the conditions and bitterly disappointed by the insecurity of much of the employment on offer.

• Inside Amazon's Warehouse: Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer

  Both permanent and temporary employees are subject to a point-based disciplinary system. Employees accumulate points for such infractions as missing work, not working fast enough or breaking a safety rule such as keeping two hands on an inventory cart. If they get too many points, they can be fired. In the event of illness, employees have to bring in a doctor's note and request a medical waiver to have their disciplinary points removed, those interviewed said.

• The Window: Watch the Rebirth of the American Car in Tesla’s Stunning Factory

  The red robots filling the building provide an eye-catching contrast to that stark background. They’re fully automated production systems using the latest technology, and that ensures not just a high level of quality, but the ability to adapt production techniques to be even more precise, more flexible, and more efficient.

  But while machines are great for repetitive tasks, humans are smarter. And that’s why Tesla made a big investment in its workforce. They’ve employed some of the best technicians in the area to help build the Model S, and the final product proves that you can perfect the man/machine balance in a production facility.

Perhaps Robert Hunter said it best, 45 years ago:

Got to get down to the Cumberland mine
That's where I mainly spend my time
Make good money/five dollars a day
Made any more I might move away

Gran Torino: a very short review

Here I come, bringing up the rear: four years after its first release, I finally got around to watching Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.

Gran Torino, justifiably, won Eastwood considerable acclaim, although one wonders if much of the praise was of the rather back-handed sort noted by Samuel Johnson.

Gran Torino is not an easy movie. You will be angry, frustrated, and upset.

But if you persevere, you will be rewarded: you will laugh, you will cry, you will be horrified and shocked, and you will be transported.

Like great art in whatever medium, what Gran Torino does is to take a clear-eyed, unflinching look at an aspect of human life, and, without blinking or backing away, reveal to you the truth of things, letting you inside a new understanding of not just how things are, but why they are.

There are lots of ways that people behave towards each other which I could wish to wish away. But, failing to so conjure up some alternate reality, the best alternative is to come away wiser and with a fuller understanding of how the world comes to be the way it is.

I'm glad I spent my time with Gran Torino, and I hope Eastwood has many more such works to share with us.

Oooh! Bridge Porn!

Gorgeous, just gorgeous: Constructing the World’s Largest Self-Anchored Suspension Bridge

Joseph Blum has been there to see it all as the men and women on the bridge have worked in all kinds of conditions to make the blueprints a concrete and steel reality. He shoots with 25-30 pounds of equipment, climbing high above the water and dangling from sections of massive infrastructure. Blum has become accustomed to the conditions on the bridge: wind, rain, fog, cold and extreme heights. He’s also 72 years old. Blum spoke with WIRED last week after coming off the bridge where he was “tied-off” (in a harness) and hanging over 150 feet above the water as he watched parts of the falsework (the supporting bridge) being cut away.

Postcards from the land of commodity hardware

I enjoyed this blog article from cloud computing vendor CloudFlare: A Tour Inside CloudFlare's Latest Generation Servers.

Their newly-deployed cloud computing servers contain:

• Storage: 6-24 Intel 520 SSD drives, 240 GB each
• Memory: 128 GB RAM
• CPU: 2 Intel Xeon 2630L CPUs at 2.0GHz; 12 physical cores (and 24 virtual cores with hyperthreading)
• Network: Solarflare SFC9020 10Gbps NICs, FiberStore SFP+ dual fiber/copper connectors

The RAM seems puny to me. But since their previous generation of servers (14 months ago) were 48 GB RAM, this is a big jump for them.

There's lots of good material in the article backing up their choices with information about their reasoning.

CloudFlare is a relatively low-end cloud company; as they concede:

Unlike companies like Facebook and Google that build data centers from the foundation up, at CloudFlare we deploy smaller footprints in more locations. This means we don't control the entire environment of the data center and haven't been able to do more exotic things like chassisless deployments, direct DC power, or exotic cooling strategies.

Thanks, CloudFlare! That was some gear-head joy :) .

The curse of monetization

Two weeks ago, the Internet was all abuzz over Ramin Shokrizade's great article about how some games try to use various psychological techniques to convince you to give them money: The Top F2P Monetization Tricks.

In order to improve the efficacy of the soft gate, these games also make it so that resource generation in-game increases faster than the player's ability to spend these resources (because building/spending takes so long). Thus these “earned” resources are lost (taken away) if real money is not spent. This is a method of combining reward removal with a soft gate to increase the pain level while at the same time layering, as the consumer may be gullible enough to assume these effects are coincidental or due to some strategic misstep they took earlier.

Then last week, the Internet was all abuzz over Gmail's Promotions feature, reported by media like Wired months ago (Gmail’s New Inbox Sorts Emails Into Tabbed Categories), but suddenly and breathlessly noticed by the rest of the world when Gmail rolled out their new inbox on a larger scale last week: Google uses Gmail's promotions inbox to promote a new kind of ad.

Google was very clear that while the new ads look like email, they're not actually emails, and advertising partners don't have any more access to your email address or other personal information than they did before. They merely get prime real estate compared to every other advertiser who tries to email you.

Now, this week, the focus moves to Linked In, with Nick Corcodilos's great article describing how Linked In is monetizing the job search world: LinkedIn Payola: Selling out employers and job hunters

LinkedIn sells positioning to job hunters while it sells database searches to employers. Talk about getting paid on both ends of a deal! Meanwhile, the “Basic” applicants (those other suckers, who ride free) are relegated to the bottom of the list.

I wrote back to LaToya: “Don’t the employers get upset when they see someone ‘paid’ to get bumped to the top?”

That was taken care of, explained LaToya: Employers “have the option to turn on and off the setting.”

So I buy top positioning in recruiting results for $29.95 per month, and the employer has the option to render my payment a total waste. The only winner is LinkedIn — higher revenues, higher stock price, higher corporate valuation, and more suckers paying. This is the leading website for recruiting and job hunting?

But as Derek Powazek describes in his superb deconstruction of the "If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product" meme: I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet, this is nothing new, just the continual re-discovery of the fact that you have to be aware of what sort of relationship you're entering into with all the various organizations you deal with.

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data.

But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

And we should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything, it excuses the behavior of bad companies, and it makes you sound kind of like a stoner looking at their hand for the first time.

On we go.

Do less to do more

Here's a little story. I'm sure you've seen this before, so I'm telling you nothing new. But it was on my mind, so I wrote it down...

At the beginning, you have the best of intentions. You know what the 12 rules are, so you're going to be agile. You're going to release early, and release often. You're going to use time boxing, so you keep your sprints short. You've established your personas and used them to write user stories. You know you need to deliver working software, so you publish a release train schedule, and hold your daily stand up meetings and include test driven development as part of your practice of continuous integration.

So far, so wonderful. There is not a thing wrong with any of this; these are best practices for a reason, and you do indeed have the best of intentions.

But as time goes on, little things occur.

A developer hits a bit of a speed bump and her estimated 3 day effort leaks into the 4th day. The build team are struggling with new tools, and the builds aren't immediately available. Automating the tests is turning out to be challenging for the testers, and sysadmin has struggled to deliver the VMs because of a vendor slip. The first several sprints have gone well, but a few bugs linger from the early releases. And, having finally had some hands-on time with working software, the product managers have re-thought the requirements, and the stories for the sprint that you've just begun are no longer seen as the most critical.

You make a fateful decision: you decide that if you just expand this sprint from two weeks to three, everyone will be able to catch up.

And it seems to work! Some extra bugs get fixed, a few more tests are written, the builds are being delivered more reliably, and, best of all, the developers found the time to react to product management's requests and were able to fit a few more features into this release.

But then, it happens again: the next sprint starts with its two week schedule, but on the fourth day you realize that, once again, a few things are cropping up, and oh, couldn't we just make this release a three week sprint as well?

After a few iterations, the three week sprints seem to be successful, but it's been confusing, as the team members are no longer sure whether they're working on a two week schedule or a three week schedule. The product managers and the developers are starting to figure out ways to fill up the time, adding larger projects to the plan, and you can hear new words in the hallway discussions: people are differentiating between "core" stories, "optional" stories, and "stretch goals". When you ask them what's going on, someone says:

Well, the schedules keep slipping, so to keep everyone fully occupied we've added a few extra optional stories into this sprint. We know we may not get to them, but if it turns out that somebody has time near the end of the sprint, they can pick up one of these projects and fit it in.

It seems like a reasonable request, and so you let it go.

But then, just as the sprint is supposed to be ending, on the next-to-last stand-up, one of the developers pipes up and says:

I thought I had enough time, so I've started on this story, and I've almost got it done. In fact, I've checked in some early code, so that's why those tests are failing. But I won't be done tomorrow, because it's a bit more complicated than we thought it would be. I just need two more days to finish, so let's slip this sprint until next Tuesday.

What are you going to do? Of course the slip is granted. Three week sprints weren't the end of the world; surely a four week sprint isn't going to kill us?

But soon you find yourself neck-deep in trouble: sprints are taking 4, 5, even 6 or more weeks. Predictability is gone, and confusion is rampant. You know it's reaching a climax when upper management convenes a two-day offsite with the topic: "How do we regain control of our development process."

What went wrong?

I think there are two basic issues here:

1. Firstly, there is a fairly simple feedback loop in effect here: the more you try to do, the longer each incremental cycle takes. But the longer each cycle takes, the more you try to do, as your staff automatically compensate for the longer cycles by embarking on more and larger projects. Moreover, one of the major reasons for having extremely short increments is to minimize the impact of estimation errors. As projects get larger, our ability to accurately estimate their size and difficulty drops dramatically, leading almost inevitably to schedule slippage as cycle sizes grow.
2. Secondly, and perhaps without your realizing it, you have been sending a message to your staff that "schedules don't matter." There are many different aspects you can prioritize in a software project: features, reliability, usability, performance, budget, timeliness, etc. Since you get what you reward, it should be little surprise that as you've been favoring things like features and budget over schedule, your team is reacting to that by paying less attention to the schedule and more attention to those things that you are rewarding.

So what can you do?

I think there's really only one answer:

Do less to do more

Agile processes can be very effective at controlling runaway development costs, and at coordinating teams working on complex problems with great uncertainty, which commonly arise during software development.

But you have to stay disciplined! Continually emphasize to your team that it is critical to keep each sprint small and contained, and that you'd prefer to omit a feature than to slip the sprint end date.

Keep the focus on small, easily understood user stories, operational features, and continually executing test suites, and your agile methods will bring you success.