Toyota

I couldn't agree more

Don't measure against rivals.

It seems like companies, when they develop a new product, just try to emulate what is already available in the market. Unfortunately, it takes 3 to 5 years to create a mature product. What is currently available is somewhere in that 3 to 5 year span. If you attempt to emulate that, you will also take 3 to 5 years. However, by that time, the market will have moved on. You will always be reactionary and you will always be behind the competition.

Data mining

To feed my continuing interest in behavioral economics, I've decided to dig deeper into data mining. It seems that every researcher uses data mining in some way. I'm taking a course in statistical approaches to natural language processing. It is definitely improving my understanding of the difficulties involved in analyzing the data. I also hope to get a few books on the subject soon.

It seems that real estate data is quite the gem of the behavioral economics world. I guess because it is free and easily accessible, it gets more interest, much like blogs for the search community.

Probably the best thing to do would be start with a question. What do I want to know about the world? And then start finding the right ways to answer it. I'm not sure what my question will be. Stay tuned. In the mean time, I wonder where you find real estate data...

Lost

The other day, we lost a student in our program. Our website, still in beta, was a bit too buggy and too confusing. He or she was right to leave, we should have put more time into user testing. Instead of throwing out half-baked ideas, we should have made them a little more solid. We released a student site and sent them a link, but didn't link to it on our homepage. We did have a link to our forum, but our forum username wasn't the same as the student username and password. But we learned from that experience. We're focusing heavily now on usability. We're trimming unnecessary fat and trying to unify our systems. I lost one student, but I don't want to lose another for similar reasons.

So, if we send out a link to it, the link better be on the front page. Also, people like to have a button that says "login". Finally, if you have multiple features, the login information should be consistent among all three. Since we grew organically and a little haphazardly, we didn't think of these things. Now they've bitten us and it is time to fix them.

Michael Buble

My wife and I went to see Michael Buble' last night in Memphis. He's a very good entertainer. However, it was sad to think that he is the best standards singer of our time. He's not on the level of a Frank Sinatra or even a Bing Crosby. I think of him more like a Sammy Davis Jr. type. I actually like his original compositions more than I do his take on the standards. Anyway, I would recommend going if you get the chance, he's worth that. I just wouldn't go more than once.

At least Memphis in May is coming up soon. I am looking forward to that!

Remote users

Remote users are the worst. It was nice when all I had to deal with were me and my friend. There were no versioning problems and when differences did arise, I just drove down the street and took care of them. Now, my software has to run on XP and Vista (yes, that can be problematic). It has to run with different versions of Internet Explorer. It has to deal with all sorts of problems that it didn't have to when it was just for me. However, I have to say I'm learning a lot. I can now manipulate the DOM like nobody's business. Is that useful? Probably not. But then again, when have I cared about usefulness, as long as its cool :)

Why doesn't everyone use unicode?

Well, my promise to blog daily was short lived, but I'm back now. Wednesday's are going to be hard for me to blog because I teach a night class about 2 hours from where I live. But, I should have blogged on Thursday, no excuses there.

On to today's topic.

I spent multiple hours yesterday dealing with a character set encoding issue. As I've mentioned, our chess training site is multi-lingual. Therefore, we store all of our messages in UTF-8. Our database, MySQL, is set to use unicode as is our server side language, PHP. Our client side language, perl, is also set to use unicode. However, no matter how hard I tried, whenever I sent a message using red hot pawn via our software, the message got corrupted. I could manually copy and paste the message from our database viewer to the message sender and it would work fine, but when my software did it, the ä came out looking like à and some other symbol that I wasn't familiar with. Of course, having it print to my screen from perl caused it to come out looking like a third symbol Σ. Obviously, Internet Explorer, perl, and my windows console were all using different character sets. I found my setting for Internet Explorer. It was set to ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1). I did not find the setting for my windows command prompt. I assume it was using some Windows character set. I tried changing the Internet Explorer setting, but it didn't seem to have an effect. Finally, after a few hours of hunting and validating various settings, I checked the encoding on the red hot pawn page. It was set to ISO-8859-1. Ah ha! So, they were enforcing their own encoding on the page. Apparently, when I copy and paste, the operating system does the conversion in the background for me. However, when my program does it, I have to do the conversion myself. Because of a few limitations, using the perl Encode module was not an option for me. So, I settled on utf8::downgrade. This won't work if someone's desktop settings are not Latin-1, but is suits my needs at the moment. Why can't everyone just use unicode?

The value of free

Predictably Irrational spends quite a bit of time talking about the value of free. Apparently, free makes you go bananas. For instance, if you are checking out at a store and are offered a hershey's kiss for free or a lindt chocolate truffle for $.14, over 70% of the people take the free kiss. If you charge just $.01 for the hershey's kiss, then over 70% of the people will take the truffle, even though it is $.15 (adding the penny back in for relative difference reasons). Free makes people bananas.

Another study came from Amazon. When Amazon started offering free shipping, their sales increased dramatically everywhere but in France. France saw no difference. After researching it, they discovered that the French division had decided not to go completely free, but instead charge 1 Franc (about US $.20 at the time). This small fee was enough to change people's brain chemistry. When they reduced the price to free, France also saw a big jump in purchases.

The next chapter expands this by considering social norms and market norms. We deal with both every day, but we try not to mix them. If you are using a social norm (like eating dinner at a friend's house), you don't offer to pay. You can give a small gift as appreciation, but you NEVER bring up money. Contrariwise, if you are using a market norm, then you want the best deal - you act selfish. What their research found was that the smallest payment was enough to change people from a social norm to a market norm. In fact, even the idea of money was enough to make the change. For instance, if you ask someone off the street to help you move a couch, they will agree. If, instead, you offer to pay them $1.00 to help you, they will turn and run because they are insulted. When operating in market norm phase they want the best deal, when operating in social norm phase, they want to help.

Perhaps we take the free Hershey's kiss over the lindt truffle because we want to operate in a social norm. We are social creatures and we want to be unselfish. Perhaps by thinking of the kiss as a free gift, we get to stay in our social environment that much longer, keeping out the harsh market realities.

Force and Counterforce

I'm programming the Personal Chess Training website with a friend. He does most of the content work (web design, chess problems, hints, etc...). I do most of the hard core programming. We split the database work, the hard stuff goes to me and he picks up the easier things.

The one thing that is interesting is how force and counterforce work together between us. For example, I prefer to take things slow and steadily. He prefers to rush in and see what breaks. I have my students set to 1 or 2 problems at a time, he sent out 25 to all of his students at once. I had hoped to add 1 or 2 additional teachers, he signed up 10. Often, his forces create counter forces in the code base. For instance, I got tired of hardcoding the teacher name in the code, so now I pull it automatically from their cookies. We needed some way to handle his problem load, so we created tracks and simultaneous games that could be set per teacher. I also added automatic restarting of mates in 1 since he was having to work through so many that students missed. Each push that he has given has resulted in a counter push by me to automate the site to reduce my workload.

I wonder how many other things have come about from a force and a counter force. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

Personal Chess Training

Recently, I've been working on a chess training site with a friend. He's around 2100 and is a very good endgame technician. We designed a course to help others with their endgames. If you are interested in improving your chess endgame (for free!), then please visit our site. You use a free correspondence chess site www.redhotpawn.com to play the games with REAL HUMANS. We've had a number of great comments on the redhotpawn forum that we can direct you to if you are interested.

To subscribe, just join red hot pawn and message me (thgibbs) or my friend (petrovitch) with a message indicating your interest.

Comparisons and Anchors

It's been a while since I posted, but I'm going to try and post daily from this point on - we'll see.

I've been listening to the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions on my iPhone that I got from my audible subscription. In this book, the author describes how we compare things and how anchors affect us. In short, an anchor is the first thing that we related to a category. I'll give an example. If we see a bicycle advertised for $20, then $20 becomes the anchor price for all bicycles. If we later see a bicycle for $40 we believe that it is either better in some way or overpriced, but we always go back and compare it to the first price we saw. He performed studies where anchors were used to manipulate the amount people would pay for an item. For instance, if people were asked if $10 were a reasonable price for an item, their maximum price was much higher than those people who were asked if $0.10 were a reasonable price. The initial anchor greatly affects how we view future spending on an item.

I believe that an iterative approach to software development should be described in these terms. With the first iteration we give the user an anchor. He then can make decisions about that program with the initial program in mind. His requests should be more rational because he is going to frame them in the context of the initial anchor. With a traditional waterfall approach, the user has to create the requirements without an anchor. This leads to unnecessary requirements and unused features because the anchor isn't present. There doesn't exist a "good" or "bad" context to help shape the program, there is only air. By creating an initial draft of the program, we create an anchor that guides the user, giving them the all important context that ensures a successful program.