I've never been that keen on the blockbusters and Worthy Movies From Big Name Directors – Mainstream movies. Sure Angels and Demons is okay for the Sunday Afternoon Movie but it's not what I want to watch on a Monday evening to set me up for the week, or a Friday to reward for showing up every day. As I get older, I'm more and more interested in little movies that tell a story and are strong on character and sense of place. (Genova was really good for sense of place: when I emerged from the Prince Charles Cinema in the evening, I felt a real shock that I wasn't actually in Geonva. Take me back now! I felt.) So here's a few I think are worth watching if you find them...
Strong Language – Simon Rumley
A bunch of London-based twenty-somethings talk about their lives to the camera, and one anguished guy in a warehouse tells a story about the night his girlfriend was attacked in front of him. It comes together in a remarkable way and works because the editing works so well. The characters are interesting and the actors are having fun with them. It's all in the writing.
Kids – Larry Clark
Never mind the “wake-up call about our children” bit. Watch this for the breakout performances from Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, the photography, one of the few convincing party scenes in a movie and performances so natural you don't even think it's a script and there's a director. Okay, the lead male characters are pretty much sleaze-bags, but did you miss the bit where I said Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson?
Groove – Greg Harrison
Set in the San Francisco rave scene at the end of the 90's and featuring an appearance by the world's greatest DJ, John Digweed, it's a night-of-revelations story with excellent dance music from real DJ's and general all-round craftsmanship. It's only the second time round you realise how good the writing and structure is.
Baise-Moi – Virginie Despantes / Coralie
Ignore the pseudo-intellectual hype. The first fifteen minutes or so are a standard French abduction / rape porno and the rest is full of casual, sordid, meaningless sex and violence. In the end one of the women is killed and the other arrested by the police. It would be much easier to ignore if it wasn't so well made and acted. This isn't art and it's not uplifting, but compared with the infamous tunnel scene in Irreversible it's a stroll in the park.
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist – Peter Sollett
“Are you sorry we missed it?” Asks Kat Dennings as she and Michael Cera go their separate ways at the end of a long night of teenage adventures which ended by missing the concert of their favourite cult band. “We didn't miss it. This is it.” Cera says. And he's right. The night is a metaphor for adolescence, and the “it” is finding their first adult relationship.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Monday, 22 June 2009
The Fallacy of Individual Event Probability – A Real Life Example
Identifying the proportion of a population willing to do X with the probability that any individual in that population will do X is a fallacy – the Fallacy of Individual Event Probability. What follows is a real example of it in action.
A very large bank of my acquaintence has a gadget that calculates the value of a given loan L of amount £A and term T months for a APR of r, call it V(r; L). It also has a gadget to calculate the probability that a customer in a credit segment S will accept an APR of r for the loan L, call it P(r). Maximise the product – the expected value - of the two by changing r. The APR that maximises the expected value is what the customer gets.
The most important thing the bank needs to know is what the default rate or bad debt will be from lending to a customer. Ideally, every customer should pay back the original loan and the interest, but in practice some don't. Credit analysts spend a lot of time trying to work out parameters that will tell them who doesn't and to what extent. In particular, they worked out that people in the segment S will lose x% of the original loan on average. That number is used to calculate the price rmax. Let the probability of purchase at rmax be pmax. At the lower-quality end of the risk scale, the maximising APR is surprisingly high and the corresponding probability of purchase is astonishingly low – around twenty per cent and sometimes even lower.
Take a look at the buying psychology. Each of the customers in the segment has a price beyond which they won't go, either because they can't afford the repayments, because they think they can better elsewhere, because the sheer folly of the entire enterprise hits them when they hear the cost or a dozen other reasons. Call that APR the shut-off point rshut. Let the proportion of customers in this segment willing to accept a price of r or higher be D(r). When you set the APR via the maximisation, you are only getting those customers for whom rshut >= rmax.
Here's why the bank has a problem. They are treating P(r) as the probability that any customer in the segment will buy at the rate r: their calculations assume that every customer in the segment has a probability of pmax of accepting the rmax. This makes the use of the loss rate of x% in the calculations correct. But it doesn't work like that. Why not? Because it's a logical impossibility: an individual customer either accepts the price or not, there's no probability. Uncertainty, yes, probability, no. What their gadget actually tells them is D(r) – the proportion of people willing to put up with a rate of r or greater. But this means they need the loss rate for that sub-segment, not for the whole segment, when they calculate the value of the loan. They have gone from a proportion of a population to a probability over the whole population and been mislead about the nature of the model they need in so doing.
Like many fallacies, a suitably benign world will not punish anyone too harshly for commiting it. To get round it in this case, the bank either has to calculate the appropriate loss rate, or has to show that within the segment S, for each subsegment defined by a value of r, the loss rate varies only randomly and with a small variance at that.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Blame The Victim – Variation 1,237
Back in the day when men were men and I worked for American companies, they told you you were redundant or re-organised to your face. Blunt. “We're letting you go” or “You'll be based in Cardiff from next week”. So what are the HR weasels doing? Well, we can apply for jobs in the new organisation. Only jobs of the same grade and only in the same business area. We can “preference” three – our applications will be sent to the “hiring manager”. Except the hiring manager doesn't know who he/she is yet. So we don't know who we're applying to. So when we don't get a job, it won't be because they decided they didn't want us, it will be because we “weren't successful in finding a position”. Our fault. Not theirs. Our fault if we are made redundant or have to go down a grade. Not theirs. Sure, go right ahead and blame the victim. And I have the slightest doubt I need to be out of there?
The next couple of weeks are going to be distracting. And then I can get back to making sensible posts and looking for a job.
The next couple of weeks are going to be distracting. And then I can get back to making sensible posts and looking for a job.
Thursday, 11 June 2009
The Danger Signs: You'll Want to Move On When You Realise...
1.Just how much is outsourced to EDS, Capita or IBM
2.There is no Style Book – anyone can format a letter any way they like
3.You have a better computer and better software at home
4.There are whole sections of the office that are spookily empty
5.Expenses are paid from India
6.There's no induction to the company's products, senior management, history and main procedures
7.All the people you like turn out to be contractors
8.No-one can remember the last time anyone was promoted internally
9.When you ask for any information about anything, everyone refers you to the Intranet, but no-one knows where on the Intranet
10.A lot of people have been in their jobs for less than two years
11.When you ask about career development, they tell you it's for you to define for yourself
12.When you ask about training, it's all online
13.Half the projects you hear about are cancelled, delayed or held over because of some mega-project that is always in another part of the business
14.You ask how you get an “outstanding” on your appraisal, and no-one knows: when you ask your manager, her answer is vague and unhelpful
15.You are encouraged to develop “people skills” and your personal presentation, not to develop substantive technical skills and knowledge
16.Everyone spends a lot of time explaining the past rather than trying to plan for the future
17.The organisation talks about “leadership” not management
18.There's a six paragraph procedure about sending information by mail
19.The toilets keep blocking and the ventilation is poor
20.The boys / men are better-looking than the girls / women
2.There is no Style Book – anyone can format a letter any way they like
3.You have a better computer and better software at home
4.There are whole sections of the office that are spookily empty
5.Expenses are paid from India
6.There's no induction to the company's products, senior management, history and main procedures
7.All the people you like turn out to be contractors
8.No-one can remember the last time anyone was promoted internally
9.When you ask for any information about anything, everyone refers you to the Intranet, but no-one knows where on the Intranet
10.A lot of people have been in their jobs for less than two years
11.When you ask about career development, they tell you it's for you to define for yourself
12.When you ask about training, it's all online
13.Half the projects you hear about are cancelled, delayed or held over because of some mega-project that is always in another part of the business
14.You ask how you get an “outstanding” on your appraisal, and no-one knows: when you ask your manager, her answer is vague and unhelpful
15.You are encouraged to develop “people skills” and your personal presentation, not to develop substantive technical skills and knowledge
16.Everyone spends a lot of time explaining the past rather than trying to plan for the future
17.The organisation talks about “leadership” not management
18.There's a six paragraph procedure about sending information by mail
19.The toilets keep blocking and the ventilation is poor
20.The boys / men are better-looking than the girls / women
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Welcome To My Wonderful World of Work
A pricing team adds value in one of four ways: first, often as being the only people in the company who understand marginal costing and contribution analysis, the fundamental techniques needed to evaluate the worth of a product and the profitability of a price; second, by building tools to automate price and proposition analysis, administration and reporting; third with their knowledge of the market: competitors, suppliers, customers, the commercial relationships between them and the prices between them; and fourth, by being the only people with the sheer nerve to make the decisions. If it doesn't do these things, it's really only a pricing admin team, preparing and evaluating quotes from account execs and sending prices and specs for data entry.
There is no market. Banks pretend they are in competition for loans, but they aren't. If you don't have a current account or a mortgage with the bank, they might not quote you at all, or they may give you a silly price. The very act of having them look up your credit rating with Experian or Call Credit actually affects your credit rating – downwards. You can't go shopping for prices: what you see in the window is not what you will pay. The few lenders who don't need you to have a current account only lend to the top end of the credit bracket, so the odds are that's not you. There are no suppliers – the money comes from captive depositors or the money markets via the Treasury function. The customers? We knows everything about them except the things any real marketeer would want to know.
The cost analysis is done for the pricing people. The largest cost is bad debt from people not repaying loans and that is the domain of credit risk. I grant that consumer credit risk is a specialist subject, but it's not that hard and people don't do it that well. All the models are backward-looking. In all the banks. No-one has built a forecasting model. They have had thirty years since I started working and learned to look for relationships between GDP (or inflation or industrial production or average earnings or whatever else was published by National Statistics) and whatever we wanted to model. They haven't looked at using Black-Scholes option-pricing techniques, where there is a huge literature on forecasting. I say this to prove that what banks do is not that sophisticated – tedious maybe, but not sophisticated. The point is, the cost analysis is done elsewhere.
The pricing models have been devised and coded (in Excel – nothing like a sharp, professional look) by a specialist part of the business where dwell all the model-builders and data crunchers who aren't in credit risk. So the pricing team has no internal programming and modelling expertise of its own – except me and neither are on my job description.
It doesn't set prices because it doesn't make decisions. Those are made after endless crunching of huge samples by a group of “senior” managers, and they always ask for more figures or re-assurance. Because making a profit is all very well, but it can't get in the way of sales. Banks are not so sales-driven as sales-obsessed. No, actually, obsessed is mild. Banks have a mania about sales. Compared to banks, Mars, Tesco, Sainsbury or Microsoft think that it's nice you buy their products. Banks want to have both their hands in all your pockets and the only reason they haven't taken more is that that Chancellor of the Exchequer got their first. And all the pricing analysts around me do is report and analyse sales, model the effect of pricing on sales and notionally on the improvement on profitability. They aren't pricing analysts, they are sales analysts.
Finally, I've understood why I just can't get that interested in what they do. No market knowledge, no commitment to developing technical skills, no interest in the outside economy, no decision-making, no modelling and tool-building. Nothing I like doing. Not pricing at all, really.
And then there's the hygenie stuff: the Internet connection is awful, we only get to use M$ Office and VBA, the bullshit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it, productivity is daily hampered by "risk management" and IT policies dreamed up by people who don't use computers, there's no training and the idea of Cool New Stuff being fun and paying off down the road? The list is a LOT longer than this. Don't even discuss the toilets.
And I've got to pick a job in the new organisation – to show willing. They will put me in the one they want me in anyway – but they are pretending we get to choose (or “preference” as a verb) up to three jobs. Before they tell us we're doing the fourth.
There is no market. Banks pretend they are in competition for loans, but they aren't. If you don't have a current account or a mortgage with the bank, they might not quote you at all, or they may give you a silly price. The very act of having them look up your credit rating with Experian or Call Credit actually affects your credit rating – downwards. You can't go shopping for prices: what you see in the window is not what you will pay. The few lenders who don't need you to have a current account only lend to the top end of the credit bracket, so the odds are that's not you. There are no suppliers – the money comes from captive depositors or the money markets via the Treasury function. The customers? We knows everything about them except the things any real marketeer would want to know.
The cost analysis is done for the pricing people. The largest cost is bad debt from people not repaying loans and that is the domain of credit risk. I grant that consumer credit risk is a specialist subject, but it's not that hard and people don't do it that well. All the models are backward-looking. In all the banks. No-one has built a forecasting model. They have had thirty years since I started working and learned to look for relationships between GDP (or inflation or industrial production or average earnings or whatever else was published by National Statistics) and whatever we wanted to model. They haven't looked at using Black-Scholes option-pricing techniques, where there is a huge literature on forecasting. I say this to prove that what banks do is not that sophisticated – tedious maybe, but not sophisticated. The point is, the cost analysis is done elsewhere.
The pricing models have been devised and coded (in Excel – nothing like a sharp, professional look) by a specialist part of the business where dwell all the model-builders and data crunchers who aren't in credit risk. So the pricing team has no internal programming and modelling expertise of its own – except me and neither are on my job description.
It doesn't set prices because it doesn't make decisions. Those are made after endless crunching of huge samples by a group of “senior” managers, and they always ask for more figures or re-assurance. Because making a profit is all very well, but it can't get in the way of sales. Banks are not so sales-driven as sales-obsessed. No, actually, obsessed is mild. Banks have a mania about sales. Compared to banks, Mars, Tesco, Sainsbury or Microsoft think that it's nice you buy their products. Banks want to have both their hands in all your pockets and the only reason they haven't taken more is that that Chancellor of the Exchequer got their first. And all the pricing analysts around me do is report and analyse sales, model the effect of pricing on sales and notionally on the improvement on profitability. They aren't pricing analysts, they are sales analysts.
Finally, I've understood why I just can't get that interested in what they do. No market knowledge, no commitment to developing technical skills, no interest in the outside economy, no decision-making, no modelling and tool-building. Nothing I like doing. Not pricing at all, really.
And then there's the hygenie stuff: the Internet connection is awful, we only get to use M$ Office and VBA, the bullshit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it, productivity is daily hampered by "risk management" and IT policies dreamed up by people who don't use computers, there's no training and the idea of Cool New Stuff being fun and paying off down the road? The list is a LOT longer than this. Don't even discuss the toilets.
And I've got to pick a job in the new organisation – to show willing. They will put me in the one they want me in anyway – but they are pretending we get to choose (or “preference” as a verb) up to three jobs. Before they tell us we're doing the fourth.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
How To Re-Make A Bad English Movie
Things To Do Before You're Thirty – one of many joint equal holders of the worst British film award – was an awful film of a really good idea. A bunch of men who play for an amateur football team are asked by a female journalist what they would like to do before they turn thirty. The journo is a friend of most of their partners. So the men scribble down various answers, many of which are either silly Man Things or guaranteed to upset their partners – the young lad with Billie Piper for a girlfriend wants to have a threesome. The journo publishes the list and shares it with their partners and the rest of the movie goes over the usual arguments, revelation of homosexuality and missed threesome with Billie Piper (I was very upset at that bit). After splitting up, leaving and breaking friendships, everyone comes together at the end to Win The Final Match. Trust me, it doesn't work a tenth as well as it sounds. It was written by an Eastenders staff writer. Right at the start you ask how the lads could be so dumb as to tell a journalist the truth, later, when you meet some of their partners, you wonder how on earth they ever got together in the first place, and of course you wonder what a girl who looks like Billie Piper is doing going out with a scrawny lad who looks like that. The whole thing is implausible – especially the Gay Revelation moment.
So this is how it could have been done. The journo asks for the lists, the lads write down some suitably harmless twaddle designed to be shown to their partners – because they are smart enough to work that out - except one who tells it like it is for him – call him The Lad. Over the next week, they discuss the question, in pairs and threes, finding out that none of them told the truth. So what would do they want to do, they ask each other – safe this time from the censorious eyes of the female. This lets us see the relationships between them, understand who they are and what their lives are like. Some of them, we learn, have Things To Lose, while others Have Yet To Live (this would be Billie Piper's boyfriend) and some Hate Where They Are. We meet their partners, most of whom are Thoroughly Nice Women – except The Bitch and the Wet Rag. Now we know what the stakes are. One by one the men start to go after what they want, and discover the price in terms of work, change and above all conscience. We learn the difference between a fantasy and a dream. We cheer when the Bitch gets hers, shake our heads sadly when the Wet Rag gets left behind, chuckle when The Lad comes good, approve when dreams are abandoned for Marriage And Children, wonder if marriage and children will last when He Takes A Job In Another Town, and the boyfriend lets himself get jumped by a girl we've only seen in the background after he sees Billie Piper going at it with another girl one evening. Cue music and close with a three-way cut between one of the lads getting ready to sky-dive (which was what he wanted to do) and another with his girlfriend getting ready to ski-jump and the Bitch unpacking her bags in a new town. (I like a little ambiguity in the ending.)
So this is how it could have been done. The journo asks for the lists, the lads write down some suitably harmless twaddle designed to be shown to their partners – because they are smart enough to work that out - except one who tells it like it is for him – call him The Lad. Over the next week, they discuss the question, in pairs and threes, finding out that none of them told the truth. So what would do they want to do, they ask each other – safe this time from the censorious eyes of the female. This lets us see the relationships between them, understand who they are and what their lives are like. Some of them, we learn, have Things To Lose, while others Have Yet To Live (this would be Billie Piper's boyfriend) and some Hate Where They Are. We meet their partners, most of whom are Thoroughly Nice Women – except The Bitch and the Wet Rag. Now we know what the stakes are. One by one the men start to go after what they want, and discover the price in terms of work, change and above all conscience. We learn the difference between a fantasy and a dream. We cheer when the Bitch gets hers, shake our heads sadly when the Wet Rag gets left behind, chuckle when The Lad comes good, approve when dreams are abandoned for Marriage And Children, wonder if marriage and children will last when He Takes A Job In Another Town, and the boyfriend lets himself get jumped by a girl we've only seen in the background after he sees Billie Piper going at it with another girl one evening. Cue music and close with a three-way cut between one of the lads getting ready to sky-dive (which was what he wanted to do) and another with his girlfriend getting ready to ski-jump and the Bitch unpacking her bags in a new town. (I like a little ambiguity in the ending.)
Okay, there's more to this, and it will follow.
We had the Big Announcement today and I understand that there were tears and tantrums in Chester. There were some stony faces in London. No-one understands the new organisation, which is littered with junior analyst posts. The job descriptions are a hoot, the roles are shallow and ill-thought out. Of course they are - the whole thing was made up of whole cloth from the senior guy's head. Or is the most calculated series of insults HR ever came out with - nah, they aren't that smart. Between now and next June, everyone will have to apply for a job in the new organisation. If they don't get one - and twenty per cent of the roles are going - they win compulsory redundancy. Now the thing to see is how many people decide they have had enough of being messed around by an insensitive, self-centered organisation and take the money. My guess is that it will be way more than HR expect.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
The Philosophy of Mistakes: Summary So Far
At the start of this series of posts I was asking why I made so many mistakes. There's been a bit of a lull in this subject – partly because some of it turned up in a presentation at work. I understand now that I was wondering about a number of different things.
First, why was I letting the wrong people see working drafts?
Second, why wasn't I asking other people to help me remove the errors and oversights, which is a natural part of producing a document?
Third, why did / do so many errors and oversights slip by me?
Fourth, why can't I get it right first time?
Here are the answers. First, because I didn't understand that the receivers of a document are The Enemy, whose only intention in asking for anything is to gloat over the mistakes in it. Second, because there's no-one in my team I can ask. In an organisation where everyone is busy and there are few shared skills and knowledge (everyone's a single point of failure) your colleagues can't help you. Third, because I don't really know what answers to expect, so I can't see the wrong numbers. That and the fact that I'm not as sharp as I used to be – even if the grey hair is distinguished.
Fourth is not really about mistakes. It's really a way of asking, why am I so damn slow? The answer to that is, I'm not. Okay, so you can leave me in the dust, but you work for a serious technology company: six months in a retail bank with our lousy equipment and your brain will turn to mush as well. I give myself the impression of being slow because I dive right in and start cutting code – and I'm the only person who does that - Not. With spreadsheets, it's tempting to draft directly in the workbook: the average Excel-basher would think we were crazy if we suggested that what they are doing is the same as cutting Java or VBA raw. But it is – the spreadsheet is the code. Of course, I don't understand the problem when I start and only begin to as I try to solve it. Then it feels like I'm making mistakes or being slow – because it's code and code should compile. So I get side-tracked from the task of understanding the problem and how to solve it into writing first-draft code that compiles. Ooops. I'd be better off if I did some scribbling of ideas on a pad of paper first. That doesn't look like working to some people, and it also makes me feel like I should be able to talk about the task with someone else. Which I can't. It's easier to tap away at the keyboard and look as though I'm working – which I am, but not always effectively. Also, the open-plan office is not a great place to concentrate. (Wondering if you're going to lose your job always helps as well. We should be hearing sometime in the coming week.)
This isn't all of it, but it takes a lot of the emotion out of the subject for me. More to follow on it.
First, why was I letting the wrong people see working drafts?
Second, why wasn't I asking other people to help me remove the errors and oversights, which is a natural part of producing a document?
Third, why did / do so many errors and oversights slip by me?
Fourth, why can't I get it right first time?
Here are the answers. First, because I didn't understand that the receivers of a document are The Enemy, whose only intention in asking for anything is to gloat over the mistakes in it. Second, because there's no-one in my team I can ask. In an organisation where everyone is busy and there are few shared skills and knowledge (everyone's a single point of failure) your colleagues can't help you. Third, because I don't really know what answers to expect, so I can't see the wrong numbers. That and the fact that I'm not as sharp as I used to be – even if the grey hair is distinguished.
Fourth is not really about mistakes. It's really a way of asking, why am I so damn slow? The answer to that is, I'm not. Okay, so you can leave me in the dust, but you work for a serious technology company: six months in a retail bank with our lousy equipment and your brain will turn to mush as well. I give myself the impression of being slow because I dive right in and start cutting code – and I'm the only person who does that - Not. With spreadsheets, it's tempting to draft directly in the workbook: the average Excel-basher would think we were crazy if we suggested that what they are doing is the same as cutting Java or VBA raw. But it is – the spreadsheet is the code. Of course, I don't understand the problem when I start and only begin to as I try to solve it. Then it feels like I'm making mistakes or being slow – because it's code and code should compile. So I get side-tracked from the task of understanding the problem and how to solve it into writing first-draft code that compiles. Ooops. I'd be better off if I did some scribbling of ideas on a pad of paper first. That doesn't look like working to some people, and it also makes me feel like I should be able to talk about the task with someone else. Which I can't. It's easier to tap away at the keyboard and look as though I'm working – which I am, but not always effectively. Also, the open-plan office is not a great place to concentrate. (Wondering if you're going to lose your job always helps as well. We should be hearing sometime in the coming week.)
This isn't all of it, but it takes a lot of the emotion out of the subject for me. More to follow on it.
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