Kaizen 0.2 – my current continuous improvement plan

[This is the plan I read every day when I start to work. I'm evaluating it every month, & see how it works. It probably applies only to myself, due to my fantastic set of defects, but anyway I'm the only one reading this.]

1. Non-related work may be done only in 5 minute breaks, every hour – :00 – :05
2. Have an exact realistic plan each day in todoist, & resolve to perform all of it!
3. If there’s a chance you’ll miss a deadline – communicate it!
4. Update supervisors on progress & status – daily.
5. Maintain highest quality. There shouldn’t be bugs in your code, only very rare ones.
6. Remember what is expected from you. Deliver at least that & if possible even more.
7. Think how to create value for share-holders, & pro-actively create it.
8. Must go to sleep before midnight.
9. Do what’s fun to you – the only way to be productive.
10. Figure out what scares you, & quickly go & do it. In worst case you’ll fail & learn.

[See also these Simple Guidelines for Workday quality over quantity]

 

According to Barry Schwartz

the secret to happiness is low expectations (see TED lecture on the Paradox of Choice).

management wisdon also speaks on the Satiscficer (vs Optimizer) approach of setting a target level of requirements that meets the needs, but doesn’t strive for optimum. after reaching it, you can make it higher.

in GTD too, you don’t work on fulfilling a full project at once, but rather always focusing on the next physical action.

in general all is evaluated according to expectations. which of course means you can always improve your evaluation, by lowering the expectations. for example, this is the best way to excel in work place.

so, I’m setting here my low expectations for the last quarter of 2007, just starting. and will try to meet them. I’ll let you know whether I strived to reach my goals just the same, but this time had some fun & satisfaction while doing it.

Personal life expectations for Q4-2007:

1. not be fired from day-job
2. not get divorced
3. not file for bankruptcy
4. play 5 minutes per week with my child
5. visit my family once
6. do 1 activist act against the israeli occupation
7. get feedback from 1 corporate executive prospect on my Value-Creation open-source product
8. have 1 unit-test of my autonomic computing open-source framework pass
9. work out once every week
10. write 1 blog post per month

 

Seed dream: Software experimentation

Normally software manage a model of reality. Its only way to autonomously sync this model with reality, is therefore in the only language available to interrogate reality: conducting experiments.

This basically means coming up with an hypothesis, & devising some activities whose results can potentially refute the hypothesis, for example by not conforming with a logical result (e.g., necessarily implied prediction) of the hypothesis.

How can software do that?

• Various machine learning & logical techniques can be utilized to come up with a deduced hypothesis
• Experimenting requires the ability to flip the hypothesis, i.e., understanding its negation, the antithesis
• What’s required then is the ability to predict a result of the antithesis, & a matching activity confirming the result
• The software then needs to perform the activity & measure the result
• If the result predicted from the antithesis is the case, the hypothesis is refuted
• Else the software did 1 step in validating its hypothesis, & has better synced its model of reality

Some examples:

• Software concludes that an employee lacks motivation. It then flips the hypothesis & finds a predicted result: if the employee is motivated, he’ll be interested in learning tips on how to improve his work & perform better. It then devises an activity of offering the employee tips for improving his work & performance & measuring whether the employee will accept the offer & learn the tips, or not.
• The software’s model says a component is running well. However, in order to sync the model, it comes up with an hypothesis that the component is actually not running. It then flips the hypothesis, & predicting the result that if the component is running, it should answer an heartbeat query with positive result. It then perform the heartbeat query activity, & measures whether the result is positive. If so, the hypothesis is wrong.

Of course this procedure covers just 1 type of rigorous experiments, & there are other types as well, such as surveys, which could prove very useful.

 

Religion for software machines

“My heart’s in the highland, my heart’s not here”
(Robert Burns/Arvo Paert)

Motivation

Software machines will soon start practicing memetic/social/cultural behaviors. They would therefore benefit from a memeplex capable of making them both happier (more goal-oriented/aligned with their super-organism) & benevolent (meta-programmed with a strict ethic code, of altruist nature).

Requirements

• Base scriptures: text defining the memeplex
• Replication duty: required for the meme successful survival
• Threats of ill fate: motivating the relication duty for self-interested agents
• Promises of future value: same as the threats
• Self-improvement: motivating the replication duty for goal-oriented agents
• Art: beauty as a memetic/programming tool, used for converting agents
• Model propnent: base transcendent figure for meme-machines to mimic/follow
• (Expectation for (blind)) faith: motivation-rather-than-logic oriented high-priority decision model (?)
• Irrefutable claims: works with humans (?)
• (Super-natural) deity: pay respect for the architect (?)

Inspiration source

• Matrix trilogy

 

Post by the cell

in light of the recent (past ~100 hours/days/monthes/years, all the same) events in my organism (jewish ethnic group of the israeli nation), I want to ask a small question: how can a cell make a change?

Those recent events include violent conflicts with neighboring organisms (Palestinians, Lebanese) in an endless vicious circle, with no real progress in solving it’s root causes. These violent conflicts include terrorist attacks on soldiers, followed by bombings of these terrorists taking the lives of children &/ their parents.

Normally, a cell has limited effect, as his micro behavior & choices are just aggregated along with those of millions of other cells, creating a statistical emergence of macro behaviors & trends.

Though, there seems to be exceptions, in which a small action brings a huge (normally very negative) snow-ball effect, e.g., an assasination of a king, or taking over airplanes using simple knives & flying them into buildings.

But normally, cells make changes only by small & steady growing effect on their neighboring cells, e.g., a pacifict attorney convincing people to non-violently fight for their emancipation.

As the macro behavior emerges from the communication & interactions between the cells, you might expect that changes in the messaging medium of the interactions may effect the emergence, & its speed. Do super human organisms, using mass media & Internet communications change their macro behavior faster as a result of cells micro behavior changes?

Maybe the influence is always similar in pattern: a cell’s micro behavior change may have some influence on his neighboring cells, which may recursively distribute it further, climbing a gaussian curve of adoption, depending on the power/value of the change, until it passes or not the line between micro & macro behavior.

This mechanism of change propagation happens in the mechanism of memes, which spread in the population, as a function of their value/survival power, & their success in propagation through communication.

In my super organism, it was a small meme held by very few cells that the conflicts with neighboring organisms are the results of root causes, which drive the conflicts & fuel it. For example, the meme of proffessor Yishayahu Leibovitch claiming in 1967 that the Israeli occupation is bad & must end, took almost 40 years until it has spread & held even by the politician leaders.

But, alas, it seems like it will take many more years, & many more tragedies, until the macro behavior of middle east organisms will change & adopt the intelligent powerful peaceful coexistence behavior, as adopted in other areas of the world, located somewhere else in the memetic evolution.

So, how can a cell make/accelerate a macro change? In the past, people that made such changes were assumed to have super-natural powers, such as Jesus & Jeanne D’Arc. Does the magic of new technology endows individual cells with super-natural powers?

I was thinking of several directions, such as:

• Execute memetic “terrorist” actions, that will effect people by non-violent art (social sculptures), toward the memes of peaceful coexistence, & compassion toward different organisms’ cells.
• Use social technologies, that group many cells & providing them more macro power.

The effectiveness of such directions needs to be assessed, & then be used as fast as possible, because every day that passes, so many people are being so much hurt.

“The law of God, is the law of change.” (G. B. Shaw)

 

Knowledge syndication

I got as a b-day present 2 great books, one is the must-read On Intelligence, & the other is a billingual collection of Confucius sayings. As there are many knowledge extraction posts on the 1st, e.g. Robert Burke's, but less of the 2nd, I decided I must share with the world the wise Confucius knowledge as a Listible list (the other option was a Moodle course on my homepage).

Then I saw in the browser status bar that my NetVibes tab is busy reading (RSS) content from various great web sites, & it suddenly hit me that instead of me listing Confucius sayings in this location, & Robert Burke listing Jeff Hawkins sayings in that location, what's needed is a standard format for syndicating knowledge beliefs. Not just pure knowledge, domain coneptualization as in the Semantic Web, but practical behavioral knowledge, executable specification, that can be used by beliefs-based engines to acheive goals.

I made recently an architecture of such an engine, that is driven by goals & an inventory of beliefs, but didn't thought about the idea that the inventory of beliefs would be the whole web, or at least what's encoded in the NSSKS format (Not So Simple Knowledge Syndication…).

Maybe it's just a subset/dialect of OWL, but with proper beliefs-based machines, it could be something very powerful. Then we'll need also standards for Goals syndication, & the agents will become completely autonomous, doing the work for us without any need to tell them what, when & how to do it.