Quantity vs quality - big litter vs few children - product strategy

There's a set of biological characteristics around number of children that seem correlated.

(picture source)

(picture source)

Some organisms, like mice, salmon, and dandelions, have lots of children in a litter. This is correlated with those children (or eggs or seeds) having little parental maintenance, small body size, short-lived as adults, not particularly robust, having a low probability of any individual one reaching maturity. Others have small litters or even just a single child, tend to large body size, long life expectancy, and lots of time and energy is spent in making it a high probability that the offspring lives to child bearing age.

The theory behind it is called r/K selection theory (I only described a vague phenomenon, not any reason or mechanism behind it). The r and K come form a simple equational relation those as probabilities to the number of offspring.

The theory says that the evolutionary pressure that's behind all these correlations is stability of the environment. 'r-species', those with quantity offspring like mice, tend to exist in unstable, unpredictable environments with a lot of room in their niche (high 'carrying capacity'). 'K-species', quality offspring like elephants, usually occur in stable (low population change) environments or close to filling the niche.

That said, there is a loose, not perfect, analogy with product design. Consider a widget making company. The company can spend all its energy creating lots of different widgets of acceptable quality. Some may work out some may not, but having a lot of then increases the chances that at least one will work out in the end.

Another company with the same resources may spend them all on making very few widgets but very refined specially made ones. Each of these few widgets are very likely to become successful because of the resources put into them

So, just like with animal reproduction frequency, it's a tradeoff. For constant resources, low probability survival of individuals can be offset by many individuals, and high probability of survival requiring lots of resources offset by having very few individuals.

For business, the corresponding explanation would be that in an unstable unknown business environment, having lots of products with slightly different features, can increase the chance of viability (eg web game companies have many games on offer but only one or two become famous). In a very stale business environment, with few companies selling few alternatives, a lot of company resources should be spent on just a few very large well-known products.

So this is just theory, and an analogy of a theory, and one can imagine many examples for which the explanation works, for which it practically works, and for what it just makes no sense.

'Agile' and 'lean' and 'fail quickly' are recent manufacturing trends. They are usually in contrast to the software development 'waterfall' planning method. Agile and waterfall don't necessarily apply well to the same kinds of software. Waterfall usually works best for a large scale well-understood design situation, and agile for a small project where all issues are not well-understood before hand and quick changes need to be made based on changing circumstances.

The analogy from biology to business to software development is not perfect but there are enough similarities to be recognizable.

One more analogy: scientific publishing. Historically (Europe), publishing of scientific knowledge started off as monographs (eg Aristotle, or at least that's all that has survived) and during the renaissance included personal correspondence which morphed into privately bound collections of papers and now (early 21st c) the library-industrial complex of journals. Textbooks and monographs are still considered the pinnacle, but are infinitesimally small by weight of paper, or more modernly, number of bytes.

Also, research has turned, during and after WWII, a government supported endeavor (where before only rich people had the means to do it).

There is so much research going on and papers being produced and science being fractured into narrower and narrower domains, that many papers are published (after being peer reviewed) and never read by anyone else. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It sounds bad because that effort seems wasted. I'm just pointing out the analogy with quantity vs quality; the recent trend is towards quantity. Actually I don't think quality has necessarily bee traded off, just that the resources has exploded, allowing lots of failures to exist alongside really great advances that would never have come without the resources.

Comments on "10 things that sound entirely true but are false"

A recent lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson is entitled

"10 Things we have heard and Re-told but are completely False"

Great lecture on mistakes in elementary astronomy  (only 2 slides for 10 minutes breaks the many slides rule in just the right way). You only need to know elementary physics and astronomy that you pick up in elementary school and life to understand how these are both right and wrong. Here is the main slide:

I want to comment on the flip between 'obviously right -> explanation -> so terribly wrong' presentation for each one, what the nature of the rightness and wrongness is. The generalities are that almost all of them are conceptual mistakes, but some are context mistakes and others naming mistakes. That is, some are actual errors in understanding, some are errors in misplacing the context intended, and others are mistakes in using the names themselves wrongly. No actual trick questions.

• What goes up must come down - this is a context dependent. In the context of a person throwing a ball in the air, yes, it must come down. In our limited experience that is entirely the case. But rockets are basically high powered throwing. And (most) satellites never come down
• The Sun is yellow - context. The little time we can actually look at the sun it is near the horizon when yellow is the predominant color. But most of the day it is up high and is blindingly white (it -could- be yellow but happens not to be).
• Weightless astronauts left Earth's gravity - with respect to say the ISS they loo weightless. But no they are falling around the Earth because of gravity along with the ISS. Also as far as words go, gravity goes forever, some satellites have 'left' = won't be pulled back in/not elliptical path.
• The North Star is the brightest - this is just a factual error, or rather an error of just assuming that an important thing excels in all aspects. Polaris is actually pretty faint in comparison to other main stars.
• On a dark night you can see millions of stars - an error of words (and counting?). there are a lot of stars you can see with the naked eye away from the city on a moonless night. But millions? If you count by the area of the sky, given average human eye acuity, there are 1000's. But millions is over reaching, just using the word 'millions' to mean 'a lot'. The Milky Way galaxy you say? Sure you can see the galaxy, but you're not actually able to pick out individual stars making up the milky band.
• Total solar eclipses are rare - This is a context error. Sure they're rare for your location, but not for the Earth. The band of darkness happens every couple years. Also, rare is relative.
• Days get longer in summer, shorter in winter - This is a naming error (also a little conceptual). Summer starts (by official name) on June 21st the solstice which is when the days start getting shorter. So if you include June in your meteorological summer, then yeah for part of a month the days do get a little longer before it goes backwards.
• At noon the Sun is directly overhead - conceptual: sure in them olden days, that was the definition of noon, when the Sun was at its highest (I'm not going to get into the complexities of directly overhead). Because of time zones and daylight savings, the clock time of 12pm has been set so that the Sun is mostly near the highest point, but further off depending how close you are to the border of a timezone. It's hard for the eye to tell how far off things are in the sky. 
• The Sun rises in East, sets in West - a naming problem, somewhat pedantic. Directly due East is a point on the horizon, and the sun only rises there on the equinoxes. Dates further away it is further away on the horizon (furthest at solstices). All it takes is looking at where the sun sets on June 21st. People just tend not to do that.
• The Moon only comes out at night - I think this fits all three. 'Comes out'? You only notice it at night. The moon is always there somewhere in the sky.  We've all seen a half moon during the day.

What are really the problems with EHRs

There are a lot of complaints about EHRs (2016). Too much useless typing, too many clicks to get what you want, records are not really available. scanned documents are a pain, release forms take forever.

The intended benefits of an EHR are obvious. Data gathered about a patient should be available to everybody who needs to see it, quickly and seamlessly, just like all the other rocket science apps that track our dating.

I see two major problems: data sharing, and user experience.

• Data sharing - electronic health records was never a community service. When a doc or medical situation of a small team needed an IT solution, it was solved only for that particular team or doc. Nothing was intended to be shared. This creates the data silos. It would be a perfect metaphor except real silos can exchange grain so easily just by trucking it over. There is also the other turn of phrase, standards, of which there are, comically, many. There's no universal heath record, or even univesal health patient identifier.
• User Experience, both data entry and retrieval. The pencil used to be the universal recording medium. It was infinitely creative, hobbled a bit by legibility. Typing is so ... easy... that you're expected to do it constantly, but you can't draw. For retrieval, the current EHRs have at best the most rudimentary search. The EHR for a single patient reads like an electronic phone book: if you know what you're looking for you can find it, but it doesn't tell you what the town is like. Everyone complains that you get a lot of data but you just don't get what is happening to the patient.

It's annoying to hear complaints with out solutions. For once I feel I have some.

• Data sharing - the world is going to have to spend some time and money making a universal health record, just like a utility. It's not difficult to do, it just takes some desire and money
• UX - there's a lot of deeply -thought out UX design that could happen. But really just a quick modification to the 'facesheet': add a 3 line text box for a few notes about current status. A lot more could be done but that would change things radically.

These problems are not rocket science. Technologically they are simple. Maybe labor is involved but not much thought.

Going away speech

People often ask you at the end (well, really a change) of a career if you have any regrets. Is there something you would do differently, now that you know the consequences, your deathbed confessions of life changing decisions, minor twists that inordinately changed the direction of later events, what you wish you had done or or what you wish you had not done or stopped doing over and over and over.

You will regret many things. But of all those individual things, you will regret the many times you've had to regret things and you will regret that you failed to regret the things you've done and haven't done. You will probably regret hearing this too.

But now that you are a half step out of our daily lives, I'll tell you this: at your new place, things will look up, things will look down and you may miss all those good ol' days and familiar likeable and happy faces, just feel comfortable in that, once the door has closed behind you, whatever happens back there, those that are left behind will end up blaming you for it.

How to sound native in a foreign language

How do you sound native in a foreign language. First, there's obviously the accent, how you get those weird vowels and inflection just right. There's just plain grammar, which words are masculine or feminine, is the the past perfect continuous participle or the simple hortative passive? Then there's just plain word choice: a sentence could be translated one-for-one but you just don't say it that way in the other language.

Most grammars/instruction of languages will give you this. They give you all the conjugations of all the regular and irregular verbs. They teach you the right preposition. And maybe you can give a lecture in high-speed particle physics or order cake at a coffee shop or even discuss basic politics with a taxi driver. And all this fluently.

But they don't tell you how to be influent like a native. How to make the mistakes a native speaker would make. Hemming and hawing and slurring and skipping unnecessary words and adding the slightest of hints at words that change the entire meaning of a sentence, all like a native.

So here's a list of things, some barely linguistic grunts, in English that you should learn in the other language of your choice to add that bit of informal fluency.

• Uh, um - /u/, /um/ just filler until you can think of the next word
• Hm - /h/ I'm thinking
• Hunh? (recently considered to be a language universal, the similar phonology) 
• What? (I didn't hear your or I didn't understand you)
• Uh hunh (yes) u hū
• Unh unh (no) ū ?ū
• Right? (wasn't I correct) also No?
• Hey ('watch out!' or 'look at me!')
• Pfft /f/ - expression of disdain
• Ha 
• just plain laughing - different in every language
• ow! (that hurts!)

Of course, these may not translate well, or translate at all. German has 'je', 'doch' etc, Chinese the sentence endings 'a', 'ba', 'ne'. What are the universals?

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It goes without saying (but I'm actually saying it and that's contradictory. Does that go without saying?) that profanity and other taboos are a large part of sounding native. I hesitate to add that as another category of things to learn. First, because they are almost by definition part of an informal language that is not very public and so not that necessary for communication. And second, it's bad enough when a native uses it, but it's extra awful when someone with even the slightest hint of an accent mouths off; it's rude _and_ they didn't do it right!. That said, here goes:

• ow! (I hurt myself)
• dammit! (I made a mistake)
• Damn you! (you made a mistake)
• You bad person! (insults)
• Leave me alone
• You suboptimal person! ()
• Taboo body parts and functions (sex, death, family, religion, and excrement), stand alone or in combination.

I've gone almost beyond mincing, but I think these are universal situations for which you can give canonical examples and extrapolate from there. Some languages have their own idiomatic domains (e.g. Quebecois seems to only use taboo terms that are also perfectly fine vocabulary of the Catholic Church, Arabic seems to favor comparisons to animals). There is surely a lot of overlap in the list, and many possibilities for each one. Expanding to full phrases may involve all of them.