Great Problems

Our world is constantly changing and the rate of change has constantly increased.
Today, changes are in large part caused by the humans themselves, due to the growth of their global population and the ability to use technology to change matter, i. e., in agriculture, energy production, goods production, and transportation. Part of the ability to steer the forces of nature and humans in controlled ways can be attributed to the invention of management:

"The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase manual worker productivity fifty-fold (Drucker 1999)."

The fast rate of change in the environment and in human societies causes great Great Problems wealth, but also great problems, e. g., social problems, economic problems and ecological problems (Vester 2000). As an example, very few people had foreseen or understood the financial crisis in 2008. Many bankers said in interviews, that nobody could understand the complex relationships of markets and financial products any longer. Humans must tackle the pressing ecological and economical problems.

Bush (1945, p. 108) summarised the motivation for this thesis nicely:

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.".

Drucker (1999) puts it more optimistic and foresees:

"The most important contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase knowledge worker productivity -- hopefully by the same percentage. [...] The methods, however, are totally different from those that increased the productivity of manual workers."

What could be methods to increase the productivity of knowledge workers?

Every click counts

A shot post on usability. Something that must be said. In user interfaces, every click counts.
That means, whenever I ever clicked on anything, the application must try everything to apply the semantics of this click forever.
The application must exploit and persist every decision a user has made -- until she expresses the contrary.
There should never be the need to run the same sequence of user interface commands again and again.

Practically, if I do spell-checking, the UI could remember my choice and apply the same spell-checking again, when I re-run spell-checking. Or even better: Highlight my choice so that I can press just enter. Or ask me, if this choice should be applied forever.

Loss of relevance for personal notes

From summer 2008 to Autumn 2009, 55 people have been interviewed with an online questionnaire the following questions (among others):

• A) In one week, how many personal items do you write down?
• B) Of these personal notes, how many are still relevant (in percent)
  • ... after one day?
  • ... after one week?
  • ... after one month?
  • ... after one year?

The average values for (B) are 71,55%, 51,73%, 36,09%, 20,55% with rather high standard deviations (0,223, 0,265, 0,278, 0,243).
However, when computing the loss of relevance from one time point to another one we get:

• Loss of relevance on first day: 28,45% (0,223)
• In the next six days: 19,82% (0,161)
• In the next three weeks: 15,64% (0,139)
• In the next 11 months: 15,55% (0,146)

with somewhat nicer standard deviations (in parentheses). Interpolating this we get the fraction of relevant knowledge after n days as depicted in this chart:



Assuming one creates 10 new personal notes every day, then the personal notes collection contains after 100 days 1000 notes of which 389 (38,9%) are relevant. After 500 days, 1368 of 5000 notes (27%) are relevant.

From Documents to Knowledge Models

Aha, mal wieder ein Beitrag in Richtung "From Documents to Knowledge Models".

Knobelaufgabe

Beim Schreiben seiner Doktorarbeit muss max knobeln.
Er hat 10 Frage-Päarchen mit je zwei Fragen (a) und (b).
Er hat fünf Probanden.
Nun muss er jeden Probanden befragen, so dass

• Er von jedem Fragepäärchen mindestens 2 x (a) und 2 x (b) verwendet hat. Dabei is es unvermeidlich das er pro Frage einmal mehr (a) oder (b) verwendet. Insgesamt sollen weder (a) noch (b) bevorzugt werden.
  
• Jeder Proband soll je fünf (a)-Fragen und fünf (b)-Fragen beantworten.
• Wenn er Proband 1 und 2 mit (a) befragt, also Proband 3,4, und 5 mit (b), dann soll es keine weitere Fragerunde geben, in der Proband 1 und 2 den selben Buchstaben bekommen und 3,4 und 5 andere. Ander gesagt, die Aufteilung von Probanden in zwei Grüppchen soll für jede Frage anders sein.
  

Wie muss Max die Probanden befragen? Gib für jeden Proband an, was er gefragt wird (a,b,a,a,...).

Wieviele Lösungen gibt es?

Einige Antworten werden in Kapitel 6 der Doktorarbeit veröffentlicht.

Das braucht die Welt

Simpel und nützlich.

Detect Unnecessary Code

A nice little Eclipse plugin that finds all methods and variables that are public -- but not used anywhere in your workspace!

Furthermore, it finds all methods that could be marked private or protected without harming the project.

Both makes your code easier to maintain! Try it.