Whimsley

Software Featuritis, or Why Checklists are Bad

Here is a common-sense approach to software development, which I'll call the checklist approach:

1. Propose a new feature.
2. Ask if the feature is useful.
3. If the feature is useful, implement it.

This essay uses shows why the checklist approach fails: why adding useful new features to a software product can make the overall product less useful to end users. This is a phenomenon I like to call  featuritis.

At its simplest, a software product is a set of n independent features (i = 1,..., n). Each feature has a utility to the customer of u_i. The overall utility of the software product to the customer is therefore

U = Sum( u_i )

This tells you to keep adding features to the software to increase its utility, end of story. Not very interesting.

But software is not quite so simple as this. Each feature has not only a utility, but also a cost -- c_i. This is the cost to the end user---not the developer---of using or deciding not to use the feature. The cost may include the time taken to find out about a feature, deciding how to use it, whether it is the right feature to use (among the options available), difficulty exploring and evaluating the feature, and so on.

With this cost added in, the overall utility of the software product to the end user is

U = Sum( u_i - c_i )

Let's keep things really simple, and assume that all features have the same utility (u). We can't do this for the cost though: the cost of using a feature inevitably depends on the total number of features in the product. This may be because it takes longer to find information about a particular feature in the documentation or user interface, or because it is more difficult to decide if this is the right feature to use among those that are present, or a host of other reasons (more on this below). So the cost of finding out about a feature is (c * n).

The overall utility of the software is then

U = Sum( u - c * n )

or, as all the terms are equal,

U = n ( u - c * n )

Which looks like this:

The utility function increases up to a maximum at n = ( u / 2 c ), and then decreases: that is, beyond a certain point, adding new features actually makes the software less useful. In other words, software is vulnerable to featuritis: it can become so complex that its complexity makes it useless. It may contain useful features, but finding these needles in the haystack of the product is frustratingly difficult. Experience tells us that this is a reasonable, if not surprising, result.

What is more, adding features that are useful in and of themselves can still introduce featuritis. For a feature to be useful, its utility (u) must be greater than the cost of finding out about it (c * n). So using this model, features will be added to the software until the following condition is met

n = u / c.

which is where the line crosses the x axis. The maximum utility of the software occurs at half this value (n = u / 2 c): if we continue to add features until the last feature is only just useful, the overall utility of the software will be U = 0. If features were stopped at (u / 2 c), the utility would be U = ( u2 / 4 c ). Even a useful feature degrades the usability of other product features, by making them harder to use (increasing the cost of using them).

It follows that checklist driven software development will lead to poor software. Checklists are simply lists of useful features, without any consideration of the costs they introduce to the customer. A longer checklist is often assumed to be intrinsically better than a short checklist, but we have just seen that this may not be so.

What it is about this very simple model that produces these results? The key assumption is that features have independent utilities, but that the costs of using features are not independent. In economists' jargon, features exert a negative externality on each other. Is there a reason to think this might be true?

The independence of feature utility is simply a matter of defining a feature
properly. For example, if a very common scenario requires two "features" (A and B) then the utility of feature A depends very much on whether feature B is present or not. By itself, the utility of feature A may be very low -- you can't do much with it by itself. Once feature B is present, though, feature A becomes very useful. They are not independent features. The problem here is that "features" A and B are incomplete, and so are really part of a single properly-defined "feature". The model requires that we define features in terms of tasks that customers can carry out. The model does not tell us to implement 5/6 of a feature and then not implement the last sixth because of complexity worries.

The second assumption is that the cost of using a feature is dependent on other product features. The idea of a cost of using a feature is a very general one, and is not only "how long does it take to locate this feature in the documentation?". It may also reflect the confusion and uncertainty introduced by a plethora of choices. For example, if there are multiple ways of carrying out a task, the customer must decide which way is the best. If there are other features that appear to be related, the customer must investigate those (and discard them) before deciding on a course of action. If there are prerequisite features that must be understood, the customer must learn these also. They must spend time evaluating the alternatives. It seems reasonable to assume that the cost of wisely using an appropriate feature does depend on the overall complexity (number of features) in the product. The job of user interface designers and documentation teams is, at least in part, to minimize this destructive interference between product features. Good UI and documentation can help postpone the point at which featuritis sets in, but can't hold it back for ever.

Of course, while simplified models like this might help us watch out for certain kinds of trap, they can't help us decide which specific features to include, and which to discard. Also, there is not much to be gained from trying to pinpoint the particular u and c associated with features or products. Despite the equations, it is a qualitative model and cannot be easily quantified in a useful manner. Finally, while it is certainly true that ui and ci are far from constant in any product, there is probably not a lot to be gained by trying to refine their representation. As soon as models like this are made more complex, the result is a very open-ended and conditional prediction. Building fine software products can't be reduced to equations.

But I do think the central ideas are broadly correct: complexity does influences cost and utility in different ways, software does tend to become overly complex. and---most importantly---asking "is this a useful feature?" is not the right way to develop good products.

Lawyerbots Again

Yappa Ding Ding wrote a lively post about automating intellectual jobs in response to my gripes about lawyerbots. Yappa is more optimistic than I was being about the impact of this automation. As she says:

Wouldn't it be cool if we all had our own lawyerbot to protect our interests and automatically communicate with other lawyerbots. Just put my libel case winnings in my bank account, please!

...Similarly, we can and probably will automate vast chunks of what is done by lawyers, doctors, politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, computer scientists, and so on. This could lead to a reduction in prices, just as manufactured goods are much cheaper than they used to be. That could be important. For example, now, if you are charged with a crime and have enough money that you are ineligible for government-paid legal assistance, you will likely go broke defending yourself. Ditto if you get involved in a contested divorce settlement. Even handling a real estate transaction costs hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal fees, when most of the work is rote. It would be a social revolution if the cost of getting legal advice became more reasonable.

So was I being unnecessarily grumpy or just necessarily grumpy?

Well, probably yes a bit of both. The picture that Yappa paints is definitely cool. Right now justice is, as someone once said, open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel, so making legal help cheaper is going to help a lot of people. For example, JS showed me this thing called Eulalyzer which "reads" those pesky end-user licence agreements and, well, let's let it speak for itself...

EULAlyzer can analyze license agreements in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you're about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or much much more.

This is a Good Thing, and I'm sure there are lots of other ways that software could lower efforts and costs, especially routine documentation checks, like real estate transactions and so on. Why pay lawyer rates for a person to read through these routine documents when software could go through them and flag any unusual text. Great.

But the down side remains. There are two parts to most legal exchanges - one side prepares a document and delivers it; the other side reads it and responds. While low cost makes it easier to do the reading and responding, it makes the preparation easier as well. And more than anything, it makes the delivery easy - and this is where the problem really lies: there is a prospect of spamlike legal threats, warnings, and so on because they can take advantage of the cheap production of documents and then multiply that cheapness (if that's the right phrase)  to  scatter them widely.

What we really want, of course, is the one without the other. E-mail without the spam; downloads without viruses, networks without trojans. Not a lot of chance of that, but perhaps we can minimize the downside of some of the new developments if decide that spam legal threats are invalid.

Economists and Sociologists on Organs

---

Kieran Healy, Last Best Gifts, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Gary Becker and Julio Elias, Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donation, (working paper).

---

The distinguished theoretical chemist John Murrell wrote that physicists like to solve simple models exactly, while chemists like to solve detailed models approximately. There are benefits to both approaches. Take the study of solid state electronic and magnetic properties, where the early work of physicists was to compute, using very sophisticated techniques, the properties of highly simplified models such as a free-electron gas with a uniform background of positive charge. Chemists, on the other hand, were busy studying complex materials with intricate structures, but didn't have the theory to do more than classify the kind of observations they made. As a result, physicists gave theories for superconductivity and other exotic phenomena, but because their theories had so little information about the specifics of molecular structure they couldn't predict the kind of material where superconductivity would be found. The discovery of high-temperature superconductors in the 1980's had physicists as well as chemists scratching their heads. The empiricism of chemistry (where theorists form about 10% of the population) compared to physics (where the number is, I think, more like 30%) forces theoretical chemists to deal with the messy and specific problems that their discipline's vast body of observation and experiment demands.

Economists are to sociologists as physicists are to chemists. Whenever you see a discussion of scientific method and rigour in the social sciences, the comparison is always made to physics. This is not surprising, because physics remains the archetypal science, but it's a bad thing because the social sciences -- like chemistry -- have to stay grounded in the empirical side of what they study. The details of any particular problem are so often crucial to the outcome that you can't use "the light touch of the physicist" and expect to come out with predictions. It's all very well to talk in the abstract of markets, but when reality hits it's the details that often matter. Sociologists spend their lives looking at those details, like chemists they tease out conclusions from the structure and dynamics of particular circumstances and events. And like chemists, they get less respect than their more formal, more model-driven, and less empirical siblings.

These different proclivities are on show when sociologist Kieran Healy looks at blood and organ donation in his new book Last Best Gifts and when economists Gary Becker and Julio Elias look at organ donations in their widely discussed working paper, and my ex-chemist self is glad to say that Healy comes out looking better.

The basic problem is simple. Advances in surgery and in immuno-suppressing drugs have made organ transplants safer and cheaper since the 1980's. The number of organ donors (whether live or dead) has grown, but not nearly enough to keep up with the demand, and the result is a growing shortage of organs. People who could be saved are dying while waiting for "donor" organs. What can be done?

Becker takes, as anyone who has read any of his writings would expect, a forthright and straightforward approach. Shortages mean that supply and demand don't match. As he says in a blog essay  on this issue:

To an economist, the major reason for the imbalance between demand and supply of organs is that the United States and practically all other countries forbid the purchase and sale of organs. This means that under present laws, people give their organs to be used after they die, or with kidneys and livers also while they are alive, only out of altruism and similar motives. In fact, practically all transplants of kidneys and livers with live donors are from one family member to another member. With live liver transplants, only a portion of the liver of a donor is use, and this grows over time in the donee, while the remaining portion regenerates over time in the donor.

If laws were changed so that organs could be purchased and sold, some people would give not out of altruism, but for the financial gain. The result would be an increased supply of organs. In a free market, the prices of organs for transplants would settle at the levels that would eliminate the excess demand for each type of organ.

You make supply match demand by introducing a market -- paying people for their organs (eg, kidneys) or for the organs of their family members after death -- because that's what markets do. So he and Elias do some rough calculations on what would be needed ($32,000 per liver, while the current cost of a liver transplant is $175,000), and say "let's do it". Becker is under no illusion that this proposal will be adopted soon, but believes that there is a real chance that it may be taken increasingly seriously over the coming years, and serious discussions are increasingly (so I'm told) including markets as possibilities, as in a recent issue of Kidney International.

There are no details in Becker and Elias's sketch of the form that the market would take. Of course, Becker is aware of many of the arguments against markets (many coming from Richard Titmuss's influential 1971 book The Gift Relationship) and returns to them in his later blog posting to address them: that "commodification" of body parts is immoral; that payment may drive out altruistic donations and so not yield the bumper crop he predicts; that organs may be removed mainly from the poor and installed mainly in the rich; that organs may be removed forcefully from people (as Falun Gong supporters are claiming is happening in China now) in order to be sold; that people may regret an impulsive and irreversible decision to sell; that payment may lead to people lying about their medical health and so lead to infected organs entering the system. He doesn't so much argue these issues as dismiss them. Tellingly, he uses the passive voice: the quality of blood "can be maintained at a high level", the source of organs "could be determined in most cases without great difficulty"; the number of impulsive donors "could be sharply reduced by having a month or longer cooling off waiting period". It isn't quite clear who has the incentive to maintain all these standards, or carry out these checks, or how much it would cost to persuade someone to do so. And yet in markets for experience goods (and organs, surely, are experience goods of a visceral kind) information issues are at the heart of the problem. The cavalier brushing aside of issues of trust, fair dealing, and asymmetric information makes Becker's case unconvincing to this reader.

Becker also commits what Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution calls the libertarian vice: assuming that the quality of government is fixed. In this case, that means assuming that if altruism isn't working now, then it won't work in the future. "If altruism were sufficiently powerful, the supply of organs would be large enough to satisfy demand, and there would be no need to change the present system. But this is not the case..."

Kieran Healy spends most of Last Best Gifts exploring the very things that Becker skates over so casually, and argues that they are the heart of the matter. Altruism is not a fixed quantity, but depends crucially on "the cultural contexts and organizational mechanisms that provide people with reasons and opportunities to give" (p2). Those unspecified actors who are the passive voices of Becker's arguments are, Healy argues, the key to success or failure when it comes to blood and organ donation. For example, organ donation from the newly dead is, in practice, dependent on approval from the relatives and the rate of approval depends in turn, it turns out, on who asks them. If the person who is helping them come to turns with the death is the one who asks them to approve donation of the organs, they are more likely to refuse than if somebody else (even from the same organization) asks them. Establishing protocols and practices, managing logistics, establishing trust -- all these matter. It is, Healy is arguing, not useful to talk about the issue or organ transplants without addressing the specifics of questions such as whether relatives of dead organ donors have the right to meet the recipient (as justone example), because these are the kind of decisions that can have big consequences.

The book is academically written, with all the costs and benefits that implies. It was originally a PhD thesis, so unsurprisingly it favours logic and cautious language over passion, footnotes everything, and tends to wrap conclusions in qualifiers. The empirical middle chapters in particular (3 and 4) are a bit dry. But the book is an important contribution; it identifies a whole range of important issues when it comes to organ donation, and may move the debate away from the market/altruism dichotomy to a more nuanced and realistic debate over coping with large-scale enterprises. That would be valuable. I definitely recommend it if you want to learn about the issues involved, and want some ideas for healthy ways forward.

(A minor quibble before moving on. He discusses the US and a bunch of European countries, but not Canada. This is common in American/European comparisons -- The Economist seems prone to it -- but it is still irritating to this Anglo-Canadian reader.)

Healy looks at both the blood system and the organ system, and his analysis of the failure of the blood system in the US and in Europe to handle HIV and Hepatitis C infection makes his reality-based approach uncomfortable reading for market enthusiasts and market sceptics alike. In some cases, the market-based blood plasma system in the US did better than the donation-based mainstream blood system in responding to the potential for infection, even as both sets of organizations had the same information at the same time. That they too failed at the hurdle of throwing out blood plasma that was already taken is no comfort. In fact, one of the more interesting conclusions that Healy seems to come to is that there may be dependencies among the different parts of the system (the collection agency, the donors, the recipients, the hospitals) that are more important than the presence of absence of payment in the determination of success or failure. The issue may be more one of industrialization of the system than the commodification of organs. This makes sense, once he points it out, because any market-based approach is going to involve local monopsonies and a few big players in any given region. There's not going to be a whole lot of competition going on among agencies, offering higher and lower prices for kidneys, and so the outcome will depend on the detailed interactions that take place. And if the shortage is to be tackled (there were 50,000 people on the waiting list for kidneys in the USA in 2000) then this is going to be a large-scale, industrial effort whether or not payment is made to "donors" or not.  Money will be involved because big organizations - private industry or not - have lots of money flowing through them. People will make or break their careers based on what decisions are to be made, and as the HIV/hepatitis case proved, a public or not-for-profit agency is no proof against tragedy.

Much of the discussion is handled in terms of literature on the "gift relationship". It's not something I know much about (the literature, not the relationship, although I am a bit cheap), but it seems to handle what sociology is best at. There are layers of meaning that influence our decisions and attitudes to issues such as organ transplants. Healy reminds us that life insurance was once a controversial industry, with its connotations of payment for death, that had to overcome cultural resistance and find ways to stake a position that is both morally acceptable and profitable. The life insurance industry was, of course, one of the last havens of large-scale mutual co-operative organizations, and in some countries the movement away from that model to a shareholder model is one that has not yet played out. But I digress.

The nature of the gift relationship is subtle. If payment is made to a funeral home rather than directly to family members, then does that mean the organs of a just-deceased loved one have been donated (with an acknowledgement made in honour of the gesture) or have the family been paid? If a live kidney donor is compensated for their time and discomfort, but not for their kidney, have they been paid? There are more subtleties in the book, both involving payment and not. It seems that we all agree that organ donation is good in the abstract, but not so much when it comes to the crunch. Attempts to narrow this gap between abstract approval and on-the-spot reluctance may be seen as delicate and considerate diplomacy, or may be seen as cynical manipulation (Healy compares parts of the process to the con-man's efforts to "cool the mark" meaning to make the object of a scam accept his/her position as loser in a resigned manner rather than in anger, so that they don't report it to the authorities).

My guess is that the systems developed in different countries will involve some forms of payment but will steer clear of the obvious payment that Becker appears to advocate. Any agency, public or private, will have to be monitored (oops - there's that passive voice), and that monitoring will cost money. Issues like deciding on how to determine death (and debates are going on about this now, of course) are vulnerable to all kinds of incentives I'd rather not think about; but someone has to, and it shouldn't be someone with a direct monetary stake in the outcome.

Healy convinced me that the big issue is not the economists' issue -- of markets versus altruism -- but is the sociologists' issue of coping with complex incentives in large-scale industrial organizations, and that alone was worth the price of the book. Recommended.

"How's the Book Doing?" Entrails and Tea Leaves

Having a book published has turned me into a brain addled validation junkie.

I'm sure that when Margaret Atwood or Malcolm Gladwell release a book they have a lot of work to do - book signings, tours, interviews, and so on. But when you're a no name author those kind of events just don't make much sense for anyone - publisher, author, or bookstore. And book sales are notoriously difficult to track: just because a bookstore has ordered the book doesn't mean a reader has actually bought it, so those copies may just be sitting on a shelf, waiting to be returned. So there is something of a void.

"How's the book doing?" people ask, and while (on the advice of LS) I usually respond optimistically, the truth is I have no idea. What, anyway, would be good and what would be bad? I mean, being invited on the Daily Show or appearing on the New York Times bestseller list would be unambiguously good, but below that it's just a matter of what my expectations are. Is 1,000 copies good?  10,000? Who is to say? And as it's my first time around at this particular game, I have no expectations whatsoever. So LS is right in her advice: the optimistic response is better than the blank stare and shrug of the shoulders that I would otherwise give.

In this void of information, any and all scraps are welcome to the starved author. The internet, of course, is a vast source of entrails and tea leaves that have to be prodded, scried (?) and stirred to reveal their Nostradamus-clear prophecies. But something is better than nothing so, data addict that I am, I autogoogle and troll for all those scraps it provides.

Here, then, are some of the nicer-smelling entrails I have found so far (in addition to those I've mentioned earlier in this weblog).

That someone would pick up your book and read it is a great compliment. If they reach the end, more so. If they actually put finger to keyboard to say something about it, then that's very heartwarming indeed. I've got lots of great feedback from friends, but there is of course every reason for the sceptical author to suspect these people of gilding the lilly a bit when they tell me what a fine book it is. Not that I'm ungrateful, you understand - far from it. Bring on those compliments! I just reserve my judgement sometimes.

So particular thanks goes to people I don't know. People like Persephone, who wrote this in answer to one of those book Q&A topics  that go around the weblogs.

8. One book you are currently reading?

No-One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart by Tom Slee. Well, actually I finished it a while ago, but I'm still paging through it thinking about the arguments he presents. It's very provocative. Out of all these books, read that one first.

I can tell you, that makes great reading. Thanks a million Persephone - you are indeed a sage. Other recent weblog mentions include the Relentlessly Progressive Economics blog and the Danish Observations and Stories, who both reproduce a bit from my online excerpt. Thanks to both of them.

Then there are people who use the title for their own purposes. Kerry Howley is assistant editor of Reason Online, the libertarian-capitalist online magazine. Her article "Has Wal-Mart Peaked?" argues that Wal-Mart's recent setbacks  in Germany and Korea may be a harbinger of troubles to come for the beast of Bentonville, and that those who fear Wal-Mart may therefore be worrying without reason.  She says...

The fear Wal-Mart inspires is nicely encapsulated in the title of Tom Slee's recent book No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The Deception of Personal Choice. Slee argues that Wal-Mart is a scourge we bring upon ourselves by forsaking the good of the community for the false idol of individual choice. But it was the individual choices of individual consumers in Germany and South Korea that sent Wal-Mart packing.

I don't actually disagree with her on this. Wal-Mart's global dominance is certainly not a foregone conclusion, as (among others) the Guardian recently mentioned its less-than-stellar progress with Asda in the UK, speculating that Wal-Mart may be too American to succeed globally. I don't think that weakens my book, mind you.

Another libertarian who has (more deliberately) helped to promote the book is the open-minded Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution, who said this in a recent post about a story I pointed him to.

Thanks to Tom Slee for the pointer.  I hope to say more about his interesting new book, No one Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, in the future.   Contrary to the title it's about how markets fail, not a defense of Wal-Mart!

Whether or not he does say more (and I hope he does, of course, but hey, he's a busy guy), here is the effect on my main web site of that one little mention (click for a clearer image).

Of course, I track my sales on amazon.com (I haven't been tracking them on .ca and .co.uk yet, but there's time for that to start.) During August my ranking has been bouncing around between 60,000 and 300,000 (probably 60,000 means someone has bought a copy, and 300,000 means no one has bought one for a while). Here is what the graph looks like (from my Zohosheet); a low point is a good thing. Not very legible I fear, but this is about as clear as I can make it - right click and choose View Image to see it more clearly.

Another fine thing is that you get to mix with eminent neighbours. I get a kick out of looking in bookstores and libraries at who is next to me on the shelves. At a local store, philosopher Peter Singer (The Way We Eat) of Animal Liberation fame is my neighbour. At the local library, Anthony Giddens (Runaway World) is right next door. In the online list of Working for Change resources at the University of Victoria I'm hanging out with Vandana Shiva, author of Biopiracy. This is all pretty cool.

And that's about it I think. Or wait, maybe someone has mentioned the book in the last twenty minutes. Wait a sec, I'll just check google again......

No? Oh well. Maybe again....

Update: apparently if you can write about sex with some panache, then going to the book store is far more rewarding (not safe for work!). Good for her.

Update again: I assumed  Kerry Howley was  a he. Wrong. I've corrected the references above; thanks to David Weigel for putting me right.

The whine of globalization

john_d at This Magazine writes about Canadian wines, and what makes them (or fails to make them) Canadian. The story is similar to that of British beer.

Link: BLOG.THISMAGAZINE.CA.

Andy Warhol / Supernova

Went into Toronto today, and took a look at the Andy Warhol exhibition   at the Art Gallery of Ontario, "guest curated" by David Cronenberg.

Talking to AK beforehand, she said that the show is as much about Cronenberg as it is about Warhol, and I see what she means. The theme is "Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964", and it's the Deaths part that is most obvious, and which Cronenberg has most to say about on the commentary. Given that Warhol produced so much stuff the focus on death, particularly grisly death (as in the electric chair series and the Car Crash series) and disaster does seem to have more to do with Cronenberg's interests than with Warhol's.

I went not knowing much about Warhol beyond Campbell Soup, Velvet Underground, and the odd profile of him I'd seen. I wasn't sure whether I would be impressed or not - I don't have knee jerk reactions for or against modern art. On the plus side, I like being challenged by art - anything that makes you take a different look at a piece of the world deserves praise, whether you agree with it or not - and on the negative side, I don't have much time for sensationalism for the sake of it. But how to tell the difference?

I'm glad I saw the exhibition, and some of the things I really liked (the Elvis image, for example) but overall I ended up with a lower opinion of Warhol than when I went in.

The films were the least impressive part of the exhibition. ("Blow Job", "Sleep", "The Couch", "Screen Tests", and something about a haircut) There is always something about yesterday's iconoclasts that is a little pathetic, because the most outrageous things tend to look tamer over time (well, except for Un Chien Andalou perhaps). Most people go through a phase of self-discovery and exploration of our place in the world, some with more gusto than others. But most of us don't call it ground-breaking art and I didn't see much in the films beyond a desire to shock and a desire to self promote. The expressions on some of the models/participants/actors were just "hey, look at us, aren't we something" and I thought - "no". The films seemed to catch the worst of what the Warhol phenomenon is about: the circular reasoning behind the fame and celebrity that he seemed to pursue so relentlessly. Warhol is important in part because of the subjects of his art (Jackie O, Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe); but in some cases the subjects take on their importance only because it was Warhol who pointed his camera at them: Warhol, in the end, is important only because he is Warhol. The insights that the commentary gives into his apparent shyness, his pursuit of celebrity, and his devotion to celebrity are creepy. There is a touch of the Paris Hilton here - famous for being famous. And if Warhol, you say, is deeper than Paris Hilton, then he would disagree - one wall had his epigram on it: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." The two of them share something in common.

The silk-screen images were more interesting, and occasionally more disturbing. The best -- the electric chair series (can't remember their real name) and some of the Liz Taylor series, and the famous Elvis Presley images, use the repetitive silk-screen technique to fine effect, with the sequence of images fading away, or collapsing on themselves, giving a poignant and melancholy air to the whole image. Others, such as Race Riot and Car Crash, disturbed me for different reasons. Where the commentary argued that Warhol forces us to look in a different way at the images, I'm afraid I just saw them as a self-promotional artist taking others' grief and distress and making himself famous from it. His own distance from his subject did not have the effect on me that it had on Cronenberg. He found the distancing effect of silkscreen, the coldness of the technique, to demand a new scrutiny of the image. I had no such reaction - to me Warhol's recycling of these images as art had little impact.

I'm glad I went, if only to see the iconic Presley image at full size and in the silk-screened flesh - starting tall and bold, and fading away into a dim greyness over time, it's difficult not to see it as prophecy. But I can't take Warhol seriously as a major artist. The fact that his reputation has grown since his death is, I suspect, mainly a result of his contemporaries bringing sentimental memories of the their youth into the now top-of-the-field positions that they occupy.

Developer-led Planning

Scott Piatkowski highlights a paragraph from the local paper that reminds us how market-driven and developer-driven much of Southern Ontario's recent city growth has been.

"Historically, in the early 90s, (the idea) was to strip away bureaucracy to make it easy for business to come down and open up without all the red tape," city planner Cory Bluhm said yesterday. "What we've learned from this is the opposite is now the way to go. Residents now expect the city to play a role in shaping the downtown."

About time, I'd say. The only thing worse than city hall is no city hall. Here is the full report that he is talking about.

Cool Webby Things Change How We Work

I routinely use three different computers, and so any web-based tool is a natural for me. I don't want to move stuff around from place to place, and I don't really want to store home things on a work computer. So I find myself - although not without misgivings - keeping more stuff on the web all the time.

I've used Gmail as e-mail interface for some time, and I keep photos on Flickr, and now I keep appointments on Google Calendar.  I've just discovered LibraryThing (hi piefuchs) and am working out what to do with it, but I expect I'll keep some kind of catalogue of my books there. There's no doubt these new applications are changing how useful the web is. I recently started using Zoho Writer to write longer weblog posts, and the thing is, I could imagine using it as my main word processing program. It's nowhere near as feature-rich as MS Word, of course - but being free, web-based, and reasonably usable, are three big things in its favour, and that's something I didn't expect a year ago. Zoho Sheet is pretty cool too.

One big question is whether Google's forthcoming web-based word processing and spreadsheet programs will be any good. Their spreadsheet is now in Beta, and I'd say it's not quite as good as Zoho Sheet (no graphs, for example). Their word processor is probably not too far off, as they bought Writely a few months ago. While Google Earth is one of the coolest programs ever, some other things they have done seem half-finished, so I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that Google will win this particular battle.

I can really see a time, not too far off, when many people will use web-based applications for most of their word processing and spreadsheet programs. Microsoft Office is overdue for some competition from some kind of disruptive technology, and in a couple of years MS could have some real problems.

Carnival of Wal-Mart

Starling Hunter at The Business of America is Business puts together collections of weblog posts on a couple of topics on a regular basis. One of those is Wal-Mart, and he included one of my posts in his latest collection:  Carnival of Wal-Mart III.

Among the others, there are posts about Chicago and Maryland's new employment laws that affect (or, in Maryland's case, would have affected) Wal-Mart employees, Wal-Mart's failure in Germany, the Walton family's shrinking tax bill,  and Wal-Mart's new shoplifting policy.

Starling Hunter has worked at Boeing as an Electrical Engineer, at Exxon, at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and now at American University of Sharjah, "just outside of Dubai, United Arab Emirates". His perspective on Wal-Mart is, unsurprisingly, definitely different from mine -- but I do like his take on Rockonomics.

Crisis and Opportunity

I watch The Daily Show pretty much every night, but somehow I missed this one, which is brilliant.