BMW’s new bike – the S1000RR

BMW has just released the street version of their Supersport bike. This is an important event in the decade long takeover of the marque by horsepower crazy hoons.

Those hoons still believe in ABS and traction control – this bike has 4 settings that adjust the engine, ABS and traction control for Rain, Sport, Race and (even) Slick. I like how there is no ‘cruise’ setting.

As with all Superbikes, relentless efforts go into reducing weight. Look at the tiny reservoir for the rear brake fluid:

The chain goes through the swingarm:

While the integrated rear lights both look elegant and don’t interrupt the airflow.

The bike joins its dirtier cousin – the G450X – in allowing BMW to compete at the very top in motorcycle sport. It will take a while for them to start winning regularly, and then to dominate, but this is a great start.

You can’t just design a series of great bikes and start producing, expecting them to sell and to be reliable. It is even tougher if you are starting from the position that BMW did back in the early 1990s.

The successful transformation of the Motorad group is one of the great stories of the motorcycle community – but sadly an untold story, one I would like to read. It seems that BMW decided that they want their bikes to be as good versus their peers as their cars are versus theirs. Full credit to them for this transformation.

Uncovering the truth behind “50% of teens post senstive information”

Last week we saw a plethora of New Zealand headlines bemoaning the poor behaviour of ‘kids today’ – this time in how they handle their sensitive information online.

The punchline was that one in two students had posted sensitive information about themselves online in the past year.

TVNZ went with Half of NZ teens post sensitive info online while NZHerald went with Nearly half of Kiwi teens post sensitive info online – both remarkably similar to the original press release.

Some went further though – and the three best articles that I read were from:

  1. The venerable ODT – with Teens lax over online security a very well written article that included a local angle and even a call to a local academic.
  2. The Dominion Post with Internet’s effects may be taught – an interesting angle, and with only passing reference to the survey. Well done to the Dom Post and Greer McDonald.
  3. TV3, with some new news Policing unit to monitor internet for criminal activity which probably means bald 50 year old men masquerading as 15 year old girls are going to start flirting with me online.

The articles all stemmed from preliminary findings published by PhD student, and research manager at Netsafe – John Fenaughty.

Colour me skeptical. Indeed I am frighteningly skeptical about any headlines that say “the youth of today are….” as I remember all too well that the youth of my day were actually pretty on to it.

I suspect (and from what I see, know) that the youth of today are much better at figuring out what they can and cannot put online than their older peers. In particular I see that horribly inept early Bebo pages and youthful utterances are increasingly becoming the norm, and employers and voters of the future will accept it as such.

But I was also concerned that the survey itself was a bit of a half baked scaremongering exercise. So I decided to dig into it a little. The Netsafe website was useless – but I did find the press release after a fellow twitterer shared the link.

So I called (there was no email address) John Fenaughty and left a message. He got back to me very quickly on email, and I posed him 12 questions – cunningly displaying them as 10:

1: How was the final respondent group selected, including response rates etc? How did you avoid bias across the multiple dimensions?
2: What were the exact dates of data collection?
3: What were the actual survey questions used to derive these answers? especially the “wouldn’t want to find” part.
4: How were the questions asked? – e.g interviews, filled out by students etc.
5: What was the age (or school class) distribution of the responding students?
6: What percentage of students didn’t use the internet? were they included in the survey?
7: How was the “one out of two” figure derived? – can you provide a break down (crosstab) that shows the combination of sensitive information provided?
6: What is the breakdown of age (or school class) versus provision of the four sensitive informations identified in the press release?
7: What other questions were in the survey?
8: will you be making all of the coded source data available?
9: How do you define cyber bullying?
10: What convictions for cyber bullying have there been in NZ?

Quietly readying myself for a nice evisceration of the study, I noted that his reply wasn’t instant – and perhaps wasn’t ever going to come. I mulled on the state of research these days, but eventually I did get a reply almost a day later.*

It was rigorous. In fact it was an excellent reply, and I am posting it in full beneath the fold.

John sent me back complete answers to all of my questions, and satisfied my greater concerns about the study. Simply put – he is doing the best he can within the constraints he has been dealt.

I noted to myself that this is just the sort of evidence that you would want to see from a PhD student, especially as a PHD needs to be defended in front of a committee. Having sat on one of those committees before (we had to say no in the end) it is a grueling exercise for the student, but with the quality of this response John is demonstrating that he will be ready.

If you read the reply, ask yourself whether any research that you conduct or read about can be answered just as well. Are your questions tested? Are all ethical grounds covered off? Are the samples truly statistical and non-biased? and so on.

So well done John – Not only have I deleted most of the blog post I’d drafted, but you’ve even managed to turn it into a “how to respond to questioning bloggers” lesson.

Continue reading “Uncovering the truth behind “50% of teens post senstive information””

The spectrum of blogging engagement

While I may not agree with it entirely, Mikearauz has come up with a useful way to look at the way casual interest can turn into advocacy online.

Since I don’t agree with it – I decided to have a crack at my own version. This is my take on “Blogging Engagement”  – written from my perspective as both a blogger but more importantly as a reader of blogs  (or columnists or news websites or authors).

What do you think?

2 shots were fired

I am immensely proud to live in a country where, when faced with a well trained and armed guy fortressed in a house, the police acted in a responsible manner.

Even after the provocation of seeing one of their number shot and lie dead in the street for the duration of the siege, police fired only two shots throughout the entire event. Well done.

So if you happen to have your own stash of guns and explosives in your fortressed home, then remember this simple thing. No matter how much you provoke the police, or how much they provoke you, they will not shoot you.

This isn’t America, it isn’t the movies – it is New Zealand, and I am happy to live here.

So I fervently hope we do not over-react to this outlier incident by arming police – with either guns or tasers. Neither would have helped, but more importantly if our criminals know they won’t get shot then they are far less likely to shoot first.

And that is safer for everybody.

The XT network debable – Winners and Losers

I was pretty angry at Telecom yesterday when I wrote Pay the $900,000 Telecom you cheap sods, but a day later it seems that they will do so. Good.

Now that the debacle is over, let’s check the winners and losers tally.

Winners – in order
Vodafone, for a well-timed legal action which created a major PR win and delay of a rival network

NBR – and Chris Keall for two excellent articles – one head and shoulders over the rest in summarising the court proceedings, and the other tipping that a settlement was likely today. Even their reporting of the final result is excellent.

Telecom – for capitulating in the end and continuing the journey on the long road back from purgatory

The Lawyers – they always win

Losers – in order

Telecom

  1. For not doing the right thing from the start, and installing the filters to prevent interference with Vodafone’s network
  2. For not understanding how this was going to play out early enough and letting it get to court
  3. For the resulting major PR loss, the delay of the new network and the wasted marketing spend
  4. and bonus for all this happening so soon after releasing a video that says how wonderful they are

All of us customers – To have to watch two giants playing silly buggers with each other while we cope with inadequate mobile and broadband infrastructure

Vodafone – for having released into the public domain information that makes us thing you are stretching your network’s capabilities, making us realise why our call and 3G connections are so lousy.

<update: Reynolds is unrepentant, and says that Vodafone will share the costs of Filters. He also says that there are already 1000 filters in place. Courtesy of the NBR – yet again.

Money quote:

Although Dr Reynolds sees his company in the right, Telecom settled the case, seeing a two-week delay in XT’s launch as a price worth paying to rid it of Vodafone’s High Court action, and to answer a request from the Justice, in Dr Reynolds’ words, for both sides “to sort it out”.

and

“there will be some circumstances in which we share costs”.

which has the ring of  Telecom paying almost all of the time.

Also

“Give me a break. The first I heard of it was late last week,” says Dr Reynolds, of Vodafone’s threat to go legal. “They finally came to the table two days ago”.

I would be looking searchingly at the strategy and engineering folk in Telecom if I were Dr. Reynolds. How the heck could this threat have been missed?>

And for your enjoyment after the fold are some tweets from this morning: Continue reading “The XT network debable – Winners and Losers”

Spend the $900,000 Telecom – you cheap sods

Sigh.

And there I was praising Telecom the other day – praise it seems that was all too soon. I am concerned that recent behavior is indicating that Telecom is back to its old monopolist ways.

I write of course of the XT network interference with the Vodafone network. The facts laid out in Vodafone’s submission and the court case – ably reported by the NBR – are on the surface pretty simple:

  • Telecom’s new XT network interferes with the Vodafone network
  • Telecom has known about this for a while
  • Telecom could have removed this interference by spending $900,000 to install filters

There is a bit more nuance in the court case, but as a customer I am mad enough as it stands.

Yes Vodafone could spend some money to maintain their own service quality, yes Vodafone coverage is not close to perfect anyway, and yes Vodafone could have formally engaged with Telecom earlier.

But one the thing that has changed is Telecom’s new network.

The absolutely crazy thing is that the $900,000 to update all Telecom cells is chump-change in this context, and by not spending it Telecom is not only risking a lot, they making us all suffer:

  • Telecom suffers as they suffer PR damage, just as they launch a new network
  • Telecom suffers if their launch date is delayed
  • Telecom and Vodafone suffer financial costs of the court cases
  • Vodafone suffers as their network quality drops precipitously
  • We all suffer as we all have even more lousy phone services
  • The lawyers win – they always do

It’s positively juvenile, and the sort of behavior I would have expected from the old Telecom administration.

So please wake up Telecom – and behave in a way that shows you care about all New Zealanders. Demonstrate some of the values that you are trying to show in the video you produced.

  1. Fess up, say you will install the filters as quickly as possible
  2. Install those filters within a week. Nothing is impossible
  3. Settle with Vodafone so that their lawyers don’t run your business.

In the meantime those in the executive suites please ask yourselves How did this happen? Was this a decision made at the top or were you as blindsided as much as we were? If you were blindsided then how could your culture let that happen?

Until you fess up and move on we are back to the old promote one way and behave in an entirely differnt way – it doesn’t work for children and it certainly doesn’t work on us adults.

We’ll find out tomorrow at midday whether Vodafone is vindicated, but in the meantime I just want my phone to work properly.

The media is no longer the message

An interesting survey by eMarketer, via WebProNews:

Stop. Don’t look too hard at the table. This survey is fundamentally flawed.

The flaw is simple, and it reflects an old mode of thinking: These days the media is not the message.

For example there are over 200 million blogs (they have stopped counting), and to rate them all together is patently unfair. You cannot compare, say, Bernard Hickey’s Interest.co.nz/blog with The Bad Blog (which is what I found when I googled “bad blog”, and which is actually not that bad).

To put it another way, on interest rate matters the interest.co.nz blog is more trusted than, say, TV1 Business News. However on general business or current events news, TV1 would be better.

Meanwhile Bernard and the rest of the team’s blog is less trusted, by me, than the Wall Street Journal – a publication that is a newspaper, has a online news site, offers video, does product comparisons and has blogging.

How do we measure all of this that? How do we compare the WSJ video with their print edition? How do we compare Fox TV news with their internet site with their internet delivered video?

The answer is that we don’t, as we know that increasingly the media type irrelevant and the publisher’s brand is everything. We seek our trusted providers, and we are getting pretty agnostic about where we find them:

  • If we are watching TV then we know that the BBC has a better global perspective than Fox News – unless we are right wing and living in the USA.
  • If we are online then the NYTimes is better than the Waikato Times – unless we live in Waikato and want the latest Hamilton news.
  • If we are reading about something esoteric then we know to search the internet, and that Wikiedia or a blog is probably going to have the best answer.

We assess credibility very quickly. We look for the publisher (e.g. Bloggers that write for newspapers have more credibility), we assess the credibility of the writer by looking at the production or site design, checking the publisher or writer background (about 2.2% of the traffic here checks my bio), see who refers to the that source, then look for well-crafted writing and video solid references and so on. We are often not really aware of how we do it, but we can do all of this in less than, say, 5 seconds.

It used to be that we looked for beautiful people to deliver news that we trust, but Fox news in particular has made this increasingly irrelevant – as we have come to realise that beauty is not correlated with intelligence or trustworthiness.*

We have already made decisions for older media – The Dominion Post and TVNZ news have a rich heritage, and so we tend to trust them, while a new magazine like Idealog will need to earn our trust through excellent writing, distribution and product design. However the older media can lose our trust, and when it goes, as it has for me and most TV news, it is very hard to earn back.

So how should the survey have been written? Here is one possibility. It’s not ideal but I feel it is a better way to ask the question. The audience is of course biased – and it will be interesting to see how biased.

Lingopal is big in Japan

Lingopal translates between 42 languages – and can be operated in any of those languages as well. That means it is of use to people shopping on all of the Apple iTunes stores.

So it was always going to be interesting which countries picked us up first. Would backpackers from Australia and UK find us more useful, or would we be big in the USA?

Turns out we are biggest in Japan. We have done no marketing there – it is all organic growth as our google ad writing and PR ability is not so good in Japanese.

To see how different this is versus the normal distribution of sales by country, here are out sales compared to Flight Control sales figures:

I guess it isn’t surprising that we are not big in the USA, as the average person travels there a bit less, and it really is early days for every country. I’d expect us to be bigger in the UK and Germany though – but this is just a matter of when.

At least the Japan numbers are telling us that Lingopal is useful and that when it gets popular it stays popular.

You can skew these numbers if you like – go ahead and buy Lingopal on iTunes!

Importing MYOB data into Xero – opportunity?

I’m trying to convince my mother to switch to Xero from MYOB. The unfortunate problem is that all of her history is stored in MYOB, and so switching requires re-keying of invoices and the like.

The solution to this is to commence using Xero at the start of a financial year, which leads to a spike in Xero sales at the end of each year, but means a discontinuity in systems. Moreover the end/start of the year is a particularly busy time for bean counting, and is therefore the worst time to try to change your modus operendi.

To me this is a pretty simple “just do it” for Xero, and there are three powerful reasons for doing so:

  1. Encourage switching throughout the year, increasing speed of adoption and word of mouth sales through the year
  2. Increases sales by letting customers have test drives using live data – customers can upload their MYOB data to Xero and just start playing. It’s pretty hard not to notice the difference in usability when your own numbers are displayed.
  3. Provide a better product to customers by importing history and thus being able to report comparative results versus previous financial periods

How about it Xero? Sure this is a non-trivial task, but surely it is possible?

If not, then let us know, as there is a market gap here and a new company (let’s call it NewXco) could help.

NewXco would simply provide a (semi-)automatic MYOB upload to Xero service, charging a fee or taking a commission on Xero sales. The repetitious work could be done out of a cheaper location, such as India or rural New Zealand, and the cunning code provided by some smart locals. Anyone in?

How Baupost’s goresight let them weather the storm

Notes from Seth Klarman’s speech at Columbia Business School is, interestingly, the most popular clicked-on link from here, coming from The Baupost Story post. So let’s do a round up of coverage, find some more reading on the Baupost story and see what we can learn about how Baupost’s approach pays off for investors during tough times.

First here’s an excerpt from Seth Klarman’s wildly expensive “Margin of Safety” book – talking about liquidation value. I’m not so sure that it is entirely obeying copyright rules, so read it while you can.

Next have a read of some early Baupost Group letters (recently uploaded by Noise Free Investing and found through  Valueplays) to great insight to how Baupost operates. The letters refer to a smaller fund that is run alongside the main fund for friends and family of the main fund investors. It is remarkable to see the foresight in the commentary leading up to and through the dot com boom and bust and to see the letter series end in mid 2001 with the fund holding 48.6% cash. That no doubt set them up well for the post September 11 crash, and so I guess they continued to do well. I would dearly like to see the rest of the series of letters – in particular the returns over the last two years would be fascinating.

As it happens another letter has leaked out from the main fund from September last year. The comments are pretty telling, again showing Baupost’s foresight* and providing vindication for their cautious approach to investing. (I first miss-typed that as “goresight” which I thought was appropriate)

Market Folly has a good summary of Baupost’s recent behaviour – mentioning that Baupost has $14 billion in assets, which was mostly 50% cash in recent years and that over 25 years the compound annual return was 20%. It seems that Baupost is starting to spend that cash now as they see bargains that meet their rigourous requirements. It takes real discipline to sit on a hoard of cash and not invest it, and while you may miss out on the next dot com or housing boom by doing so, you’ll also miss out on the potential to lose everything when those bubbles burst.

A more recent interview with HBS on Market Folly and via Valueplays again lets us know that Klarman started with just $27m in the fund in 1982, and was paid a salary of a princely $35,000. The new news is that the writer also mentions that Baupost had cut their cash hoard in half – to about 25% – by December last year.

Compare that 25% cash figure to April 20  last year when  Baupost had 45% cash, 20% equities, 17% distressed debt, 11% real estate and an amazing 6% in South Korean equities.

45% cash in April 2008 was an astonishingly smart move – and Seth Klarman even mentioned that they would have gone to 100% cash if it made sense. That let them go on the gradually accelerating shopping spree.

The Korean move was interesting, as the market there hasn’t fared too well since then in USD terms – down 44%. However the Korean Won is also down 25%, so overall the market was down only 18% in Korean Won terms, and I imagine there was a currency hedge. That’s much better than the S&P500’s 35% loss in the same period, but still tough given Baupost’s “Rule 1: don’t lose money” philosophy. Baupost would have picked decent securities in the Korean market and probably had some interesting hedges against the high volatility events that happened.

The Korean market in US Dollar terms
Google
The Korean Won versus the USD
Google
The Korean Market in Korean Won terms
 Trading Economics

On the other hand Baupost may have simply closed out their Korean positions early.

Praise, yes praise, for Telecom

This really is a stunning piece of work – even made this cynic think twice. Well done Telecom.

It’s important because it shows that Telecom increasingly gets it – they are getting that it is about delivering the right service to New Zealanders (fiber to the home rated a mention), they get that it is about the people that work there, and they get that Youtube (and twitter) are great mediums for spreading the news.They manage to say this while taking little digs at themselves and being very human.

It was uploaded yesterday Youtube time, and  had just 392 views when I saw it. It will be interesting to observe how far and fast the views go.

The cast list was telling – the boss is the eighth listed, which means he was the eighth person to appear in the piece. That’s leadership.

It’s so nice to be able to write something good about Telecom. Roll on the days when we can write a whole lot more.

Global warming and you

Here’s  excellent graphic from FiveThirtyEight via Treehugger and via New Zealand’s The visible hand showing data from a report from the the Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies School Climate Change project. It needs no explanation.

The project’s survey: “Climate Change on the the American Mind” is a lengthy and ponderous read, and is so queued in my reading list. It contained this graphic, which has the same (and a bit more) information as the inverted triangle above – It’s a chart that any consultant would love, and it is difficult to read and, well, boring.

The learning here is that each chart should deliver one message, and to focus the chart on that message alone. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in presenting everything sometimes, when taking out the key facts has much higher impact.

This chart is has great information  – however it really could have been drawn better. It says that 69% of Americans believe in Global Warming now, but more importantly that only 10% deny (to one extent or another) that it is happening and only 3% are extremely sure it is not happening.

(*Incidentally the FES school was until pretty recently called just the Forestry school. Also I did one course there so anything I say about them will clearly be biased. )

Wear your safety equipment – black Gloves are cool

Following on from an earlier post on dorky safety Glasses – the next easiest piece of safety protection to wear is a decent pair of gloves.

They can even make your live easier when working. Indeed it is this that has led me to wear gloves a lot recently, and while the gloves can make fiddly things a bit tougher the benefits outweigh those costs:

  • Better grip: The right work gloves grip well – so you can apply more force where it is needed. The gloves’ extra grip mean that your will hands slip less often, reducing the amount of times your hands get hit.
  • Protection: When you do hit your hands then the gloves dull the hit and importantly they will save you from getting cut.
  • Cleanliness: When you are done your hands are clean – it’s a remarkable feeling. You can wash the gloves by leaving them on and washing your hands in the normal way.

To be fair you do need to get the right gloves, making sure they match the task at hand. I’ve been astonished at the variety of gloves available these days, and they are at very good prices. (check out your local handyman store.) There are tight fitting ones that actually make gripping fiddly things easier and heavy ones that keep you warm while working outside.

One friend lost the tip of his finger in a sawing accident – he could have been wearing gloves that could tolerate a brief encounter with a whirring blade and saved a finger. These ones are essentially a modern form of chain mail, and are bound to impress small children as well:

diynetwork

Another person I recently met lost a finger tip after getting pricked by a rose – I kid you not. It became infected quite some time after the incident and he

was lucky not to have died. These days there are gardening gloves specifically designed for handling thorns – and you can even get gauntlets and chest protectors for those in the thick of it. Imagine being able to prune roses and the like knowing that your hands will not be hurt – not that pruning roses is any particular love of mine. The gentleman I met said he was still pruning roses without gloves, as was the surgeon that removed his finger-tip. Both could save themselves some pain.

Wear your safety equipment – dorky glasses are cool

This chap ended up with a grinder blade in his head and is lucky to be alive.

What the article does not say is whether he was wearing a face shield, and it also makes no comment on the safety of the tool itself, whether he was wearing other safety equipment such as a face mask and so forth. It certainly doesn’t sound good.

@hellonearthis commented on twitter “I think its more the need of a guard on the 9″ grinder than a face mask. A 9″ grinder would flick a face mask of the head if hit.”

I absolutely agree about the grinder guard, but I would question whether an face shield is not available and also ask why such a big grinder was required. A decent sized face shield attached to a helmet should divert the blade away from the face. Here’s one for sale in the USA – $10.50 each or $8.50 in bulk. The visor flicks up when you don’t need it and has a cam to lock it in place. Price isn’t the issue with safety equipment – usage is.

I dare say this example from safetyglassessusa.com looks a little short for the task, while the open shirt is inviting trouble and he is wearing glasses but not goggles and it appears he has no hearing protection.

Minimum standard equipment on a safety oriented site for grinding is normally a face shield (to protect against face injuries and big chunks), safety goggles (to protect against smaller pieces in the air and a second line of protection), helmet, earmuffs, gloves and so forth.

Indeed @hellonearthis “9″ grinder only cuts 4.5″ A better mask, a full face helmet design. For the grinder to kick back, he was using it upside down.”, agreeing with the helmet/face shield approach. He also points out a very important fact – this accident happened because the tool was not used appropriately – reinforcing that the operator didn’t take the time to make sure the job was safe.

I cringe every time I see people doing tasks without any sort of protection. Indeed the risk of hurting yourself at home is probably higher than at work – because at home people take safety shortcuts, thinking that wearing safety gear is something that work imposes rather than something that is just plain dumb not to do.

It can creep up on you as well – just the other day I saw a woman escape possible eye injury from an angry exploding barbecued chestnut because she was wearing normal glasses. That’s not the sort of accident you can plan for, but kudos must go to the BBQer for making sure that the BBQing process was otherwise conducted safely, and for cordoning off the offending nuts when the incident happened.

So start by wearing safety glasses when there is risk – it’s easy to do, and is the  thing that will save you from most harm most easily. These days you can get cool glasses from the likes of Oakley, but a dorky $10 pair will work just as well.

The two dorky options below are cheap and cheerful – the first is $4 odd and the second $10. The third pair is one of a bunch on safetyglasses.com – another US site, and they sell for $5.75 each or $4.25 in bulk. So there is not a lot of difference between cool and uncool – though I daresay not wearing them at all is the least cool option.

I wear a set of glasses when I am working on stuff and even (and/or a visor) sometimes when I am motorcycling off road*.

I went the full hog and purchased a pair of compliant prescription glasses that change shade with the sun. It means that they are comfortable to wear for long periods of time (while they do look very dorky) and that I can keep them on indoors and outside when working in an industrial setting. While motorcycling I actually found that they are better when in the sun than my prescription sunglasses, and when the sun is low they are substantially better as they adjust to the changing conditions.

Glasses are a few bucks at Placemakers and the like – pick some up next time you are shopping and hopefully we won’t have to read about a nasty lawnmower or workshop accident.

*I could wear a motor cross helmet and goggles when riding off road, but I find that the advantages off road are lost on road – they are noisy, less aerodynamic and much more tiring. I should really wear goggles in very dusty conditions – goggles seal against dust whole glasses are open to the air. In reality I just drop back or take a break if there is a vehicle going at my speed just ahead (which is rare as I wouldn’t have caught them if that was the case) or if a vehicle is producing angry clouds of impenetrable dust.