djwonk

This is the git diagram that I wish I would have made myself! Credit goes to Commit Policies by Oliver Steele.

Elance reviews don’t show when contractors bail

I recently cancelled an Elance project. My point is not to complain about the contractor; these things happen. But I must warn you about Elance’s flawed approach to contractor accountability.

Here is what happened. The contractor was decent to work with for a few weeks but then progress slowed and stopped. After about two weeks of not seeing progress, I contacted the contractor with my concerns. I didn’t get a response, so I contacted Elance support. About a week later, I started a formal cancellation process. The contractor was graceful enough to approve the process without objection.

You would think that Elance would want feedback after the experience, right? Well… not exactly. A customer can not leave feedback about the contractor on Elance unless the project is completed.

So, I just contacted Elance to ask if I could find another way to leave a review; other customers might like to know the story.*

How does this affect you? If you use (or consider using) Elance, think about this: when you look over a contractor’s profile:

• project cancellations are not going to show up
• customers that cancel a project cannot leave a review through the Web interface

I’m concerned about Elance’s approach to contractor accountability. Next time you compare contractors, beware that a key part of the story is missing.

* Here is Elance’s auto reply to my email, which totally missed the point: “Thank you for contacting the Elance Customer Relations Team. Once your job has been completed and you have paid your Freelancer, you can leave objective feedback ratings regarding your experience by logging into your account and following these steps…”

“Profound” Crowdsourcing Wisdom

Linton Weeks concludes his article with this snake-eating-tail question:

“But here’s a question for the group: What should we think about crowdsourcing? Does it work? Yes or no?”
- How About You Be The Decider

Some might say, “Look how he turned crowdsourcing in on itself. Brilliant!” Hardly. Archer says it better.

Archer: Hey, you idiots wanna hear my plan or not?
[Silence]
Archer: Alright… Suggestions.
Cyril: About what?
Archer: What are we talking about… Stopping my mother from selling ISIS to ODIN!
Cyril: You said you had a plan.
Archer: My plan is to crowdsource a plan!
- Wikiquote

Archer, the show, revels in the absurdity of crowdsourcing gone too far, rather than framing and foisting an ill-conceived, faux-intellectual question upon us.

Did you grow up in a part of the country where football is more important than math? I sure did. To celebrate, I offer an infographic illustrating the usefulness of multiplication for football, without any unnecessary clutter. Enjoy.

Sweeping 30 Year, $400M Civil Engineering Optimization Yields 15% Improvement

Just imagine, thirty long years of work on a brainy centralized computing system impressively called the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system. Strategically placed magnetic sensors and video cameras link together to synchronize all of the city’s traffic lights. Just think of the mathematical wizardry there. It must have been an operations research nerd-fest.

So… what is the impact? What does this give Los Angeles other than Matrix-inspired precision and coordination?

Brace yourself. With the new system, drivers average 17.3 mph instead of 15 mph. (That’s 15% better according to normal-person math; I don’t know what kind of rounding nonsense is required to get to 16%.)

Really, I’m not criticizing. I am big fan of simulations and optimizations. I’m just pointing out that the results appear quite modest at the individual level.

The bigger picture is impressive: the system saves 2.8 minutes over a 5 mile trip! If an average commute is 10 miles (just a wild geese) then: 7 million commuters X 5.6 minutes = 39 million minutes per day = 650,000 hours per day saved. (I wonder if the city gets to take a carbon credit of some kind for the project.)

From the New York Times: To Fight Gridlock, a City Synchronizes Every Red Light

“Built up over 30 years at a cost of $400 million and completed only several weeks ago, the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system, as it is officially known, offers Los Angeles one of the world’s most comprehensive systems for mitigating traffic.”

“The system uses magnetic sensors in the road that measure the flow of traffic, hundreds of cameras and a centralized computer system that makes constant adjustments to keep cars moving as smoothly as possible. The city’s Transportation Department says the average speed of traffic across the city is 16 percent faster under the system, with delays at major intersections down 12 percent.”

“Without synchronization, it takes an average of 20 minutes to drive five miles on Los Angeles streets; with synchronization, it has fallen to 17.2 minutes, the city says. And the average speed on the city’s streets is now 17.3 miles per hour, up from 15 m.p.h. without synchronized lights.”

The design of the [R] language contains a number of fine points and common pitfalls which may surprise the user. Most of these are due to consistency considerations at a deeper level, as we shall explain.

— http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-lang.html#Introduction

Caption Contest!

I’m hoping someone can do better than…

• “I wonder if Congress will approve of this one…”

P.S. This picture is not real, I just pixelmated it in about five minutes.

Better Online Voting

I care about making online voting better. So should you.

I think technology — particularly an open platform for voting — could play a useful role. Here’s why:

1. Many online projects have ill-conceived voting systems. There is no perfect voting system, as Ken Arrow teaches us, but there certainly are better and worse ones for particular goals and situations. So, we should choose wisely even if we can’t achieve ‘objective’ perfection! At the very least, having a small set of well-done voting APIs could raise awareness and give options for the voting systems that are available.
2. Voting systems are fascinating. The whole idea is to convert a set of individual preferences into some notion of “the will of the people” despite all of the pathologies of human nature that get in the way — corruption, strategic voting, and more. Studying them is a great way to learn about what it means to live and decide things in a democratic way.
3. Many online project’s voting systems (even if chosen sensibly) have poor implementations: bone-headed ballots, poor record keeping, poor security, and so on. For example, many sites do not randomize their ballots. Even well-known innovation competitions, such as the Knight Foundation, have given away chunks of money without taking their balloting seriously. Having tools to make good ballots easy makes it harder for people to mess it up because they don’t have time, expertise, or technology.
4. Many online projects do voting non-transparently. Having a third-party system that manages the process as securely as possible would help move the ball forward.

To be clear, I’m not talking about political elections right here. I’m talking about starting with something where technology and early adopters can move the needle.

1. The National Coalition on Dialog and Deliberation is having voting on their Catalyst Awards.
2. A friend and I ended up discussing (unexpectedly) our interest in voting systems. We do live in DC, but, really, who knew?
3. I played a classic board game called Die Macher over the snowy weekend with friends. It is an game of German elections in a multiparty system — very different from what we see in the US.
4. I recently found some notes I made (along with another Ruby/Rails developer and entrepreneur, Nick Plante) about a design for an open voting API.

I would be happy to see these ideas live on somehow or another!

Who knew that FOSS has such a presence in Oklahoma!? I wonder if they would accept this as a tag line: “FOSS? OK!”

basho / lager : A logging framework for Erlang/OTP

(I like bad puns with good beer.)

— https://github.com/basho/lager