Selling using the Black Swan

I've been reading The Black Swan recently, an exciting book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In its essence, it reminds us how fooled we may be in the way we describe reality, history and future, and possibly it may assist us to make much better decisions and being ready for the unexpected.

Taleb sums this down as being due to two primary ways of assessing things in the human mind:

• System 1 - the experiential. Rapid decisions according to experience and habit, the "gut feeling" and prejudice (in the true sense of the word)


• System 2 - the cogitative. Thinking rationally and logically about things, involving experience but also assessing the influence of abstracts such as statistics
  

The problem is of course that the experiental system can frequently be wildly inaccurate but you don't notice it unless you knowingly bring in the cogitative system to actually assess things. Using the cogitative system is both energy consuming and tricky as you don't always know when it would make a difference. I myself experience that I everyday think a certain way about things, but when you stop to think about how you actually should act, sometimes it seems that your direction has drifted way off target.

Anyway, the book also recently taught me a little clever thing about sales, especially if you're selling something obscure. Essentially if consider the probability of a generic situation A, compared to a more specific situation B whichas a consequence will result in A happening. Even if mathematically the likelyhood of A must be greater than that of B (and thus A) since other situations than B may also cause A, if B feels rational and A more complicated, people will generally think experientally and inaccurately think that B feels much more probable than the complex situation A.

So how to use this in sales? Well, describing the situations you want your customers to use your product for will make them seem more likely. Maybe this is very basic to anyone in sales, but for me it was a realization. I'll make an example below, and as a hint, A as described above is someone stealing and your email password and abusing it because you don't use SSL and B is computer wiz-kid stealing your password while you're working in the same café:

Rather than just talking about the importance of using encrypted POP and SMTP email (that's just a matter of ticking a box in the email program) tell the story of the university computer security student who has a hobby to run a network sniffer and log anything interesting when he's working from cafés. Your email program is checking the email every few minutes and the young student captures your username and password every time. Every now and then he takes a look in the logs and checks out the people of which he's got the accounts of, emptying his nets so to say.

In a couple of months, he's soon gathered some thousand accounts and realizes that besides playing pranks on his clueless victims (they had really given him their passwords!), he can make a little bit of extra money from monitoring the gossip or business pages and matching them to his secret lists. It is easy for the guy to be very safe from getting caught, every now and then he will get his hands on some very valuable information, and the people he sells it to can create a world of trouble for the victims. And all this because they didn't use secure email connections. Please use secure email connections and don't become a victim yourself. Tick that one box, check it now.

Young Scientists in the Physics Olympiad, prepare to beat them this year!

Already back in June this year (section down, here in google cache instead or the page at fysikersamfundet), two members of the Swedish Federation of Young Scientists, Gunnar Peng (1st place) and Karl Larsson (4th place), qualified for the Swedish team for the International Physics Olympiad. Yay guys, congratulations! (Actually, the finals were 20-29th of July... so how did they do? - Well, Carl Andersson got an honoruable mention whereas Estonia got one silver and two bronze medals!)

The funny thing though, Gunnar (who's from the same school as Karl, Katedralskolan in Linköping) was already qualified also to the finals of the International Mathematical Olympiad just like last year so was replaced for the physics team, supposedly by the runner up, Petter Säterskog who replies to the question whether he will go to the physics finals in Hanoi: "I'm not sure since I am already qualified for the biology olympiad in India. Not sure if they run at the same time. I am better at physics than biology". He did participate in India, and together with Emelie Sandberg and Martin Van from Sweden and Rudolf Bichele, Marit Puusepp and Kärt Must from Estonia got bronze medals! Tomas Kesek from Sweden and Kai Tiitsaar from Estonia got silver medals!

But... just say WHAT?! Not to say that Gunnar and Petter are not probably brilliant guys, but that just makes me think the whole Swedish participant community of the international science olympiades must be really tiny and inbred. In his Sommar i P1 program, Stavros Louca (mathematics teacher in celebrated "Klass 9A", download his Sommar i P1 program here or here) told of how he stimulated his students by challenging them to these olympiades, and they were successful! So, my contributon to remedy this situation, and for the benefit of everyone involved, is to help all everyone who can to compete in the olympiade.

So, generally the olympiades are for students in last year in high school (Swedish gymnasium third year) i.e. roughly 17-19 years old. The competitions seem to start qualifications during winter-spring (so you've got a couple of months to decide that you want to participate), national qualification finals early summar and international finals during the summer. The topics you can compete in are according to wikipedia:

• The International Mathematical Olympiad (Matematikolympiaden and Skolornas Matematiktävling - which starts already in November, and Gunnar Peng got a silver in Madrid this year! - "för [alla] gymnasister ... grundskoleelev i årskurs 9 kan beviljas dispens att deltaga")
  
• The International Physics Olympiad (Fysiktävlingen - "för tredje årets gymnasister som har avslutat A-kursen i fysik och läst större delen av B-kursen i fysik")
  
• The International Chemistry Olympiad (Kemiolympiaden)
  
• The International Biology Olympiad (Biologiolympiaden has no info since 2005)
  
• The International Olympiad in Informatics (Programmeringsolympiaden are clever, they help you participate if your school doesn't make sure. Though I don't believe this, Gunnar Peng also won a finals silver in the Informatics Olympiad finals in Egypt!)
  
• The International Philosophy Olympiad (Sweden is not represented yet)
  
• The International Astronomy Olympiad (Rymdstyrelsen should arrange Astronomiolympiaden but haven't update the page since 2005)
  
• The International Geography Olympiad
  
• The International Linguistic Olympiad (Lingolympiaden)
  
• The International Junior Science Olympiad
  
• The International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics
  
• The International Earth Science Olympiad

As a final note, I would like to share with everyone that the Federation of Young Scientists' chairman blog (in Swedish) is up and running again, and that LinkedIn now has discussions for groups, including for the funnny group of O-Unga Forskare (sw. "Non-young Scientists").

New iTunes 8, and why you should start using it

Rumor has it that Apple will be releasing both a new major iTunes version and a new minor version of the iPhone firmware during their "Let's Rock" event (Tuesday) September 9th.

It is still curious how even releases of just software updates from Apple still manage to stir some excitement. However, when Apple releases a new version of iTunes for example, it usually indicates some pretty big new feature somewhere in the Apple product family. iPod video, iPhone, movie rentals through iTunes and other big announcements from Apple have all been accompanied by a feature update of iTunes. So if iTunes 8 is released tomorrow, at least I am curious about what will come with it. My best bet is that Apple is moving towards the location aware-market with the GPS iPhone, I suspect they will have some cool location-related feature.

Even with how great iTunes is already today, there are several of you out there who haven't realized it, so here goes my favourite features of the current iTunes:

• DAAP / iTunes server using (the free!) Firefly on my home server gives me seamless access to all of my music archive. Now I'm just missing iTunes remote speakers in software, but I guess I can live without it (Yay, there exists, cool now I will have to try it! - Umm... no "The key stored in iTunes has been extracted by Jon Lech Johansen, enabling 3rd party software to stream music to an Airport Express. However, the key stored in the AirPort Express is not yet known, and 3rd party software that mimics an Airport Express is thus not possible"):
  
  


• iTunes party shuffle is very nice to keep track of the playlist not only during parties. You see what next bunch of songs will be played and can modify it, you can add tracks manually or let them fill automatically as you play. Unfortunately DAAP / iTunes servers doesn't offer a party shuffle:
  
  


• iTunes manages my podcasts and syncs them to my iPod, including displaying which I have listened to. Very convenient:
  
  


• last.fm scrobbler plugin logs what music I listen to and keeps track of it in my online profile. Besides providing a great smörgåsbord of music, as I have previously written last.fm also keeps a great track of upcoming events:
  
  

These great features aside, iTunes is nifty for cleaning up the ID3 tags and filenames when you're an compulsive order nut like me, and of course it's simple and convenient for mom to rip her CDs in iTunes.

(Update: So that's it (on IDG here and here) indeed iTunes 8 was released, and except as I said, another version of an already great program, it's got some nice new shuffle function and a closer connection to the iTunes Music Store. Cool. iTunes is still the only program which cares and does justice to your cover art)

So you thought your OS was secure?

When looking for information about the IDA disassembler (anyone who knows it and can give me a few hints?) I found an interesting video at Google Videos. Alex Sotirov discussed how he found a very applicable "ANI" exploit in WinXP and Vista, including showing his best IDA tricks. Quite academic and extremely technical. As food for thought he ends the lectures with this diagrams about what OS provides what security measures:


We Mac users sometimes brag about how secure OS X is, while in reality it probably has a pretty solid base in Darwin and provides a reliable development environment with Cocoa... but when bugs and exploits are found, OS X is standing there almost absolutely naked and defenseless.

Of course, Windows drags a larger pile of legacy code behind itself, but it also is a lot more under fire, it makes a lot more sense to produce exploits and viruses for Windows.

My advice (which I hope will soon be published at mjukvara.se are still simple: 1) use good, secure software which throws away popups and spam 2) install system updates as they become available 3) run some sort of firewall and maybe free antivirus software . You, or if someone does it for you, need to keep your computer reasonably clean and well-oiled. Don't blame a virus if it's you who's filled up your disk. By these simple principles, my systems have been essentially perfectly free from virus trouble for at least five years. Knock on wood :-)

A little PS about that dangerous Internet hole which recently was "discovered" by Anton Kapela and Alex Pilosov. Experts are saying that indeed the "hole" is there, but everyone concerned were already aware of it and will not have much problems with it. If anything it is a small reminder that whenever you transmit passwords or any sensitive data over the Internet, you should not make any assumptions that the network is not wiretapped.

First exciting thing about Google Chrome - Gears

This morning I went to download the new Google Chrome browser. A lot of noise had been made about it, releasing a cute comic explaining the high-tech features of the new browser one day before releasing the browser.

Once I try it out it looks nice. Very nice, making the tabs part of the window bar and stripping away a line or two of menus and status bar makes the browser feel very slimmed.

Though the first and most fascinating thing I discover is features provided by Gears. My Google Reader can now download and provide me articles offline, nice! As I understand it, Gears is an interface to easily expose advanced browser functions to programmers in a unified way. It's with great anticipation I am looking forward to what great user experiences and features web applications using Gears can bring.



PS. Ashish has the head-start of time zones, but I find more interesting things :-)