Expanding space, or moving galaxies?

Consider a bunch of beads evenly spaced on a long elastic string.

Suppose that you position yourself next to one of the beads and look to an adjacent bead and you see it moving away from you.

What’s happening? There are two possibilities:

1. The adjacent bead is moving along the elastic string, away from you
2. The elastic is being pulled

How would you know which is the case?

It is well-known that the galaxies are moving outward, away from our galaxy.  Are they actually moving, or is space expanding?

Hearing true things is more important than saying smart things

When dealing with customers, is it better to

• listen carefully to their needs, or
• have something smart to say?

Answer: Hearing true things is more important than saying smart things.

Being wise is more important than being smart.

People need to ask good questions before they can come up with smart answers.

– Hard Facts by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

Synergy between Wisdom of Crowds and Statistic’s Sample Size

The core idea behind the “wisdom of crowds” is that by aggregating information from a large, diverse group of individuals you can obtain a better solution and make better decisions.

Today I was reading Statistics for Dummies by Deborah Rumsey and realized that the motivation for the wisdom of crowds is quite analogous to the motivation for having a large sample size in statistics, as can be seen in these snippets from the book:

Fewer participants in a study means less information overall, so studies with small numbers of participants in general are less accurate than similar studies with larger sample sizes … Most researchers try to include the largest sample size they can afford, and they balance the cost of the sample size with the need for accuracy … Check the sample size to be sure you have enough information on which to base your results.

Your company needs to long-range forecast? Don’t depend on a single person!

Companies try to forecast the future. For example, a printer company tries to forecast the future demand of printers. Based on their forecasts, they make planning decisions. Thus, decisions are made in the face of uncertainty.

The more power you give to a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

Conversely, decisions made by aggregating the collective wisdom of a diverse group of people will outperform even the smartest person most of the time.

– Paraphrasing The Wisdom of Crowds by James Suroweicki

We’re all learning better ways of designing for the Web

We’re all learning better ways of designing for the Web.

For example, we’re discovering methods that increase a web site’s readability and accessibility by using lean, semantic markup and CSS for design.

– Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm

Watching the history of the universe unfold

When astronomers peer at the heavens through telescopes, they see distant objects not as they are now, but as they were when the light reaching the telescopes embarked on its journey across space.  In this respect, a telescope is also a “timescope.”  For example, if a nearby star exploded yesterday, we would be blissfully unaware of this cataclysm for years, until the pulse of light announcing the star’s demise arrived on Earth.  Looking further afield, we see stars in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy as they looked about 2.5 million years ago.  More distant galaxies appear correspondingly older.  The Hubble Space Telescope routinely records images of galaxies as they appeared long before Earth even existed.  The oldest galaxies can actually be seen still in the process of formation, more that 12 billion years ago.  So by penetrating farther and farther into space, astronomers can watch the history of the universe unfolding in reverse.

– Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies

Strategy is destiny? Not necessarily!

Many companies think that if only they can devise the right strategy (plan) then they will be successful. Companies spend lots of time and effort devising a corporate strategy. However, strategy is overrated: “Successful implementation is much more important to organizational success than having the right strategy.”

In the book Hard Facts by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton the authors make an analogy to football:

In U.S. football, virtually every play is designed to go for a touchdown. Why doesn’t it? Failures in execution. Linemen miss blocks, running backs stumble, receivers run the wrong routes or drop the ball, the quarterback doesn’t throw the ball where it was supposed to go, and so forth. There is no question that there is, on occasion, brilliant play calling — the sports equivalent to strategy — that can make a difference in the outcome. But most of success in football and in other sports is based on being able to effectively execute the plays that are designed.

Competence and capability are important for corporate success. Too much attention to getting the strategy right can divert attention away from building the capability to operate effectively. We have seen that many organizations use planning and talking about implementations as substitutes for action — a syndrome we called “the smart-talk trap.” To help his players avoid this trap, former SanFrancisco 49ers head coach Steve Mariucci told them, “I never wear a watch because I always know what time it is. It is always NOW. And now is when you should do it.”

The dramatic effect of “random friends” in connecting you to other people

Let’s say we have a population of 1,000 people with 10 friends each and no “random” friends.  That is, everyone’s friends are drawn only from a strictly defined social circle[1].  Then the average degree of separation is 50; in other words, on average it will take 50 hops to get from one randomly selected person to another.  But if we now say that 25% of everyone’s friends are random, that is, drawn from outside their normal social circle[1], then the average degree of separation drops dramatically to 3.6.

[1] Your collection of friends most likely includes people you grew up with, people you went to school with, colleagues from work, people in your profession, and your current neighbors.  These are friends who come from your normal social circles.

[2] In addition to your structured social network, you also have a few random friends, people who are not in your normal social circle, who your have somehow met and become friendly with. For example, it might be someone you got to know while on vacation, or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

– The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker

The “big bang” was not an exploding ball of matter

Popular accounts of the big bang often describe it as the detonation of a compact ball of matter poised in a preexisting void, with the galaxies compared to fragments flying away from the center of the explosion.

Easy though this image may be to grasp, it is seriously misleading and the source of much confusion: people are inevitably prompted to ask, “Where is the center of the universe?”

If the big bang really had been an exploding ball of matter, then some galaxies would lie deep in the midst of the melee, surrounded on all sides, while others would be located near the edge of the assemblage.  Suppose this were so, and picture the view from a far-flung galaxy.  In one direction would lie the center of the universe; in the opposite direction there would be empty space.  The sky would appear dramatically different depending on which way an observer looked.

That is certainly not what we see from Earth: the universe looks very much the same in all directions.  As far as our telescopes can penetrate, which is about 13 billion light-years, encompassing roughly 100 billion galaxies, matter is distributed uniformly (strictly, it is clusters of galaxies that are distributed uniformly).  There is no evidence for any bunching up around some sort of center or, conversely, for any thinning out toward an edge.

How, then, should we describe the big bang and the expanding universe, given these observational facts?  Cosmologists have struggled to find ways to describe the expanding universe in simple language.  Here’s one attempt:

The big bang happened everywhere, not at one point in space.

A simple analogy that may help is to imagine a very long string of elastic with beads attached at regular intervals.  As the elastic is stretched, the beads move apart.  Every bead extends its separation from its neighbors, so the view from any given bead will be of other beads moving away.  All beads are equal: there is no center bead.

– Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies

An animal’s efficiency in converting food into biomass is around 10%

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100%: typically about 10%.  That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000 pound cow.  If instead you want to grow 1,000 pound of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn.

– Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond