Paul Miller

• The Beijing subway is brilliant but a bit full on during rush hour. I guess you can’t really complain for 20p a ride.
• Internet use is restricted but VPNs are usually ok and a lot of people use them – it makes me wonder how many UK twitter (or BBC iPlayer) users are actually in China.
• The argument the Chinese Government uses for blocking some sites isn’t about censorship (they’re actually quite open about that) but that they don’t want American companies to hold lots of personal data about Chinese citizens. Google Docs is blocked for that reason and it’s the same with Facebook.
• People don’t really buy hot coffees in the summer – it’s all about the iced coffee.
• The Communist Party has over 50 million members. They vote on stuff fairly often.
• There’s pretty much a Chinese internet that we don’t see. The vast majority of Chinese internet users access it through their phones rather than a web browser.
• The electric bikes are brilliant – particularly the tricycles with an motor strapped underneath them. Why don’t we have them in the UK?
• The tech industry in China has a special place and is given a lot of freedoms and support by the Government. A lot more than the tech industry gets from US or UK governments.
• Dumplings for lunch – tasty, filling, 50p – what’s not to like?
• The idea (you often hear in Silicon Valley) that Chinese coders don’t have any creativity is really not true. While it’s arguably behind at the moment the startup ecosystem in China is developing much faster than the US or Europe.
• Chinese beer is respectable. Chinese wine less so.
• I’ve started thinking the software patent debacle in the US is more likely to derail the tech industry there than the intellectual property regime in China is here.
• The plug sockets (see above) are genius and should be compulsory in all hotels and event venues everywhere. They take plugs from pretty much any country you like.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a very good programme on BBC Four called The Truth About Exercise presented by Michael Mosley.

Instinctively I guess I knew that different people responded differently to exercise but I hadn’t really looked at the science. One study mentioned in the programme found that in a sample of 1,000 people given the same WHO recommended exercise regime for 20 weeks, 15% had a dramatic improvement in their fitness but 20% showed no real improvement at all (so-called ‘non-responders’). It also seems that there are genetic markers that can predict where you will be on this distribution.

The programme then looked at some of the research that’s going on into High Intensity Training which sounds too good to be true and has led to a few somewhat dramatic headlines. The idea is that you can get many of the same fitness benefits of the WHO recommended regime based on just a few minutes per week of really pushing yourself in full body exercise. What was interesting was that Michael Mosley is in the ‘non-responder’ group but the High Intensity Training did still have a benefit to him – it improved his insulin sensitivity by 24% which in his case (with a history of diabetes in the family) was very important.

It brought me back to my hatred of gyms which was what got me interested in Good Gym in the first place and thinking about how we could radically improve the health of a large percentage of the population. Only about a third of the UK population meet the recommended levels of exercise for a healthy lifestyle and it’s costing the NHS billions of pounds and probably having all kinds of other effects on the economy and society as well.

I think there’s a huge need for tools that make preventative healthcare work. Unfortunately the NHS  (which is really a national ill health service) isn’t set up to build them so I think they’ll have to come from elsewhere. I’d like to see services that can offer advice and motivation to people about exercise on a personalised basis. They could involve some element of genetic propensity to benefit from different types of exercise as well as looking at other lifestyle issues such as your activity levels (the programme singled out sitting down at work as probably the UK’s biggest killer) and devise nutritional and exercise advice that takes into account budget and lifestyle.

Image  Some rights reserved by Josiah Mackenzie

Related articles

• TV review: Horizon: The Truth About Exercise; Supersize v Superskinny (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Fit in three minutes’ claim tested (bbc.co.uk)
• How To Get Fit With 3 Minutes Of Exercise A Week: BBC Doc Tries “HIT” – Medical News Today (medicalnewstoday.com)

The Checklist Manifesto probably isn’t a good book to read on a plane. The main source of examples is flight safety – or more specifically plane crashes and what was learned from them. When I read it on an easyJet flight to and from Milan, I couldn’t help notice that the crew of the plane seemed to be younger than me. They say policemen only get younger, but it feels slightly scarier when it’s pilots.

The manifesto is also written by a surgeon (Atul Gawande) and so most of the other examples are about cutting people open in emergency situations. Also not good for me – I’m very, very squeamish.

It is however a very good book and I’m beginning to think there’s something in it. The basic thesis is that work and life are getting ever more complex and while we are getting better and better at mastering the world around us, we’re also more susceptible to making stupid mistakes. Gawande contends that the answer to this conundrum is remarkably simple – checklists.

The first checklist to reduce stupid mistakes in complex situations was created by Boeing after they realised that even one of the most distinguished pilots in the world could make a simple mistake in trying to take off in their (at the time) cutting edge technology – the B-17 four engine bomber. Ever since, every plane they’ve ever built has had a series of checklists created for it and they are designed to be incredibly easy to use. Check out this flight manual for the SR-71 Lockheed Martin ‘Blackbird’ which is now declassified to see how specific the checklists are.

At a more mundane level, if you’re cabin crew on easyJet, there’s even a simple checklist for giving the captain a cup of tea. That might sound ridiculous but get it wrong and you could let somebody gain access to the cockpit. It’s a one in a million type situation but that’s what checklists can prevent – they reduce risk. They enable six people under 35 to safely launch a metal tube filled with explosive to 30,000 feet and land it again with 153 other people on board.

Beyond flight and surgery, the book touches on a couple of investment firms or partners at firms who use this approach and say that while it’s early days, they’re seeing good results. I can imagine that’s true. Investing is all about finding the startups that reach escape velocity but there are a lot of things that can go wrong along the way. As an investor, using checklists could reduce the risk of those things happening both in decisions about investments and when working with investees.

It’s also a pretty useful approach for startups themselves and one we’re going to be using for Bethnal Green Ventures. We’re developing a checklist for pretty much any situation you could find yourself in during your first year as a startup. They’re not meant to tell you what to do, just to stop you from making silly mistakes that other founders wish they hadn’t made. Once we’ve tried it out, we’re also hoping to publish it so that others can use it too. In the meantime, this list of 40 steps every startup should take by Andrew Scott is a very useful place to start.

Photo  Some rights reserved by WexDub

I feel like I’ve noticed the limitations of the internet’s infrastructure more often in the last few weeks than ever before.

The first time I was doing something I often do which is using my phone as a kind of radio around the house, streaming programmes or talks I’ve missed over my home wifi connection and playing them through the loudspeaker. In this case it was a video of Paul Graham’s PyCon keynote (although I was only actually listening to the audio). As often happens, I realised I was late to meet friends so picked up the phone, stuck some headphones in and walked down the road for 10 minutes, still listening to the talk. Just before I got there though, the audio cut out and I got a text message from O2 saying I’d exceeded my data limit for the month. I didn’t actually know I had a limit.

The second time I felt the internet creaking was checking the speed of my home internet connection which is starting to become far less reliable. In this case I think it’s because of the aggregate effect of increasing demand on my local exchange. I should have kept the data over time but based on a few spot checks it seems that it’s about a third of the speed that it was two years ago.

The third thing that’s becoming really frustrating is the glitchiness of wifi networks on the move. I wonder whether this has always been the case but now I just expect it to work better. It often takes forever to connect and cuts out every few seconds as it tries to migrate you across different base stations – especially in large buildings like hotels. Don’t get me started on how much some places are charging for wifi – I basically refuse to pay.

I know I’m a pretty heavy user but the point is that if I’m bumping up against the edge of the internet now, it won’t take long for the whole system to reach its limits. I’ve always thought of the UK’s communications infrastructure as quite good but for the first time I can see how it might not be enough.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if there’s room for a new player offering something much better because everything I’ve read about (such as ‘super fast’) is really just a bit more capacity. It feels like the demands we’re beginning to place on the infrastructure are a couple of orders of magnitude greater than we currently have.

I’m a bit bored of watching the little rotating dots on iplayer. If the UK is going to be one of the best places in the world to create new applications of the internet we’re going to need to up our game.

Image  Some rights reserved by FirasMT

When I was a policy wonk I went to some very odd events. On one occasion I found myself giving a talk about public attitudes to nanotechnology at an academic conference in Columbia, South Carolina. Like many academic conferences it was a bit hard to follow unless you’re deeply immersed in the very specific vocabulary of that particular discipline but there was one talk though that really got me thinking. It was by a Harvard academic called Peter Galison.

Galison was talking about the idea of Trading Zones – a term he used to describe the places and situations where major scientific or engineering breakthroughs had taken place. In this instance he was talking about the Manhattan Project.

Galison contends that there was no one person there who knew how to make an atomic bomb. All the experience and knowledge needed were in Los Alamos – but in the heads of a bunch of people who had – in the main – never met before. The key person was Robert Oppenheimer who wasn’t the best scientist or engineer in the world (although he was very, very good) but who realised that the only route to succeed was to get these people to work together. In the midst of one of the most secretive projects in history, Oppenheimer embarked on a process of radical openness and communication between the scientists – from many different disciplines and the engineers. He encouraged them to explain their work to one another and to ask each other to solve each others’ problems. He also made sure that everybody there felt equal. Even though there were young engineers working alongside Nobel Prize winning scientists, academic rank went out the window. It was all about what knowledge they could ‘trade’ in order to solve the overall problem.

The idea of Trading Zones came back to me as we were planning the first Social Innovation Camp. We realised that we were bringing together people who ordinarily would never have worked together and it was then that the ‘tone’ of Social Innovation Camp was created. We made a very conscious decision not to use any language that would alienate people or to slip into using the jargon of any particular group that we were bringing together. It’s perhaps best epitomised in “Hello.” but it’s everywhere when you start to look. The way we wrote all the copy for our invitations, the way we ran our call for ideas, the way that we facilitate workshops without people having the slightest idea that they’re in the middle of an ‘ideation process’.

And it works. One of the things that people often say about Social Innovation Camp weekends is how much they’ve enjoyed working with people who aren’t like them. One of the most gratifying things was that all the presentations at the end of the weekend are understandable too. (again it was a deliberate move on our part to invite outsiders in to the final pitching session so that all the projects had to explain their ideas in language that anybody would understand).

Creating a common way of communicating is one of the most important things in collaborative projects. Diversity of experience and viewpoint is vital in creating new things but without having a way of talking that diversity can quickly become a barrier to working together.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha’s book The Start-up of You went straight to the top of the best-seller lists this week and it’s not difficult to see why. I read it in a couple of sittings and once I’d overcome my British reserve about the slightly cheesy style of business writing I have to admit it is a very good book. It’s also well worth listening to two podcasts with Reid Hoffman that add to the argument and advice in the book. This one of a talk he gave at Stanford University and an interview with the ever brilliant Peter Day for the BBC’s World of Business.

It’s really a book about how to get yourself in the position to start a startup or create new opportunities in your career. It suggests a few things that I did back in 2005 when I left Demos such as saying yes to events I wouldn’t previously have gone to and taking people who I only knew a little bit for coffees and drinks (see the Strength of Weak Ties for why). That all led to me finding new networks of people and being exposed to plenty of new ideas – I ended up spending a very odd Valentines Day with an amazing group of people that included the very nice man who is now Denmark’s Culture Minister for example.

All of the stuff in the book about Plan A, B and Z is really good advice. I actually don’t think most people should just “jump off a cliff and assemble the aeroplane on the way down” and start a startup because the financial risks can be very high. You need to be comfortable with the ‘downside case’ or Plan Z as Reid and Ben call it for it to work. What pains me is that there are some people who would be brilliant at starting something up – in fact much better than many people who are successful as entrepreneurs – but who don’t because the ‘scene’ puts them off.

I’ve met Reid Hoffman once and spent half an hour talking about early stage investing for the Startup Factories report, quite early in the morning if I remember rightly. He’s a pretty impressive guy all round but there’s one thing he said that I remember clearly as I pushed him on why he works with so many companies and how he chooses what to work on. He said with a smile, “I’m trying to build new institutions that help millions of people and last forever”, knowing how ridiculous is sounded, but he was at least partly serious – startups were just his vehicle for achieving social change. I wish more people in the tech world thought like that.

Related articles

• 10 Memorable Quotes From The Start-up of YOU (forbes.com)
• In Startups And Life, You Need Plan A, B, And Z (techcrunch.com)
• Reid Hoffman’s New Business Book Tells Everyone to Act Like Entrepreneurs (allthingsd.com)

I’ve been thinking a little bit about gadgets in advance of the now widely trailed Apple announcement tomorrow. It feels like one of the biggest tech media events for a while with the tech blogs getting so desperate for news they’re even covering shipping prices.

The thing I care about is how we can use technology to solve difficult problems. In my mind that usually means software because it’s software that does the organising and the hardware (so the theory goes) is neutral. Of course the truth is that there is a complex relationship of behaviour, software, brand, networks and hardware that goes into creating any kind of social value through technology

The reason why these big announcements sometimes matter is that occasionally a gadget really does change things and starts an avalanche of new ideas and companies. It takes time though. It’s 5 years since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone but it’s only really now that the things that I thought might be possible when I first saw it are happening. We needed a huge ecosystem of developers, APIs and user awareness to grow too. Of course the impact is also easier to see now because they’re now selling over 10m phones a month.

This led me to think about all the things I want to be possible but where the hardware isn’t quite ready yet. I thought about all the little bits of embedded computing in my life that nearly work and where the ecosystem could grow. Wattson is still chugging away telling me when I’ve left the immersion heater on. Fitbit is following me around, telling me (when I remember to sync it up) how active I’ve been. Both are imperfect, but I can see how future iterations or competitors could be really useful. I’m very happy that Nest are working on the home energy problem for example and using learning software to take it further and I’m sure at some stage, Fitbit will crack the syncing problem – probably by it connecting via the phone rather than the clunky adapter.

The most interesting recent gadget launch for me though was the Raspberry Pi – a product launch pretty far away from the ‘ooh, shiny expensive thing!’ style of Apple. I hope in 5 years time there will be just the same kind of ecosytem of developers and ideas for the Raspberry Pi that the iPhone has today meaning that millions of people (especially young ‘uns) get under the hood of software and programming. It could be a very good thing.

Related articles

• Raspberry Pi, activist tool (arstechnica.com)
• Raspberry Pi demand at 700 per second (ubergizmo.com)
• 3D-print your own Raspberry Pi case at home (news.cnet.com)

If you get a chance, I’d definitely recommend reading Clay Johnson‘s book – The Information Diet. Clay was a founder of Blue State Digital – the company that many people credit with winning Barack Obama the presidency in 2008 thanks to their online campaign. He’s left that world behind now but is obviously still passionate about politics and particularly about how people come to form their opinions.

His thesis in the book is that, in much the same way as there are good calories and bad calories when it comes to our nutritional diet, there’s good information and bad information for our intellects. I’m not one of those who think the internet is making us stupid but I do think we have choices to make about how we should consume the mass of information that surrounds us nowadays. Some of Clay’s stories about how big news sites operate certainly make you feel like you’ve been manipulated for years. It also made me realise quite how far the hollowing out of the journalism business in the US has gone – I don’t think I’d really recognised the stark economics of the situation before. As Clay puts it:

The industrialization of information is doing to journalists what the industrialization of farming did to farmers. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit out of a piece of content, expensive journalists are being replaced by networks of less-qualified but much cheaper independent contractors. In the world of fiduciary responsibility, quality journalism means market inefficiency.

I went through one of the exercises Clay tries in the book to recover some control over his information consumption last December. I tried SaneBox for a month and soon realised that most email is absolutely useless and unsubscribed from almost every email newsletter. For some reason I can’t seem to get rid of the private jet and auto-dealer spam, but I’m pretty much down to the important stuff.

Twitter is still a bugbear for me - I’ve written before about my twitter twitch. Just the other night when I was in the pub with friends, a number of people said they found themselves just pressing refresh for hours on end in the afternoons. I do too, until I catch myself.

I also think that I agree with Clay that producing is the best deterrent from consuming junk information. If you settle down to write each day without any distractions, your mind feels straightened out. I’m going to really try to make it a habit as my working day is going to be a bit different for the next six months or so.

My favourite section of the book is actually the first appendix entitled ‘Dear Programmer’ which echoes Tim O’Reilly‘s “Work on Stuff that Matters” talk that inspired Social Innovation Camp and is certainly at the heart of Bethnal Green Ventures.

Clay quotes Facebook’s Jeff Hammerbacher saying, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” before writing:

My plea to [developers] is that you take your role in society seriously. Find an issue you care about: the environment, cancer, space exploration, education, rewiring communities, pet adoption – anything – and dedicate some portion of your time to finding new ways to put your skills to use in that community.

Related articles

• An Information Diet For Founders – with Clay Johnson (mixergy.com)
• Start Every Day as a Producer, Not a Consumer [Productivity] (lifehacker.com)
• Book Review: The Information Diet (lifehack.org)

This is roughly what I said at Benefits Camp this morning. Thanks to Dom at FutureGov for giving me the excuse to think about it a bit.

I want to open up your thinking a little bit, but first it’s worth just reiterating why we’re talking about this now and why this can feel like such a frustrating area of policy.

Firstly, the demographics are only going in one direction. The number of people who will be entitled to benefits as they’re currently structured is going up. This terrifies Government because historically it has been such a difficult area to reform.

The economy is also – in the minds of people who make decisions about benefits – only going in one direction. GDP in real terms is going down and despite the rhetoric about a ‘growth agenda’, politicians and civil servants are preparing for a long slow period of stagnation.

This leaves us with a problem – there are less ingredients but the diners are all getting hungrier. It’s pretty depressing place to start but I just want to offer three ways to think differently. I think the only way that big systems like this change is by demonstrating that an alternative way of thinking about the problem can have better outcomes for everybody. Arguing inside the current system can be incredibly frustrating.

Think about different financial models

Some people talk about in terms of handouts, scrounging, allowances. But the aim of most benefits is to change things. Could benefits payments be investments where everybody has an incentive to make things work because their interests are aligned?

Or rather than looking at the benefits themselves, look at the costs of administering them and see if you could do it better. Just one example I’ve found is that the cost to Local Authorities of administering housing and council tax benefits in 2005 was about 5% of the total spent. That sounds quite good until you realise that cost was £880m.

Think about how this could work without Government

Think radically and without the constraints of the state having a monopoly on decisions about benefits. Look at what happens with foreign remittances for example. Developing countries receive $325 billion in payments from their relatives in other countries. That’s three times the amount that they receive in aid payments from Western Governments and some evidence suggests that it’s much better spent.

Think practically

My hunch is that nothing in this world moves because of evidence or logic. It’s a world of half-baked ideologies that barely mask some pretty hateful prejudices – on the part of almost everybody concerned. This means you constantly risk logjam if you follow the usual channels of protest or lobbying. I think the way to argue your case is to show how things can be better practically – creating new schemes where everybody benefits.

A few weeks ago I visited Biosphere 2. If you haven’t come across the project before, it was built as a test of whether we could recreate the support systems we have on Earth (or Biosphere 1 as the project’s supporters call it). To test this idea they built a $150 million airtight greenhouse in the Arizona desert.

Related articles

• New science in the ruins of Biosphere 2 (boingboing.net)
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