Most of the posts you will read on this blog relate to either technology, law or business and I’d thought I would change that today by discussing something in the realm of charitable endeavors that I believe in. Charity – by definition – is the act of giving to those in need who are non-relations of the giver. Relative to this definition, this means giving to a family member is not a charitable undertaking as such an act would been done regardless. No, charity must have that critical variable of non-relation to be truly a charitable undertaking. In social psychology, this typically raises the presumptive  notion of a charitable gift economy such that a valuable item or service is provided to a non-related entity without any explicit agreement or quid pro quo – that is, there is no consideration provided by the donee to the donor.

The question I have often asked myself is – does this work and is it effective? Are charity’s truly an optimum and effective methodology of providing assistance ? Evidently, the question must be answered in the affirmative – charitable institutions are by enlarge extremely important organisations to assist those in need – not because of the wealth they generate from donor’s but rather because they are effective distributive mechanisms which have large networks that are able to dispense resources to those in need quickly. In my opinion, most large charitable institutions should idealistically therefore be modeled on concepts two primary concepts. Firstly, that of pure altruism – the selfless concern for the welfare of others by being motivated to act without any reward – and secondly, that of duty –  the evident concern for others juxtaposed against the rationalization of one’s moral being. Indeed, I write should be because while many charitable organisations are hugely reliant on these two principles - they are by no means definitive.

Most charitable organisations required large donations to survive and only the second limb mentioned above is the one capable of manipulation – the moral being. In this light, there is no question that game theory is an important element to charitable donation paradox both the perspective of the charity and from donor’s. That is, the probability of a donor providing a valuable item or service to a charitable organisation is motivated and positively correlated by the choices of others around them. For example, this is highly prevalent in the corporate donor sector – a business will become a donor only in response to another business becoming a donor with the hope that their net benefit from the donation will ultimately be more positive than the first-to-move. Similarly, one person donating because another person is donating in order to achieve some greater outcome benefit. Evidently, such notions of giving are a considerable distance from those first core principle mentioned in the prior paragraph but are none-the-less a critical facet of the charitable-donor relationship due to the corporate sector typically donating the largest sums of money. Unfortunately however, while you might think this has a positive net benefit – it can also lead to a reduction in overall donations since game theory is an entirely reactionary model. This infers that one’s intentions and strategy are modified by others – which can lead to a reduction in net benefit if the first-to-move donates considerably less than what the second-to-move would have otherwise donated.

You might be thinking ? So what – the charity now otherwise has money it didn’t have prior – net win, game over. Evidently, yes – you’re right – there is a benefit to the charity in the short-term but the negative effect to the business can affect its long term donation strategy as the reactionary model can provide a disincentive to donate at all. This can result in non-donations if a nash equilibrium is reached – that is, each player knows all of the others players moves and changes in strategy’s such that no player wins. Of course, the primary assumption is that the business wants a net benefit – an argument correlated to shareholder responsibility, profitability and countless other factors – but primarily one which is answered, again, in the affirmative. In this regard and perhaps most importantly in respect to disincentive effects of the donation process, most corporate donation scenarios result in a pareto optimilaity situation such that one company will always be better off and one will always be worst off which can often lead to non-donations. Imagine, first-to-move Company A donates $1,000 and is a hugely profitable enterprise while second-to-move Company B donates $10,000 and is only small – the net benefit to B greatly outweighs that of A leading to A to question it’s donation strategy or being forced to donate more in response – again, a win to the Charity in the short-term but a potentially negative long term affect due to the circumstantial outcome to Company A. To put this in perspective, many of you may be familiar with the age old Prisoners Dilemma question:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other (defects) and the other remains silent (cooperates), the defector goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

There are 4 outcomes – both silent for 6 months, A silent/B speaks – A 10 years/B free, B silent /A speaks – B 10 years/A free, A speaks/B speaks – 5 years. Evidently, the zero-sum-game presented is that neither should speak – but of course human nature is to question the strategy of the other and conclude that both are better off to speak than be silent since both are worse off if only one speaks. Such a scenario can easily be extrapolated to Company A and B above such that donations tend to be optimal if companies seek to act in equilibrium in donating – both potentially achieving net benefits without damaging the other while still positively benefiting the charity.

Of course, the common denominator in all this is the attribution to the economic value of the gift being provided and the analysis of game theory to donations. Evidently, if everyone were to follow the notion of altruism and duty then none of these such problems would occur. Indeed, while there is no doubt that large charities are needed and I donate to them - I truly do prefer the concept of Pay It Forward which is a merging of the two primary concepts mentioned above. For those that have not seen the movie of pay it forward – it is essentially a notion of altruistic signalling. That is, one temporarily reduces their value by increasing another’s with the expectation that the other will act in a similar way at some point in the future to a separate person again – this absolutely ensures that the flow of fitness travels directly from the one individual to the another. The notion of value is no way limited and can be simply measured in time or by purely economic means. Benjamin Franklin adequately framed such a notion in 1784

When you [...] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.

Of course, there are two fundamental flaws in the pay it forward model such that firstly, there must be a large and indefinite number of opportunities which exist regardless of form – and secondly, there will be those that simply do not pay it forward. I would argue that the first is not a large problem since there really are an indefinite number of problems to solve in the world while the second is highly correlated to duty. The primary reason I like the pay it forward model is that it is effective and morally gratifying – you perform a task directly for someone, and they in turn can provide a benefit to someone else. A simple example is purchasing a coffee for the person behind you and leaving a pay it forward note on the counter – the social morality and duty of the concept then falls into their hands – a moral obligation then associated to karma and the seemingly moral psychological and ‘karmic’ risk of not performing the act.

In conclusion, while this post seemingly has meddled together a number of different concepts – I think both options have their place. Large charitable organisations dispense to those who can otherwise not be reached and attack fundamental social fabric problems at a broader scale – while the pay it forward model is a direct model that provides immediate results to the donee. If more people chose to pay it forward, then I have no doubt that many more people would begin to donate to a greater number of charities purely from being a recipient of an act of random kindness for no apparent reason. It really is entirely uplifting to both grant and receive a gift – no matter how insignificant – from a total stranger. Try it yourself.

Google have released a brand new search interface called ‘Google Instant‘. To try it you must be logged into your Google Account and then access either the US or UK versions of Google.  Basically, Google have ‘enhanced their search technology to show your results as you type’. It is suggested that by offering ‘advanced prediction technology’ – that Google can actually show you results before you type.

A simple example – is “weather”. Under the current Google search structure, you would type “weather” and then hit Enter or press the Search button – consequently rendering the search results. This process has required 8 keyboard strokes – 7 for the word and 1 for pressing Enter. Using Google Instant, you would type the letter ‘w’ and it would automatically show you results for the top most common searched result ‘weather’ and an additional 5 top keyword searches saving you a considerable amount of search time for common searches. Google postulate that this is going to save more than 350 million hours of search time each year – due to the time saved in typing and the faster response delivery from Google. They suggest the key benefits are “Faster Searches, Smarter Predictions, Instant Results” – at least that’s the mantra.

So after we push through the gloss of the new release – what are the potential problems.

Firstly, Google suggest this is a fundamental shift in search and as a corollary of this – it’s going to cause a fundamental shift in the way people search. This suggestion is entirely based no the premise that page 2 search results are going to become increasingly redundant. Why ? Because Google Instant – at least in the short time period I have been using it – encourages you to redefine your search queries as the results appear. The previous mantra of ‘search, press enter, browse results, enter new search, press enter’ is no longer relevant since using Google Instant – the mantra changes to ‘start typing, see results, end’ or ‘start typing, see results, redefine search, see results, redefine, see results’ etc. Despite the fact that Google promises ‘nothing has changed as you can still always hit enter’ – the change in the user interface provides a disincentive for users to hit enter and frankly I forgot totally about hitting enter during my testing.

Secondly, this presents a problem for relevant results because amazingly – content is still highly relevant which appears on pages 2+ of Google. It’s just outside Googles top 10 ranking mechanism and is ranked from 11-30. This is forcing a dependency on Google that the results seen within the first 5-6 results are always the most relevant – if they are not – users simply change their search query and expect to see 5-6 new results. This is increasingly highlighted by the fact that currently – the ‘suggested search results’ box remains – even after you have finished searching and when you click outside the search box – encouraging you to search a new query. The box should really disappear once you have finished searching – highlighting search results and not suggesting that you search again.

Thirdly, I see a big increase in bandwidth. Checking out Google PageSpeed has shown a number of increases in bandwidth – checkout the 2 pics below. The first presents the search results using the current Google Search – searching ‘weather’ and the second presents the results under Google Instant searching ‘weather’. There is one proviso in this test – I typed the full keyword in both searches – so naturally Google Instant is going to return a greater bandwidth load. If I was just searching for ‘weather’ – then typing ‘w’ would have been enough.

However, any other search result which doesn’t relate to the top 5 searches is going to pull significantly more bandwidth – correlated, as a computational function, to the number of letters pressed. That is, longer searches “what is the capital of america?” – are going to pull results for each and every letter – significantly increasingly bandwidth. Notably, this didn’t bring up a “suggested search result” and so it means that I was required to type each and every letter. To show you just how much more bandwidth is eaten up, check out the results using ‘old google’ at the top and ‘Google Instant’ at the bottom for this test. That’s a 23.9KB increase in the old and new bandwidth requirements for Google Instant or a 122.5% increase in bandwidth – a significant amount.

Evidently, this becomes a much bigger issue on mobile. So far, I have not read any material from Google about the increase that Google Instant is going to have on mobile phones. Evidently, delivering results on the fly constantly is going to increase the level of bandwidth on mobile devices – and from seeing the results above – it’s pretty clear that this is going to be significant. How this effects users mobile plans, data flow and overall network bandwidth is questionable and so far hasn’t been addressed.

So it seems while some queries are faster – ‘weather’ – this is offset by the large proportion that are going to suck down a lot more bandwidth – “what is the capital of america?”. The question for Google is – while time is saved, how much extra bandwidth is consumed on the Internet ?

Some food for thought.

It’s been a while between posts – and I apologize for that but frankly I’ve been flat out working full-time at FlucMedia hoping to get our product released this month in beta – a bit on that later in the month. Since it’s been a significant period of time since my last post – I’d thought I reopen with a fresh post about the utilization of time and a commitment to trying to getting at least 1 post out per week. Yes, that’s per week at this stage with the hope that eventually it will come down to every few days.

Time Utilization you say ? Yes, Time utilization and the rationalization of a time within a week. I sat down the other day to try and figure out where my greatest “time sinks” were in any one week and came to the conclusion that appropriate planning of time can really change the manner in which you work and which you relax. For the last few months, I have been working pretty crazy time schedules which has lead to ridiculously inconsistent sleeping patterns and very little sleep indeed. This isn’t necessarily a long term endeavour and is a facet of building a start-up – but I wanted to try and normalise my time within any particularly week and figure out what exactly I was doing.

In any week, you have approximately 168 hours at your disposal (TT = total time = 168hrs). That is – for those that can’t be bothered to do the maths – simply 7×24 hrs which arrives at this magic number. Now let’s assume that each day you sleep around 7 hrs – that means your total time (TT) is now reduced by 49hrs to give you an available time period of approximately 119 hrs (AT=119) or around 17 hrs per day. Frankly, when you think about it – that’s a lot of hours available to be doing stuff. For the “average 40 hr week worker” – this would break down to be something like

1. 2 hrs for work-related travel
2. 8 hrs of work
3. 1 Hour for lunch
4. 1 hrs of personal time [waking up/shower/cleaning etc]
5. 5 hrs of relaxation time

On this basis of a typical working week, then approximately 17 hours of time are available on weekends or a total of 34 available hours. Such a break down infers that the total relaxation time per week available to any “average” worker is around 25 + 34 or approximately 59 hrs of disposal time (FT = free time) to do stuff – or around 35.11% of Total Time (TT) or 49.5% of Available Time (AT). In my mind – this is quite of a bit of time to do anything you like. I often listen to people complain “I never have enough time” – and after breaking the week down – I think as an average proportion of the population – you actually have 49.5% of your Available Time per week to do what you want – evidently, you are either the % proportion of people outside the above proposed structure and therefore have different Total Time variables – or you really have a lot of time but you aren’t utilizing it correctly.

Of course, in my view at least, I think the key differentiators to the above model are:

1. People sleep for greater than 7 hrs per day – inferring that they are losing a higher proportion of their available time (AT) and therefore eating into their Free Time. But – I would argue that is a choice – and therefore it should eat into Free Time – since you’re choosing to sleep more than 7hrs and therefore [in my mind] this IS leisure time.
2. People work longer – thereby increasing the level of working time and reducing the level of Free Time. Arguably, not a Free Time choice and therefore the question here is one of effectiveness and efficiency.

For those whose time “melds together” [ala me] – the key is that a lot of the relaxation time is “mixed” with the working time. That is, as a function of the working week – the time I utilize for work mixes with the relaxation time – but it is all related to work. This is perhaps a key problem (although I enjoy it) – because it means that the differentiation between the above 1-5 segments is broken and creates the inevitable “I never have enough time” scenario. Again, however, a specific choice of mine.

So how can one fix all this ? What I’ve proposed to do is to significantly proportion and timetable my week – I want to see how effectively I am using the time I have allocated for specific tasks and see whether – within the time allocations – I am actually performing the tasks I have actually allocated to try and form an optimal structure. For example, if you’ve allocated 4 hour block of working time – but you find yourself drifting to News sites or writing blog posts – you’re eating into allocated working time and this has to be redistributed to leisure time. Importantly, this is suggesting that a 4hr block of time isn’t working – so perhaps reduce the length of the blocks and reallocate them to more short blocks to ensure that you using this time effectively. For example, 5×2 hrs blocks or 3×3 hr blocks and 1 “miscellaneous working” block (email/planning etc). This would give a 50hr working week and still ensure that you have 49 hrs of FT per week (way more than I am getting at the moment).

Of course, you might be thinking “Um, this sounds quite ridiculous” – but I think that most people have a lot more time available to them each week but they just aren’t using it correctly. If you really think about it and you fall into the above structure – you’ve got 59 hours per week at your disposal to do with what you want – 49.5% of the time you are awake. The key question is – what are you doing with this time and are you using it effectively. Equivalently, if you’re finding yourself working way more than the above structure – or the variables are completely wrong – I question the effectiveness of the time you’ve allocated to working and whether the change you need to make is working more effectively as opposed to working longer. Propose & make changes to your working structure (if its possible) and this will enable you’re free time to “truly” be allocated free time.

That’s what I’m thinking anyway. Thoughts?