“No Waiting Room” and Queuing Theory – Avery Pennarun, Dec 2009
In any system, long-but-not-growing queues are a sign of a very specific kind of failure. An ever-growing queue is a bandwidth problem; a long-but-constant queue is a latency problem …this sort of problem is almost always solvable without spending a lot of money. Upgrading bandwidth requires money; improving latency only requires cleverness. It’s a variant of Just in Time manufacturing, where instead of “excess inventory” you have “patients in the waiting room.” Companies that do JIT – German manufacturers come to mind – produce efficiency without spending more money.
Networks are smart at the edges – Carlos Villela, lixo.org, Jul 2008
A toothpaste factory had a probem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up. Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together. They would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
…Six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.
A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” – he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report. It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day.
Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.
Visualising the signatures of social roles in online discussion groups – Howard T Welser, Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher and Marc Smith, Journal of Social Structure,
We found that answer people predominantly contribute one or a few messages to discussions initiated by others, are disproportionately tied to relative isolates, have few intense ties and have few triangles in their local networks.
The Collapse of Complex Business Models – Clay Shirky, Apr 2010.
1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies…
they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble.
The arc of complexity – Kevin Kelly, May 2009
What’s more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don’t have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question.
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