A Networked World

Reality checks and data points

This piece from CIO.com is a nice reality check and the general principles apply to everyone, not just IT people. Retire? How About Never?

Overall, the recession has had far more of an economic impact on late-middle-aged adults. In an April Pew Research Center study of 2,969 adults aged 50 to 64, nearly 75% said the nation's economic problems are making it difficult to afford retirement.
Click here to find out more!

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in that age bracket said their 401(k) accounts or individual stocks have been clobbered, with two in 10 claiming that their investments have lost 40% of their value and another four in 10 saying nearly 20% to 40% of their retirement funds have been erased.

I have never believed that I would be able to retire, not just because I could not save enough to do so, but because I have known half my life that when the moment came to kick back I would be doing it with millions of other boomers whose removal from the "productive" economy would shrink that economy and make it too small to support us.

I've also been pretty much convinced that rule number one of investing is "never give your money to someone else to play with on your behalf, never, ever, no, I really mean it, never"

So I have paid off my mortgage and I'm building an urban homestead where we are aiming to be able to live, not just survive, on about $200 a week in current dollars.

While most of the rest of my peers have spent their lives trying to get rich enough to retire, I've spent mine learning to live poor.

My wife is a teacher on a 4 year contract and she has 2 years to go. Here's how I rate that contract.

• Chances of it being renewed on similar terms - 20%
• Chances of being significantly cut on renewal - 40%
• Chances of not being renewed 20%
• Chances of being bought out before the end 20%
• Chances of surviving any of those otucomes, pretty good.
  

Now eher are some more data points.

1. 56 year old family member on contract for a company that provides training to large insurance and financial companies. Unpaid for several months, yesterday asked me for a loan to get through Christmas
2. 58 year old CFO for several medium sized north American companies. Laid off in march, 10 months on global search for new job. Nothing
3. 58 year old former exec and successful business man. Lost his company 3 years ago, still no job and about to run out of money

Just people close enough to hear about their actual problems and 2 of those in the last 4 days. Interestingly, all three are still in denial about their real situation, still looking for the silver lining that tells them all is going to come back to what they fondly believe is normal.

Economic recovery? Not close.

This thing hasn't even cleared its throat yet and as the CIO peives goes on to say, "there is no place to hide in this economy"

Do we still have the leisure to be "creative"?

As usual, Johnnie points to some interesting ideas that kick me off. Change and diversity

Jack Ricchiuto has some thoughts on how change happens in networks.

...the possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.

The phrase clusters of sameness resonates for me and I think organisations often clog up with those. He continues:

the fusion of difference and resonance is a powerful approach because in that space, people move away from trying to change each other, which opens the space for the possibilities of creating innovative.. changes.. Resonant listening to one another’s differences allows us to join in both-and innovations that could never be possible in an either-or constrained world

I agree about the processes, but I think the crucial thing that gets left out of all this is that there is no way to steer the process towards a "desirable" (for whomever) outcome, nor can we determine the result in advance.

We live in a control-oriented mindset, change that we do not initiate frightens us and we try to reassert whatever control we thought we had, change that we do initiate gets out of control very quickly and we waste more resources trying to get back in control.

In every case we resist any change that we don't think we can determine in advance. But we live in a real world where change is permanent and uncontrolled. Hell I remember writing in an essay in high school something to the effect that "in order to maintain a constant relationship with a constantly changing world, we have to change, constantly".

I thought it was pretty cool then and I still agree with its foundation, the only thing I'd add is that the constant relationship is itself impossible, that changes too.

The whole idea of change management is a crock. Change, like shit, happens. Our biggest problem is that we are not inclined, nor do we learn, nor are we taught as part of our education, to understand, adapt, participate in or benefit from the changes that happen. Still less are we able to abandon changes that are short term wins but long term failures.

For me, this is about opening space so that we can explore experiences fully, without the pressure to problem-solve.

I'd love that to be true but I think we are running out of the lleisure we've had to be purely creative. The number and urgency of problems that we are going to have to solve, on a personal and daily basis, as well as a community and national one, is getting bigger, faster. Those of us, like me, who have had it damned easy all our lives and had the luxury of being able to invent, innovate and think about the world rather than get our hands dirty in it are going to spend the rest of those lives working much harder for much less money and often less return of all kinds.

With dwindling resources, the small problems that we simply threw some money at are going to become harder to deal with and the big problems such as climate change and PO are starting to cause medium sized problems such as landslips and crop failures that just wont go away. We've had 2 generations of cruising on the capital, from here on we will be paddling like hell to stay afloat.

If anything we need tools like open space and theatre sports as a form of rapid prototyping; spaces where we can bring hard problems, trial a bunch of possible solutions and take them away to work on them.

Illargi does it again

The Automatic Earth: is one of my favourite hangouts and has been for a long time. They have been ahead of the economic game for years and right now they are coming under fire because they refuse to resile from their hard line of "it ain't over, not by a long shot".

But in defending their position Illargi touches on something so fundamental that it gives me the shivers to read it. I once suggested to my niece that there is a serious question whether our species is amny smarter than yeast and so far the outlook is not good. But this one nails it. The one fatal trait

People are by nature so hugely biased against the possibility of bad things happening to them, they'll all sign up for the first soothsayer with a story that uses the appropriate words. They’ll choose short-term gratification over the prospect of long-term hardship any time, any day. It matters little to nothing what tomorrow brings, as long as tonight the booze and the music's good enough to make them forget, and to evoke memories of better days.

And the morning after, they'll go look for another smooth voice. If it weren't like that, no-one could ever sell a second-hand car again. Or a good book. Or a detergent or a president. Regardless of the limits the world around us places on us, our hopes and dreams know no limits. That is a beautiful thing, as long as you put it in the right (re:smooth) words.

It also means, however, that we cannot put limits on ourselves, on what we do; maybe as individuals, but not as a species, not as a force of nature. The same need for comfort and redemption that makes us follow the circus, is the one that makes us penetrate ever deeper into the few corners of the world we haven't seen yet, and drag out of those corners what could make us belive that the clown, Bernanke, is our savior.

We can't help it, it’s what we are. There are exactly zero species on the planet that have been outfitted with an inbuilt limiter, and we are no exception. We will continue until the planet, the system, whatever you want to call it, imposes such limits on us. There has never been a need for nature to make species stop themselves, it's the one fatal trait that would destroy the driving force behind evolution.

The driving force behind evolution is the acceptance of species' extinction as the environment changes and the ecological niches shift. As we refuse to confront climate change, as we choose to squint at peak oil and especially as we sprinkle pixie dust on the economic blunders its disheartening in an existential way, to consider that this mad rush at the wall is hard wired.

Lets hope it doesn't get nasty then

This today in the NZ Herald. Swine flu more infectious than 1918 flu, study finds

Swine flu is more infectious than both seasonal influenza and the 1918 Spanish flu, a study based on New Zealand epidemic case numbers has found.

And this suggests nearly 79 per cent of an affected population will catch the virus, although not all will become ill.

The researchers, from Otago University at Wellington and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, say in a letter published in today's New Zealand Medical Journal that it was estimated early in the swine flu pandemic that the transmission rate was around 1.5. This means that every two people who are sick with the virus will infect three others.

This was calculated in Mexico, where the virus first emerged.

But Associate Professor Michael Baker, Dr Nick Wilson and Dr Hiroshi Nishiura estimate from New Zealand data that every case is infecting nearly two others - a rate of 1.96.

This is based on official notifications of swine flu between June 2 and 15. This was a period of exponential growth in the New Zealand epidemic. It began with the first case of local transmission, excludes 63 imported cases, and ends before health authorities, because so many people were catching the virus, gave up testing every potential case.

In Japan a transmission rate of between 2 and 2.6 was calculated.

The Medical Journal letter notes that a transmission rate of 1.96 is higher than published estimates for seasonal influenza in temperate-zone countries like New Zealand. It is also "slightly greater than that of Spanish influenza pandemic from 1918-19 in New Zealand", but the death rate from Spanish flu was much higher than in the current swine flu pandemic.

Drs Baker and Wilson have estimated the death rate from swine flu in developed countries could be as low as one death out of 10,000 cases.

Of course, that is only a little reassuring, since so much of our trade is with many coutnries that don't fit that criterion. A lot of oil comes out of Nigeria, food products from SE Asia, timber from Indonesia (yeah, probably dodgy) and so it goes.

If you want to get a little frisson of what it could look like, try this

I suspect there is some boost to these numbers because those figures are for consultations and in most years there will be many fewer consultations than actual infections, simply because in normal years we expect to get a flu and we expect that only a tiny proportion will need care beyond bed rest.

The high numbers of consultations certainly reflects the novelty of the virus. One sniff and we are on the horn to the Dr or turning up to the care centres. Given that it is not yet especially serious for most of us, and that we are taking it very seriously (as I believe we should) the numbers may look a lot more startling than they are in relation to actual infections in a normal year. The impact on the economy is also still invisible.

But it sure as hell will get people's attention. And like the northern hemisphere we have just had school holidays (they went back to school last Monday) so its very possible that there will be a steepening of the curve again as the kids pass it round more efficiently.

The time scale is also going to be interesting. In 5 weeks we will be into spring and temperatures will rise from averages around 12 for Auckland to about 15/16 (Celsius) and we are already seeing some beginnings of the kick up with unseasonable warmth in a few places.

Cool health issues mapping mashup

I came across this thanks to Tim O'Reilly's tweet on it. EpiSPIDER Map Exhibit

It spiders a whole bunch of sources, including online jnews for health-related stories and tries to locate them on the map. You can filter by disease type, country, province or state, Human development index, population, GDP and report age.

Now it also picks up some false positives like an NZ report on global swine flu numbers and locates them in NZ, but it also lets me know within an hour of the report that NSW has reported its first swine flu death.

List under cool tools

Pandemic - nearly there

While there is still happy talk about not asking people to postpone overseas travel during the upcoming school holidays and talk about 'containment', the money quote in this story Swine flu spreads in childcare is further down.

The Ministry of Health has moved its pandemic response status to Phase 6 - 6.2 Code Yellow. Under the pandemic plan, this stage can include declaring a public health emergency at a local or national level and restrictions on our borders. Phase 6.2 includes isolating affected areas of the country, restricting public gatherings and closing educational facilities.

Clinical director of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service, Dr Julia Peters, said these new cases could require school closures.

"We're probably close to those sorts of measures," she said.

Once you start locking off parts of a highly integrated economy, you start inducing shortages, both within the area and of products provided by that area.

If your Pandemic plan is not now fully functional, you are playing with your family's lives.

Talking Pandemic on ABC Australia

Long story about how I come to get a call from Matt Abud at ABC asking to discuss this article from Japan. But its interesting to see the kind of thing people are proposing these days. Here's some of the original article from behind a firewall.

A subsidiary of SoftBank, a major Japanese internet and mobile phone provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.

The details have yet to be fixed, but SoftBank hopes to pick a school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server. [Storage and processing power needed will be mind boggling]

A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected", and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease. [Depends entirely on knowing who is infected in the first place and the incubation period. Highly likely rthat public serrvice announcements will be more effective than trying to track each one.]

The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to be examined by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.

"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, an infrastructure strategist at Softbank.

He demonstrates with a calculation: if an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,000 people would get sick. [Depending on the illness and incubation period, these figures are suspect, while true the real world possibilities will be much higher. There will also be a natural brake anyway as infections rise and already infected people contact already infected people.]

The experiment was conceived before the outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside North America.

It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a programme to promote new uses for Japan's internet and cellular infrastructure. The country has some of the most advanced mobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speed mobile networks, and phones come standard with features such as GPS, television and touchless train passes. [Maybe they could lock people out of systems if there was an infection inside, or vice versa]

The scheme raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.

If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said.

Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease.

"If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, said. [Exactly, the level of education necessary to ensure that such panic will not occur will also ensure that people are sufficiently aware of the situation and will be constantly checking. In any case, I would bet Twitter beats them to it.]

SoftBank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in autumn. But Mr Takahashi said that whichever company was chosen, he hoped the potential benefits of a monitoring system would be enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.

There are a couple of tracks on this, the first is some preliminary discussion that we mostly didn't cover in the full interview. The second is the recorded interview, although it merges about 8:30 into a bit of extra discussion that was not meant for broadcast so I have trimmed out Matt's side of the conversation and just rambled on.

A dawning realisation about pandemic disruption

As the NZ Govt boosts powers to control swine flu our national conversation about its implications is beginning to get some reality into it. From the same story:

Schools are concerned that they have not been given enough information to advise parents of the wider effect of closing to prevent the spread of swine flu.

The ministry has told schools to be prepared for sudden closures that could last several weeks, and to talk to parents about remote learning.

But schools say they have not been advised how families could manage if their child was quarantined.

Rangitoto College principal David Hodge said he learned how disruptive quarantine was when 22 students and three staff and their families were placed in isolation after going on the school's Spanish language trip to Mexico.

Closing Rangitoto - a college of 3100 students in Mairangi Bay, North Shore City - could put the whole community in turmoil.

[...] Gladstone Primary principal Dave Shadbolt sent the pandemic plan of his Mt Albert school to parents yesterday.

Most of the advice was about general hygiene, he said, and staff were reminding students about hand-washing routines and covering mouths and noses when they sneezed.

Mr Shadbolt said he assumed families in which both parents worked would have to organise care if the school closed.

The manager of occupational health and safety for the Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern, Paul Jarvie, said the effect of widespread quarantine caused by swine flu would compound on the impact of the recession, especially for workplaces already operating with skeleton crews.

The greatest cost to companies would mostly be loss of productivity, because if an employee had used up annual sick and holiday leave entitlements, an employer did not legally have to pay them.

The national commissioner of Work and Income, Liz Jones, said: "People facing difficulties in special circumstances such as an outbreak of [swine flu] may be eligible for assistance if they do not have access to other resources or support."

I just finished talking with a colleague who worked with the Ministry of Social development when they ran a pandemic simulation and their main problem is how to feed people who are disadvantaged, by health, social or employment status or just plain poverty when they can't set aside enough food for a week, let alone a month or more.

The simulation happened a couple of years ago, but only now is it leaking out into the public domain; pretty much too late as usual.

Had a call from the Aussie ABC Radio yesterday to talk about a Japanese idea for managing infectious disease. I'll post the audio as soon as I can

NZ gets almost serious about pandemic preparedness

At last, the kind of serious language that we need from people in responsible positions. Swine flu will hit NZ hard.

Even so, they are soft pedalling some of the points at issue.

Everyone is being urged to stock up on food and essential medicines to prepare for the disruption of normal life when swine flu hits New Zealand hard.

Good start, when it hits, it will be hard, even a mild form of the flu will be hard because of its ability to disrupt the systems on which we depend. The SARS epidemic was not especially infectious or fatal, yet it lead the health system to the verge of collapse. To quote the official report:

It caused untold suffering to its victims and their families, forced thousands into quarantine, brought the health system in the Greater Toronto Area and other parts of the province to its knees and seriously impacted health systems in other parts of the country

Swine flu has infected more than 17,000 people and killed 115 globally. So far in New Zealand, it has been confirmed in just 10 cases and has generally been a mild disease, but health authorities expect it will eventually infect more than half the population.

Good. Clear, no messing about. But some of those people will also die, either from the flu itself or complications that can't be treated because medical services will also be affected.

The NZ standard planning model assumes a pandemic wave in which 40% of the NZ population (1.6 million people ) becomes ill over an 8 week period. ... The peak incidence is over weeks 3-5 when about 1.3 million people – about one third of New Zealand's population – would be ill, convalescent or only just recovered.

The model assumes a total case fatality rate of 2% which would see a total of 33,000 deaths over the 8 week period, peaking at about 10,000 in week 4 (compared with around 550 death per week normally)

Even if we cut that in half, this is nasty. No mention is made in the planning documents about the expected effects on the funeral industry when it suffers a 40% absentee rate. An industry that deals with a mere 550 deaths a week stretched over a landscape the size of the United Kingdom. The probability that such an industry will collapse completely is not canvassed, the question of who will handle the dead, where they will be kept, how, and by whom, they will be buried, and who will investigate the possibility that some of those deaths will not be from flu, those questions are not asked, let alone answered.

"It is rapidly spreading internationally, especially in Australia," said Dr Julia Peters, clinical director of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service. "In Australia, the number of cases is doubling every two days. With the amount of transtasman travel, it's almost inevitable we are going to get it in the community in New Zealand.

Doubling every day, how many days till it has contacted the whole population of 20 million? Less than you think. Starting with the current 500 you reach 16 million in 17 days. And don't talk about Australia's huge distances, it is the most urbanised nation on earth. Urgent much?

Dr Peters said that based on modelling by the World Health Organisation, it was predicted that 60 per cent of people would become infected with the new virus, A (H1N1).

Which is worse than my figures above that were written 2 years ago.

"We are promoting getting prepared, not getting panicky."

All for it.

She said that with so many people sick - including workers - services or businesses such as schools, health clinics, banks and supermarkets might not be at full capacity.

What's with the MIGHT here? Bite the bullet, they wont. And it wont just be because of sickness itself, some will be because of fear, some will need to be quarantined because a member of the family is sick and needs care. Remember Toronto? A survey a few years ago among medical staff suggested that some 70% of staff would actively consider staying home rather than risk contracting the disease? That will go for any job working close to unknown people.

It was possible the Government would invoke special regulations to prevent the spread of the virus. This would allow officials to close schools, restaurants and other facilities, and to prevent other public gatherings like weddings, funerals and movie sessions.

Right there is the paradox. To slow the spread of the flu they will have to cripple the economy overnight. The option is to accept the spread and pour resources into powering down the econiomy under some kind of control. Do we have a plan for that?

Parents needed to plan how they would care for their children if schools or early childhood centres were closed. Businesses needed to decide which essential parts of their operations they wanted to keep running when many staff were at home sick.

They also need to think about whether their customers will be there at all. If there is a heightened chance of contact and an option about being there, think about closing up for the duration and keeping your staff safe.

The one thing you don't need to worry about is getting to the supermarket. It may be open but it will be empty.

In 2000, a fuel blockade in the UK emptied some supermarkets within 24 hours because in a just-in-time economy, the warehouse is the supply chain and that is all we have between us and starvation

Thousands of gas stations hung out "no petrol" signs days ago. But by Wednesday evening, the wider effects of the action were becoming evident in many areas. The national health service (NHS), the biggest employer in Europe, was placed on "red alert" for the first time in 11 years. Supermarket chains warned they would run out of essential food within days, and some began rationing bread and milk. 

Dr Peters urged people to stock up on three to five days of long-lasting food, and to ensure they had supplies of medicines they needed personally and fever control drugs like paracetamol.

Again, a start, but realistically, if everyone tried to stock up simultaneously (and a month at least is needed) the supply chains will break, we don't have that much stuff in the system. And what about those who can't afford to stock up? What exactly are they supposed to do?

People who developed flu-like symptoms should stay at home and call a doctor for advice rather than turning up unannounced at a clinic and risking infecting others.

Ngaire Buchanan, a member of the northern regional health emergency group, said that when transmission of the virus was widespread, people would be told of their nearest community-based assessment centre.

Too late, and how nice of her to tell us HOW we will be informed?

Staff at these facilities would check patients and treat them with Tamiflu.

Umm. too late. Tamiflu works best when you have the disease but are not seriously symptomatic, by the time you are symptomatic you are pretty much on your own.

Four sites for these centres have been confirmed in Auckland City, five in the Waitemata health district, three in Counties Manukau, and 14 in Northland. In the Auckland region, they will mainly be at accident and medical centres.

And what's the big secret? If you tell us now we will already know exactly when we need it. And 12 centres for a population of 1 million plus? That's 100,000 people each and allow for some clustering. That's 1000 people per day for 8 weeks (60% ofthe population). Mhmm. Not counting fights.

The Ministry of Health said it would start an awareness campaign on Saturday about swine flu, advising people what preparations to make and what arriving travellers should do if they had flu-like symptoms.

We could quarantine ourselves but the immediate cost would be a collapsed economy and we have a government that is philosophically opposed to taking control. In normal times a good thing, right now, maybe not.

Are we smarter than a microbe? Apparently not

When I was doing some work on pandemic response, practically everything I learned suggested that official actions would fail to prevent the spread of a pandemic and that successful responses would create almost as much damage as unsuccessful ones because the measures needed to contain an outbreak would disrupt our economies in near terminal ways.

Looks like the Aussies have chosen the first method. Swine flu outbreak on cruise puts authorities on full alert

ATTEMPTS to contain swine flu in Australia appear to be faltering. The number of people infected more than doubled yesterday to at least 50 and the federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, warned the virus was spreading fast.

With testing continuing at a frantic pace, NSW Health revealed late last night that another five cruise ship passengers had been struck down by the virus, taking the total to 14.

OK, so far, so normal, disease spreads exponentially. But you might think that after the fiasco with equine influenza a while back, the Aussies would have learned that you have exactly zero leewway for complacency. Nope.

But it defended its decision to allow more than 2000 of them, many ill, to go home.

Hundreds of passengers who complained on disembarking of influenza-like symptoms have either not been tracked down or have yet to have their test results confirmed.

Health officials assumed [no they didn't, they hoped and hope ain't a strategy] they had common seasonal influenza until laboratory results, which came in several hours after the Pacific Dawn docked in Sydney, confirmed two young boys, an adult and a crew member had human swine influenza A (H1N1).

That is exactly the reason I spent some time preparing for an emergency, especially a pandemic. When it comes to responding to an emergency like this, official fear of upsetting the applecart will leave them constantly running a step behind. Then 2 steps, then 4, then 8.

At the moment there seems to be a couple of variants, some that are very mild, but some that are lethal and, as the health people point out, the longer they are loose the more chances they have to evolve and we have no way to know which way that will go.

Buckle up, this ride is a long way from over.