A Model for Corporate Power Distribution

In 1997 Geoffrey B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist published "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology".  I don't have access to the paper, but it is summarized in a youtube video here:

How Fractal Patterns Perpetuate Through a Tree, and then a Forest - Bonzai Permaculture -

In 2009 they also published A general quantitative theory of forest structure and dynamics.

The gist of the studies is that an individual tree's branch distribution (size, distance between branches, and most importantly oxygen production) provides an accurate prediction of the whole forests tree distribution.

I tend to believe these studies provide a basis for company skill level distribution.  Call it "brain power" if you want.  In a power-optimized company, there will be a fractal distribution of people with various capacities and skills.  They won't all be power-players because there is mundane work that also needs to be done - there's a wide distribution of needs addressed by a wide distribution of workers.

The alternative is a farm-model, where the whole undergrowth of a wild forest is stripped away.  This then becomes a question of whether the farm is more efficient than the forest.

The Harass-Justify Pattern

I did not even want to write about this.  Then I load youtube to watch a tutorial on Scala, and up pops this ad!

I had already written this article in my head, decided I didn't want to write about it, and then I see exactly the ad I was thinking about, all in a matter of about 1 minute.

Okay!  I'll write about it!  Here's a screenshot of the ad:

Harass

The ad starts out by saying "these are real people".  I.e. they are not actors, other than the guy throwing eggs at them.

As the people go to sit down at the table, the man in the middle throws eggs and the real people jump in surprise.


Justify

If you didn't skip the ad, the middle man explains something about "life is hard to respond to when there are surprises" or something along those lines.  The justification for the harassment of throwing eggs at complete strangers is "I have some insight to share."


The Pattern

Whether or not the insight is valuable is not really interesting to me.  What is interesting is that the 2 behaviors "harass" and "justify" are presented in combination.  Throwing an egg by itself isn't enough.  And justification by itself apparently isn't enough either.  It is a theatrics pattern.

That's all... I'm going to watch about Scala now.


POSTSCRIPT

This is really obsession-compulsion, where "harass" is the compulsive behavior ("I must"), and "justify" is the obsessive thinking.  The justify is like a broken record that keeps playing over and over again.  There's some projection of "if everyone only could see what I'm obsessing about, they would understand my harassing behavior".  Such thinking is fantasy.

I guess the pattern could be generalized into Powerplay-Justify.  It's a "when words are many, sin is not far..." sort of thing.  Something about it doesn't smell right, as opposed to people operating in a natural outflow.

We could ask "what is source of obsessive thinking?"  There is a source.

Getting Started with HP's Fabric-Attached Memory Emulator

HP's The Machine

HPE has new hardware coming out soon called "The Machine".

If you want to write software for The Machine, you can start learning about it here:

https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation


I won't claim to be any sort of expert, but I was curious to try.  The point of this post is, don't let anything get in your way.  If you are not a "guru" - just do whatever you need to do and there will be something learned in the process.


Run Debian 8.x

I'm on a Windows Vista PC, and I already have Oracle VirtualBox installed, so it wasn't very difficult to start a virtual machine that runs Debian 8.2.0.  I got my Debian distro here for an i386, but you might need a different target processor if you're running an AMD machine.  It's an iso file, and has to be burned to a boot disk (supported in newer versions of Windows, on my old Vista box it brings up Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 for burning an iso to a disk).  Alternatively you could use real hardware to install Debian, or a VM in AWS et. al. - you might even be able to do this on a raspberry pi (though I doubt it due to version requirements of the package).

NOTE: When setting up the virtual machine, the HD must have at least 19GB free, so I recommend something larger.  After more than 1 attempt, I was able to succeed with a 27GB HD fixed size HD for the VM.  It looks like 22GB would have been enough.

If you are new to Debian, try finding Search and type "terminal" to open a terminal.  My Debian install did not run sudo from the terminal.  That's okay.


Install Git

For now I'll ignore no sudo.  After installing Debian, and logging in as a user, I could log in as root via "su", and then:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install git-core

then log out of root and go to the user's ~ home directory and run:

$ git clone https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation.git

This resulted in an Emulation directory and I could run:

$ ./emulation_configure.bash 1

which failed with:

Error: The Following command(s) are needed:
vmdebootstrap virsh sudo qemu-img brctl



Install QEMU, vmdebootstrap and libvirt-bin

From root:

$ apt-get install qemu-kvm

$ apt-get install vmdebootstrap

if you need sudo:

$ apt-get install sudo

and finally:

$ apt-get install libvirt-bin



Run it (still from root):

$ ./emulation_configure.bash 1

It asks:

Change /usr/lib/qemu-bridge-helper to setuid root (yes/no) ?

yes

Error: /tmp has less than 19 G free

At this point I couldn't find any way to extend the HD on the VM.  If needed you might try creating another volume and mounting it - but I started over.

With adequate HD on the VM, it now complains "No proxy setting can be ascertained", then eventually:

Failure trying to run: chroot /tmp/tmpDx8e9z mount -t proc proc /proc

and

Build of /tmp/fabric_template.img failed

Looking into the documentation at https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation.git might give some clues where to go next, but that's as far as I will go today.  Thanks.

Augmented Reality Target Recognition

Last night I was up until 3am making this video.


Actually the video was done at about 9pm, or even earlier, but for some reason I couldn't get the video from my camcorder.  I started to wonder "did something break?"

There was this sort of ... prompting ... a real message I had seen earlier that evening which said:

 "Stop giving up."

Now what can you do with that?  Well... keep trying.  Finally at 2:30am I see the manual for my camcorder talking about "Use only a Sony cable" and after so many other wrong attempts found out I had a different cable, plugged it in.. and everything worked again!  Ugh!


Augmented Reality Target Recognition

The video was implemented running Unity app on an iPad.  There are 5 target images in the Vuforia plugin of common items.  The 3D doll that gets projected onto the items is one feature that has some application, but the bigger application is bringing in context according to which target the camera recognizes.

I had a specific application in mind, but it opens a whole world of interesting UX user experiences.  Going through the process is mind-expanding, and really fun.


Everybody Already Knows How To Do This

As soon as I posted this video, I suddenly realized "this is nothing new!" and I had some real doubts about why I should pester anyone with this technology.  Well... if that's the only way I can learn something new, then it's just part of the process.


Importing Packages Into Unity At Runtime

Because the application only knows those 5 target images I had processed on the Vuforia website, the next step seems to be experimenting with loading packages in the Unity app at run-time.  According to Unity documentation, that is supported!  So this would open up some very wide applications to at least allow some application administrator to set up their own library of recognized images.

Augmented Reality Experiment

I used Vuforia, and it was relatively easy.  Low light conditions don't seem to work very well, but it's a start!