Spotify

I’ve been trying out Spotify – a streaming music service – for the last couple of weeks and I really like it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to music, preferring radio programmes and spoken word / audiobooks. This has gotten me listening again – all the old stuff that I never got around to buying years ago, artists that I’ve always wondered about but never known where to start or what to choose, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Early Tom Waits is cool stuff, better than his more recent music that I still can’t fully appreciate even though I’ve tried. Albums that I had on tape that I never bothered to digitise. Albums that I’m glad I didn’t waste my money on. Hell, even albums I know I bought but I just can’t find any more.

Strangely, I’m going for live music more than recorded albums. Queen kicking ass. Johnny Cash at San Quentin. The laid back blues of the Grateful Dead – who I’d never heard before. Shit, I’m starting to sound old. I’m not that old, promise. There’s a lot of stuff to explore.

Sound quality is good for everyday listening but not as good as you would get from iTunes. CD quality is out of the question – still, if I like something so much that I want that quality I can always go out and buy it. As a free account listener there are ads about every 20 minutes, but there is only one at a time and they are not too long. There are ads that pop up in the application window, but I’m not really looking at that very often anyway. It’s a fair trade off – they have to make money and the ads aren’t particularly intrusive. There is the option to pay £10 / month for going ad free. I wouldn’t consider that, but maybe £5. £2 / month and I wouldn’t even notice.

The application itself is good – perfectly straightforward if you’re familiar with iTunes. There’s no delay playing tracks. Your playlists follow you around when you log in on another machine. All works well.

You can also listen to other peoples’ playlists – this is very early days but a few sites have popped up with lists.

I think this one could last, and seriously take off.

• Wikipedia: Spotify

Darwin: the ultimate Outlier?

This year is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and I’ve been lucky enough to visit his home, which is not too far away in the beautiful county of Kent.

The house and gardens are well worth a visit and offer excellent value for money at £9. It is obvious that a lot of effort has gone into making this a good experience – David Attenborough and Andrew Marr are a couple of the bigger names who have contributed. I started in the garden (choose a good day to go as the garden is as important as the house itself), being guided by the touch screen audio tour handset. Its a bit disconcerting at first because some of the parts of the garden that are highlighted in the tour (the weed garden and the worm hole especially) are actually tiny. They would be very easily missed if you do not take the tour. Other areas are smaller than you might think given the importance of the work carried out in them – the greenhouse and the work shed in particular.

The ground floor of the house is decorated as it would have been in Darwin’s day and gives a good insight into his daily life. The first floor is an exhibition detailing his work, the times he lived in and the other important people and ideas of the time.

This ties in very nicely actually with the ideas raised in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that I’ve written about before. I did not know much at all about Darwin’s background and the environment he grew up in before his trip on the HMS Beagle. He grew up in a very well off family, and this wealth meant that he did not have to work to earn a living – he could dedicate himself full time to his studies.

In my first review of an extract from Outliers (a study of the people we believe to be geniuses) I wrote that there were many aspects that influence their talent:

the willingness to put in a lot of hard work, the opportunies available to them (that they then take full advantage of) and the times in which they grew up or honed their craft. All are important, and all have to occur concurrently over a period of time – when they do, something special happens; people are able to really make their mark.

I believe that these points apply very well to Darwin. He grew up and worked in a great period of change for the country – the industrial revolution – with new ideas affecting both the technology and society of the day. His freedom from the need to work comes from the wealth accumulated by his parents and grandparents – something that simply would not have been possible before. His timing was right – the Beagle voyage changed his life and gave him the desire to study this area.

Although he was well aware of society’s likely reaction to his theories, there must have been something in the air for science and the study of nature at the time because the idea of natural selection was not unique to Darwin – Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same idea around the same time. This competition spurred Darwin on to complete his work, leading to the fame he enjoyed when he was alive – and becoming the genius we recognise today.

• National Geographic: Darwin’s First Clues, Modern Darwins

• Wikipedia: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species,

• Darwin at Downe

• The Open University: Charles Darwin

• The Guardian: Charles Darwin

• Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Article: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

My mini quest to find out what the hell has happened to the world economy continues apace – now it is Wired’s turn to cast some light on the situation. Focusing on an aspect that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention – risk and complex mathematical shit – it does a really good job. A formula was created that made it easier for financial institutions to measure correlation of risk by making some assumptions.

Everyone loved the idea – basically because it allowed people to make a bunch of new financial products, sell them and make lots of money – but the idea was not understood by most people. The assumptions it makes means that the results it gives are not as reliable as people thought. It is an unsafe foundation to build a financial system on, but that’s what happened (there is nothing wrong with the formula itself, the problem is the unwise use it was put to.) When the cracks appeared in the foundation, everything above it toppled.

• Wired:  Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Salaries, bonuses and meaningful work

The row over inappropriate bonuses rumbles on (don’t even mention pensions…), with attempts to clawback past payments that now seem (even more) horribly obscene given how events have unfolded. Some people are now starting to question the need for bonuses at all:

People are paid wages and salaries for doing what they are expected to do. If they don’t live up to expectations they should get the sack…

The vast majority of real workers do not receive any sort of bonus; our reward for good work is our wage at the end of the week.

The Observer’s concise article explains that it is not actually money that motivates many people to do a good job, rather it is the challenge of completing meaningful work. It says:

[Bonuses] seem to result in higher performance, [but they are] death to the co-operation and teamwork on which overall organizational performance depends.  From sports teams and university departments to publicly quoted companies, the greater the pay inequalities the worse the results, whether in terms of collaboration, productivity, financial performance or product quality.

So maybe the answer for the new bank executives (and other new chiefs in companies of all shapes and sizes) is to take relatively well paid positions that do not include bonuses based on performance.  A few years down the line there will be a few individuals who are recognised as doing a good job of getting their companies back on their feet.  Reputation alone will boost their position in their respective industries – and that’s the best dividend on offer for the foreseeable future.

• The Observer: However good the pay, it doesn’t buy results