Laws

Table of Contents


Data Gravity

Data Gravity: Consider Data as if it were a Planet or other object with sufficient mass. As Data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional Services and Applications will be attracted to this data. This is the same effect Gravity has on objects around a planet. As the mass or density increases, so does the strength of gravitational pull. As things get closer to the mass, they accelerate toward the mass at an increasingly faster velocity.

Services and Applications can have their own Gravity, but Data is the most massive and dense, therefore it has the most gravity. Data if large enough can be virtually impossible to move. What accelerates Services and Applications to each other and to Data (the Gravity)? Latency and Throughput, which act as the accelerators in continuing a stronger and stronger reliance or pull on each other. This is the very reason that VMforce is so important to Salesforce’s long term strategy. The diagram below shows the accelerant effect of Latency and Throughput, the assumption is that the closer you are (i.e. in the same facility) the higher the Throughput and lower the Latency to the Data and the more reliant those Applications and Services will become on Low Latency and High Throughput.

Divergent, Convergent and Lateral Thinking

Divergent thinking led to a more positive mood, whereas convergent thinking had the opposite effect, leading to a more negative mood.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It is often used in conjunction with its cognitive colleague, convergent thinking, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a ‘correct’ solution. By contrast, divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing, ‘non-linear’ manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. Many possible solutions are explored in a short amount of time, and unexpected connections are drawn. After the process of divergent thinking has been completed, ideas and information are organized and structured using convergent thinking.

Playfullness of Divergent Thinking Conceptualized in Five Traits:

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Convergent Thinking

It generally means the ability to give the “correct” answer to standard questions that do not require significant creativity, for instance in most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence.

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Lateral Thinking

Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was promulgated in 1967 by Edward de Bono. He cites as an example the Judgment of Solomon, where King Solomon resolves a dispute over the parentage of a child by calling for the child to be cut in half, and making his judgment according to the reactions that this order receives. According to de Bono, lateral thinking deliberately distances itself from the standard perception of creativity as “vertical” logic (the classic method for problem solving).

Empaty

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. There are many definitions for empathy which encompass a broad range of emotional states. Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and somatic empathy. In the development of human empathy, individual differences appear, ranging from no apparent empathic ability, or empathy which is harmful to self or others, to well-balanced empathy, including the ability to distinguish between self and other. Various theories and aspects of empathy have been researched, including empathy within nonhuman animals.

Gordian Knot

The Gordian Knot is a legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (disentangling an “impossible” knot) solved easily by loophole or “thinking outside the box” (“cutting the Gordian knot”)

Heisenbug

In computer programming jargon, a heisenbug is a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it. The term is a pun on the name of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who first asserted the observer effect of quantum mechanics, which states that the act of observing a system inevitably alters its state. In electronics the traditional term is probe effect, where attaching a test probe to a device changes its behavior.

Similar terms, such as bohrbug, mandelbug, and schrödinbug

Nemawashi

Nemawashi: in Japanese means an informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking to the people concerned, gathering support and feedback, and so forth. It is considered an important element in any major change, before any formal steps are taken, and successful nemawashi enables changes to be carried out with the consent of all sides.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor is a problem-solving principle attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. It is also known as lex parsimoniae in Latin, which means law of parsimony. The principle can be interpreted as stating

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

OODA Loop

The phrase OODA loop refers to the decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the strategic level in military operations. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach favors agility over raw power in dealing with human opponents in any endeavor.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper “Cours d’économie politique.” Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.

Peter Principle

The Peter principle is a concept in management theory formulated by Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969 in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate’s performance in their current role, rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and “managers rise to the level of their incompetence.”

The Peter principle is a special case of an ubiquitous observation: Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is the “generalized Peter principle”. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when this might not be appropriate for the current situation.

Software Peter Principle

The software Peter principle is used in software engineering to describe a dying project which has become too complex to be understood even by its own developers.

It is well known in the industry as a silent killer of projects, but by the time the symptoms arise it is often too late to do anything about it[citation needed]. Good managers can avoid this disaster by establishing clear coding practices where unnecessarily complicated code and design is avoided.

The name is used in the book C++ FAQs (see below), and is derived from the Peter Principle – a theory about incompetence in hierarchical organizations.

Causes

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are named pomodoros, the plural in English of the Italian word pomodoro (tomato), after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.

Closely related to concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development used in software design, the method has been adopted in pair programming contexts.

YouTube Video

  1. Find out how much effort an activity requires by estimating how many Pomodoros you need to accomplish a specific task.
  2. Learn to protect your Pomodoros from internal and external interruptions.
  3. Make accurate estimations on how many Pomodoros you need to complete a certain activitiy.
  4. Reserve some of your Pomodoro for recap and some for review.
  5. Set a time table accourding to your to-dos, time of day or season. ie 4 in the morning, 5 at night.
  6. After completing the top 5, find your own personal objective - typing more accurately etc.

Read the book and record progress.

Sentinel Intelligence

People with social anxiety exhibit high levels of sentinel intelligence, which is the ability to detect real threats that are invisible to other people. For example, in the study linked, participants were able to detect the smell of smoke far before others. This means that they are hyper-sensitive to perceived threats, and can feel uneasy or disturbed when they are mental or emotional in nature.

Stigmergy

Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.

The Two Generals’ Problem

The Two Generals’ Problem is a thought experiment meant to illustrate the pitfalls and design challenges of attempting to coordinate an action by communicating over an unreliable link. It is related to the more general Byzantine Generals Problem (though published long before that later generalization) and appears often in introductory classes about computer networking (particularly with regard to the Transmission Control Protocol where it shows that TCP can’t guarantee state consistency between endpoints and why), though it applies to any type of two party communication where failures of communication are possible.

A key concept in epistemic logic, this problem highlights the importance of common knowledge. Some authors also refer to this as the Two Generals Paradox, the Two Armies Problem, or the Coordinated Attack Problem. The Two Generals Problem was the first computer communication problem to be proved to be unsolvable. An important consequence of this proof is that generalizations like the Byzantine Generals problem are also unsolvable in the face of arbitrary communication failures, thus providing a base of realistic expectations for any distributed consistency protocols.

Tulpa

Tulpa or thoughtform, is a concept in mysticism of a being or object which is created through spiritual or mental powers The term comes from Tibetan “emanation” or “manifestation”. Modern practitioners use the term to refer to a type of imaginary friend.

Ulysses Pact

A Ulysses pact or Ulysses contract is a freely made decision that is designed and intended to bind oneself in the future. The term is used in medicine, especially in reference to advance directives (also known as living wills), where there is some controversy over whether a decision made by a person in one state of health should be considered binding upon that person when he or she is in a markedly different, usually worse, state of health.

Origin of the name

The term refers to the pact that Ulysses (Greek name “Ὀδυσσεύς”, Odysseus) made with his men as they approached the Sirens. Ulysses wanted to hear the Sirens’ song although he knew that doing so would render him incapable of rational thought. He put wax in his men’s ears so that they could not hear, and had them tie him to the mast so that he could not jump into the sea. He ordered them not to change course under any circumstances, and to keep their swords upon him and to attack him if he should break free of his bonds.

Upon hearing the Sirens’ song, Ulysses was driven temporarily insane and struggled with all of his might to break free so that he might join the Sirens, which would have meant his death.

Psychiatric context

Psychiatric advance directives are sometimes referred to as Ulysses pacts or Ulysses contracts, where there is a legal agreement designed to override a present request from a legally competent patient in favor of a past request made by that patient. An example of when Ulysses contracts are invoked is when people with schizophrenia stop taking their medication at perceived remission times.

Technological context

In the wake of the [Snowden revelations]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki/Snowden_revelations), digital technology companies and commentators have had to consider the situation of a technology provider being ordered by a government to act in a way that they feel morally opposed to. One example is that Apple, as part of the FBI–Apple encryption dispute, decided to engineer the iPhone in a way that made it impossible for them to read the data on it, which has been described as “a digital Ulysses pact”. A related example is that of a warrant canary, which Cory Doctorow describes as being a Ulysses pact (albeit a “weak” one, since the issuer of the canary can fail or be forced not to kill the canary), as is binary transparency (applying the idea of certificate transparency to binary executable files), which he describes as a “much stronger, more effective Ulysses pact”, since a public append-only log is harder to censor.