Microsoft have invested in making their OLAP tools do everything. Some of the functionality is, however, not intuitive and NonLeafDatHidden is one of those gotchas.
If you set the MembersWithData property of a dimension to NonLeafDataHidden then, as it says on the tin, the data associated with a node in a hierarchy disappears from view. What is not obvious, unless you get a calculator out, is that the data values remain included in the totals. Thus if a manager (e.g. Stephen Yang from the AdventureWorks example) has sales in his own name of $1M then his personal sales will remain in the grand total of $80.45M even if the MembersWithData property is set to NonLeafDataHidden.
We moved house recently. Our broadband ISP Pipex was among all the utilities that needed to be transferred. A sorry tale of customer dis-service followed.
It transpires that they have outsourced credit control in Lithuania, billing in the Philippines and Cancellations in the UK. All of these departments operate independently and are unable to transfer calls to the right department. Their IT systems appear to be unavailable on 50% of calls. They are unable to accept responsibility for sorting out a problem with a customer. The system is engineered to prevent customer satisfaction!
Grrrr!
There are issues here with outsourcing – I am guessing that each location may be run by a different subcontractor. Are any of the staff really interested in serving Pipex’s customers or are they just doing a job without any effort over and above turning up for work and jumping through the normal call centre performance hoops? The fact that several of the call centres are offshore tells me that they may be keener on cutting costs than anything else.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It looks as though we are working through a remake of the first Great Crash. Galbraith’s comments about the process ring sadly true today.
The Prime Minister, in the UK, blames this on external events. But his claimed economic success record, of continuous growth, looks hollow today as history shows that it was a boom of the greatest magnitude rather than carefully stewarded economic management. His obsessive avoidance of volatility in the economy has conditioned people to forget risk and the boom followed as banks also forgot about risk. The ratings agencies saw no defaults/risk and therefore predicted no defaults/risk – a classic (and quite catastrophic) confusion of descriptive vs. predictive statistics!
I drive at 30mph if I’m in an urban zone. I don’t drive at 20mph which might be safer or 40mph which would be more dangerous. Effectively I let the government set a safe limit and I stick to it. I don’t exercise a great deal of judgment and, so far, the arrangement has worked well. I do, however keep my eyes open and slow down if it snows or if it’s school time and there are children about.
International regulators of banks have set up similar rules which govern lending practice and institutions such as Northern Rock have responded by delegating the decision, about how much to lend, to the regulators and have lent as much as they possibly could even if it meant handing out cash to people with poor credit histories using inadequate collateral as security. Operating at the limits regardless of conditions can be reckless if no judgment is exercised.
This is another downside to government intervention that has combined with excessive stability to produce the biggest bubble in money supply that we have seen so far.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blogging
WordPress has just made a significant change to the system. Like a lot of changes that are made long after the stable door is bolted this change looks ugly, is hard for them to explain and is fundamentally not quite hitting the nail on the head.
Tags and categories look and feel like descriptors that enable stuff to be filed and found using words that describe the contents of individual posts. Reading their description of the difference you get the feeling that they wanted to let users have sections in their blogs so that an item would be sorted into one section only. This is the way that we expect items to be printed in newspapers: an article is either in the magazine section, the business section, sport etc.
However, because they introduced this distinction on top of their previous system that supported one dimension of classification and because they left the classifications in place we end up with a real camel of a compromise.
We now have two dimensions that allow multiple descriptions per item. It may have been better if they had put all of the previous category stuff into the tag system. Or, they could have allowed each descriptor to be a tag and, optionally, category.
What we really, really need is a system that has, perhaps, a limited number of entry points and then a self configuring hierarchy that allows stuff to be found flexibly.
Take an item about an old map of Norwich. This could be tagged with Maps, Antiques, Norwich, East Anglia, England etc.
It makes sense to find the item using the following hierarchies
Maps/Antiques/UK/England/East Anglia/Norwich
or
UK/England/East Anglia/Norwich/Antiques/Maps
or
Norwich/Maps
Each search path is useful and can be constructed by the system on the fly. The top level entry points could be limited in number but the current system adds, rather than subtracts, to the confusion.
Economic stability has been one of the goals of the current British government. One of the measures of this has been the interest rates that people pay to build businesses and to buy their property. In the last ten years the mortgage rates have been tethered in a tight band that has enabled people to plan with greater confidence. The downside to this is that young consumers. those looking to buy their first or second houses, are not considering the risks of interest rates in the mid teens. This has encouraged them to stretch their finances further in the belief that interest rates will always sit in the comfortable 5-8% band.
My first mortgage in the mid eighties went, if I remember correctly, up to 16% but this was not an issue as I was subject to stricter rules about income multiples than current borrowers.
Which environment was better? The current bubble and reckless pursuit of growth has led to masssive immigration and an overheated economy that is going to come down with a bump.
There will be tears before bedtime!
The crisis in the banking system which culminated in Northern Rock’s near demise is now having a visible effect in the housing market. I was called yesterday by an estate agent who was keen to inform me that one of his properties had just been reduced in price by 13%. Also, a local estate agent has a shop window that now features a good number of properties with “New Price” emblazoned across them.
It is interesting watching this unfold as statistics are being mis-used in some fairly standard ways. The difference between descriptive and predictive statistics is a slightly subtle one that can be understood by understanding that just because prices have risen strongly over the last year does not imply that price rises will continue. The price is an indicator that lags behind a whole bunch of underlying factors and events, ephemeral consumer confidence being one of the most significant, that govern what people want to pay for a property.
The financial system is unravelling at the moment. Northern Rock, a bank that specialises in mortgage lending, has come unstuck as it got caught between a wholesale finance market that is reviewing its attitude to risk following the sub-prime scandals in the US and its own sub-prime lending. Nobody wants to lend money to the bank any more and the Bank of England has stepped in as the lender of last resort. If the bank’s assets are really valuable then a buyer should be easy to find but it looks as though the latest property bubble market is bursting and Northern Rock’s willingness to lend up to 130% of the value of the house (sic) will leave it with a great potential for repossessions that will write off a few millions of its assets.
The Council for Mortgage Lenders has some interesting stats on repossession trends and lending standards that look alarming to me.
If 0.2% of mortgages are repossessed each year and an average mortgage lasts for 10 years then I calculate that we have a 2% chance of any given mortgage being repossessed.
If I have 50 friends then what chance do I have of knowing someone who has been repossessed?
If a lot of people know someone that has been repossessed then what confidence is there in the market about prices?
Another interesting structure! There is no triangulation on the front or side elevations.
Just read Peters and Waterman’s In search of Excellence (1982). Just starting to read Small is Beautiful (1973) by E F Schumacher. Reading two Very Important Books close together can lead to extra insights or different points of view that can be thought (and behaviour) provoking.
#1 What if Schumacher had lived for 25 years after his book was published and Peters had not? (I don’t mean any ill will to TP who is a very clever guy with some very good messages).
#2 Schumacher’s messages call the game into question while ISOE explains how to play the game to the best effect and the greatest humanity. Small is Beautiful is quoted positively in ISOE and both seek to promote humanity.
We can now look on both with hindsight that tells us how successful US companies have been in promoting their view and how ’successful’ we have all been in using up the Earth’s finite resources.
Perhaps we should regard the faltering US car industry as a sign of hope that people have had enough of this ‘progress’ and that it’s time for a new approach – or a re-kindling or Schumacher’s call to recognise that there may be limits to what we should have.
