I started begging my mother for piano lessons from a very young age, had my mother been a Tiger Mother I would have been a child prodigy. I’d seen Amy Chua in an interview program and had wanted to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as an instruction manual to raise my child as a music virtuoso. And although the book is not a step-by-step guide to becoming a Tiger Mother I am glad I read it.

The book is an autobiographical view of the way Amy Chua raised her daughters Sophia and Louisa (Lulu) to become straight A students, and focusses mainly on her teaching her children to play the musical instruments of her choice. In the end it devolves into a war of attrition between Amy and Lulu, resulting in a revelation for the Tiger Mother.

One thing I didn’t completely agree with in this book, and as the book Thinking, Fast and Slow shows, is that there is some outcome bias involved. The strategy – praise the good performance and punish the bad performance – seems to work well for Amy, it isn’t a perfect stratagem. It’s all due the regression to the mean. From the result that Amy had with Sophia, and Tiger Mothers seem to have in general, it looks like the stick and carrot work. And by looking at the results from Lulu you can see the regression to the mean.

This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.
–Daniel Kahneman

I’m probably a Tiger Mother, although I’m a Dragon and a father, like Jed I regret not continuing my piano lessons and want to help my children see what the benefits are of perseverance. As a child I can remember being much like Lulu, unlike her I persevered in not practicing. Perhaps I can give my children a different choice, even if it isn’t a choice.

Image source: Amazon

What about it?

Whilst having discussions on a ‘thinkers’ board that I infrequently-frequently visit, someone mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect in relation to specific politicians.

So I looked it up and something started to dawn on me.

Of late I have seen quite a number of companies adapting the ‘Google method’ of peer assessment when it comes to hiring new personnel, but for some reason those companies were having rather a decline in technical competence instead of getting the increased benefit of adding more ‘brainpower’.

As I understand it, and as related to my own observations in the peer assessments, the problem lies here in points 2 and 3 of the hypothesis put forth by Kruger and Dunning:

2) Fail to recognize genuine skill in others;

Oftentimes the higher skilled candidate is being dismissed because “he talks about weird things and can’t communicate properly” or variations thereof.

Now what I have seen Human Resources do is not recognizing this problem but rather projecting a form of ‘insecurity’ on the assessing employee ‘He may be afraid of his position’, whereupon they start complementing and ‘securing’ the assessing employee. It would go too far too add Pavlovian conditioning to this story, but it may not be too far from it.

3) Fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

Dunning has drawn an analogy to someone having an impairment, but I think a much clearer and less insulting explanation can be given by the concepts of Flatland (when read without the Victorian context, that is).

What does that mean for the business?

As for the origin of the inadeqacies, I leave that for the respective physicians and psychologists, but there are a few common mistakes companies make that help in attenuating this effect within their ranks.

- The HR departments are not sitting at the table when the peer assessments take place

This has the effect of ‘ganging up’ on a potential candidate; remember that the assessing employees will subconsciously defend their comfort zone, so no fresh blood that dares to challenge even the group of ‘old hands’ will ever be given a good mark.

And in technology, zealotism is stronger than in religion. Mention the wrong editor somewhere and you are classed ‘unqualified’. Mention that you do not have a fascist adherence to Linux/MacOS/Windows/Anythingatall and you are classed ‘incompetent’.

The way to remedy this is to have a properly prepared (as in read up, albeit cursorily, on the subject matter) HR staff sit at the table and support the candidate in matters of confidence and to ‘call off the hounds’ when needed. Also, the HR staff should ask questions like ‘why is this editor thing important in our company?’ so as to prevent the technology policies becoming the pre-conditions for a personal playground of the techs.

- Sitting personnel has gotten to the position on merits of ‘employment years’ and ‘being there first’ or ‘helping to set it up’

Often, because ‘in the land of the blind, one-eye is king’, a manager or ‘chief’ of a technical department is someone that has been a long time in a company. This is a tradition that stems from the old ‘Foreman’ habit; a senior gets to lead his peers because he knows very well what the work entails and he knows the peers very well.

But in ICT, I really have to say this, a lot of technically competent people have problems when interacting with the rest of the world. I will even go so far as to say that some of these people are in ICT because of their Rainman-like qualities; they simply are prone to defend against anything that threatens the world they have created in their own mind.

This can be remedied by not giving them decision powers. They should have all the execution powers, or put differently; they should be allowed to decide on ‘how’ to do things, but never ‘what’ to do.

Here then comes a gray area; it is sometimes hard to see when it is a ‘how’ and when it is a ‘what’. But there’s a good rule of thumb for it (this is just a marker, not a hard fact): if it involves anyone outside of the inhouse technical crew, treat it as a ‘what’. All activities done by that technical crew can be treated as ‘how’.

Obviously it never is going to be that simple, but think of this as having a race-horse pulling a gurney; the horse pretty well knows how to run by itself and given practice it even knows how to turn etc. But because the jockey has more information (i.e. the strategy, the strength and endurance of the competition) and has the ability to make judgements on that information (i.e. if the others are conserving energy, if the other horses are at their peak, when to fully go all-out) it must always be the jockey who is in control.

The horse can do things the jockey can not, but the jockey can do things the horse can not. And if the horse decides that it knows the course better than the jockey, the race will be lost most of the time.

The horse does not see it’s inadequacy in decision making, because it can outrun that little jockey even on a bad day…

And now what?

Well, just because they know more about technology and about the work they do, that does not mean they know more about healthy and proper assessment procedures.

When assessing new personnel, have the tech department set up a kind of exam with a scoring method. That way they can ask anything they want and open questions can be scored ‘double blind’ if wanted (although simply anonymous is usually good enough).

This test can then be sent to an outside consultant or other tech company to verify both the validity of questions and the standard answers.

You can have candidates (give them fair warning though that you are going to do this) take this test and have it objectively scored. This makes for an up-to-date questioning and it also gives the candidate the possibility to defend his/her answers against the scoring because it can be done fully in writing. Sometimes that will yield that the candidate is overqualified for a certain setting. But that leaves the candidates dignity in place and gives the tech department a chance to work on themselves.

The HR staff can assess the social qualities and all other properties after a candidate has gotten through the test.

I sometimes hear that ‘it is hard getting good personnel’, but I do not think so. I think it is hard breaking down the little kingdoms that have come to be and that in an open and social world, there really should be no place for them anymore.

This article is a guest written article, and was originally posted here.

Image source: Some rights reserved by Sebastian Fritzon

A good friend of mine told me about Tripping the Rift, and highly recommended it. Word of Mouth is not the way I usually get my recommendations, although I get many recommendations that way. Most times somebody will give me something based on their experience, or will pass it on to me after they have done reading or watching it.

Tripping the Rift is an adult cartoon, with a story line similar to Firefly. A band of space privateer/smugglers who constantly get into trouble with the leaders of the “good” Confederation and “evil” Dark Clown Empire. Chode – a horny purple alien – causes most of the trouble, which ends up being resolved by him and his misfit crew: teenage lizard, sex android, gay robot, and an ugly cow/hippocentaur. Nothing is sacred, which makes it all the funnier.

It is fun light viewing, and definitely not suitable for children. It probably won’t make you smarter.

Image source: title screenshot

Like Anthony Horowitz I’ve always liked Sherlock Holmes, perhaps it is because my mother joked that I was related to the sleuth. Or because I visited 221B Baker Street as a child. In any case I am much enamored with the genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and as have been disappointed with many other tributes to the creator. And I was shocked whet James Randi revealed in his book that Doyle was a firm believer in the fairies of Cottingley Glen.

The House of Silk is an enthralling book, filled with the subterfuge which can be expected from a Holmes tale. It combines two overlapping stories and can be placed in the middle of the canonical Holmes series. It touches on subjects which, although they would not be out of place in Victorian Britain, might not be expected in a Holmes story. Standing on its own the novel is good, and seems well researched. As an amateur nitpicker I would have loved to find a inconsistency or glaring error, and didn’t.

It certainly can be called a good Holmes novel.

Image source: Amazon

A day ago I read PHP: A fractal of bad design, and it made me sit down and think about writing this entry, of which the kernel has been gestating for quite a long time.

I see this a lot; pro’s ranting about an aspect of our ‘craft’ that has gone totally pear-shaped; programmers complaining about the languages or the quality of code they are asked to fix and/or maintain, systems administrators that just can not believe the insanity that is brought down on them because of either laziness of the in-house personnel or management-made bylaws.

Cryptographic specialists (even mildly spoken ones like Bruce Schneier), hackers nee security specialists, software designers… the whole palette of people that actually are proficient in their work gripe and complain.

The outages in service, security issues, privacy issues, performance issues, safety hazards with SCADA… we are accepting third-world standards here.

I could blame the hardware (‘it is all off-the shelf commodity stuff they are using nowadays’), but that would not be correct; the stock hardware now is more reliable than a lot of specialized iron from 20 years ago.

I could blame the programming languages (‘if you use tools as an analogy, then Perl is like a pair of pliers designed by H.R. Giger’), but, even though the languages make up for a goodly chunk of problems, it is not correct; whilst not elegant or correct or proper, most issues arising from the use of a specific programming language can be fixed by taking a bit of time and duct-taping on other software that takes care of these specific problems (heck, that is actually what is going on all the time).

I could blame the emerging economies’ developers (‘Indian and Chinese developers make such bad quality software’), but that would not be proper and it would actually be very incorrect; nobody pays them to take time and study to learn the correct ways. They do not have the luxury of our educational and social security, so they need to earn money right off the bat. And on top of that they get paid ridiculously low wages. If you want to work with Asian devs, make part of the assignment that they study and finish courses. Or teach them yourself.

I could blame the consumers or end-users (‘software has become a commodity product; a disposable item’), and while that may have some merit, analogous to the consumer buying Fairtrade goods or ecologically friendly items, it is not the main cause of the problems. The consumer does just that: consume.

So… who can we blame?

Well, how about the guys making the decisions, for one?

In my opinion, it is the management that needs to scratch behind it’s collective ear about the current state of IT.

First, they know something about theoretically nicely crafted project management schemes (like SCRUM, Agile, Six Sigma), and think that if you just follow all that nicely, you eventually get somewhere. The reason these project management methods are popular is because it allows everyone to just shout ‘hut hut’ and be off and ‘do something’.
Planning for the current crop of managers means ‘resource planning’, ‘deadlines’ and ‘deliverables’. The latter being no more than ‘Functional Specifications’ ‘Technical Design’ and ‘Data Model’.

Let me take these things apart:

An FS nowadays is a least-effort product because neither the ‘customer’ (sometimes an internal department), nor the ‘supplier’ wants to do a lot of work on it; it is not ‘something you can see being worked on’ (oh yeah, I get back to this one later), it becomes a totally obsolete and forgotten document the moment it is ‘delivered’, unless legal actions ensue at a later stage.

The TD is writing down what the customer says it must be (‘we support framework X on O.S. Y using hardware Z’). That is in no way a technical design. A technical design should always start out with full freedom of choice and be made to really solve all issues arising from the FS. Then, and only then, you can add restraints one by one and carefully take care of all artefacts of these restraints.

The DM is something that keeps amazing me; for some reason it is almost always like a mapping of a relational database. Why? I guess it is because companies like Oracle or the ubiquitous MySQL screwed the minds of people into thinking that ‘Entity Relation Diagrams’ are the only way to look at data. This also makes for one of the most common performance problems; all that following relations and extra tables.
I have seen queries that completely kill all possible caching just because the design was hellbent on using relations in a database. Here is a newsflash for those developers/software designers: sometimes it is computationally cheaper to do the bookkeeping yourself and let the data-model be nothing more than a key-value store.
But the managers can read ERD’s and they look more interesting than: id->Blob

Second, they need to see that something is worked on (told you I would get back to it). This makes for really weird constructions. A good software design starts at the O.S. level, builds up from that and since most of the work is (hopefully) done ‘underwater’ it would stand to reason that you would build solid foundations, then add the plumbing and finally do the decorating and window-dressing.
Not so with the current ICT managers… they want you to hang up some curtains quite soon, so you need to add a scaffolding for a window and then kind of build the house around the curtains (after all, as soon as the curtains hang, you need to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging them ‘just right’, because the ‘customer’ can not wait until you are done with the rest of the house).
This is because they do not understand ICT, but still want to act as if they are ‘managing IT’. The only thing they actually manage is to ‘not being fired’.

A good software design, whether it is a website, SCADA or communications, has the interface (the curtains, the GUI, the Look ’n Feel) separated from the engine; the thing that makes it work.

That is a requirement managers really should add to every requirement document: if you remove the interface, will it still work. If the answer is along the lines of ‘but the AJAX call…’ or ‘the widget does…’, go start forming a lynch-mob, because the person giving that answer is just trying to cover up his murder.

Finally (I could add lots more, but this is enough to get the idea across), an ICT manager needs to be proficient in ICT. That is kind of obvious, you might say.
Well, it is obvious that this should be so, but it seldom is.
A lot of ICT policy is rather because some of the engineers, admins, coders take an interest in matters above and beyond the call of duty, rather than an ICT manager becoming interested and making a point out of doing something.

Take for instance my previous entry on SPF, DKIM and DMARC; you will see that mostly the admins understand why this is a good thing and maybe they will implement it. Or an ICT manager read that blog, but then, because he is out of his depth, asks an overworked admin who tells him that is a load of bullcrap, so they won’t implement it. But very seldom will you see an ICT manager understanding the issue at hand, take time to see what the impact is in his company and then start taking appropriate actions.

In my 15+ years that I managed IT-departments, both small and quite large, I have made it a point to always manage at least one (usually not too important) server and contribute to the companies codebase once in a while.

Not because I wanted to show off my 1337 m@d skillz, but because I needed to know what the health of my department was, how external items influenced workflow and also to be able to understand my techs (and not to be hoodwinked by nonsense) and make them understand that my decisions came from real knowledge and experience, and not a 2-week management technique course with a shiny certificate at the end.

Concluding

My take on what is wrong with ICT is that management has lost the skills to manage ICT, obviously with the exception of you, who are reading this article (the fact that you even made it to this disclaimer qualifies you more than you might think).

To remedy that, I would say that ICT managers need to write at least one useful program every 6 months and administrate at least one system (it can be a workstation for all I care, as long as the thinking process involves planning and encountering the issues).

There is even an underlying scientifically proven principle to my method; people need to ‘internalize’ experiences to really incorporate them into thought-processes. Otherwise they build up analogies and models inside their head that are nothing but ‘cargo cult management’.

It is time to kick out the phlogiston in ICT management and get some real fire going on again.

This article is a guest written article, and was originally posted here.

Image source: Some rights reserved by Sebastian Fritzon

Recently I got into a discussion about astrology and was told that it was obvious that I’d never had a good astrological reading. I have difficulty dealing with people who choose to believe in pseudoscience, and have much in common with James Randi in this respect. Where he and I diverge is in our treatment of these fanatics, I tend to avoid them like the plague. The same holds for the people who suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia, the belief in the power of Friday the thirteenth.

Isaac Asimov writes in his introduction to the book that “[u]nder these circumstances, what crime is greater than that of deliberately misteaching the public about science, of deliberately misleading them, of defrauding them, of feeding and stimulating their ignorance?” Randi goes on to savagely ravage all the purveyors of trickery explaining that he seeks “to prove that ‘psychics’ use trickery by duplicating their wonders by trickery.” I believe that the main issue with this book is not that it is not written with the mainstream in mind, it is that the main stream media is more interested in spouting ridicules fiction and trickery rather than the truth, and the public eats it up. This is probably why politicians do so well.

I’m sure you had a nice day. And if you didn’t read Flim-Flam!

Image source: Amazon

Today I spend my day at the Red Hat Open Cloud Tour, this is what happened today:

Just heard the opening by Rajiv Sodhi, who is here despite having a baby due any moment.

Margaret J. Rimmler’s keynote was interesting. One of the key takeaways being openness RedHat customers should have the choice to remain portable and replace RedHat, if that is what they want.

Torben Sebens’ talk on Unlocking the Value of Open Cloud was interesting, proposing 4 models for delivery in the cloud, with the main focus on PaaS and IaaS delivery on top of which a SaaS can be build with JBoss.

Dick van Galen discuss the disruptive nature of the Cloud on IT departments and tho need to turn IT departments into service oriented organization, and how cloud can be used to improve your organisation.

^{I’m on the right side of the room under the screen}

Eric D. Schabell (@ericschabell) talk on Leverage An Intelligent Application Infrastructure for Competitive Advantage focuses on a scalable, portable, flexible, and stable platform.

It’s magic, at least I think it’s magic.
–Eric D. Schabell

Vincent Van der Kussen (@vincentvdk) from BTR Services giving a customer perspective of RedHat Cloud/Enterprise Virtualization. General marketing initiated presentation, and some real technical details on implementation of RHEV.

After the last session RedHat started handing out red hats, which I assume are supposed to be Fedoras and look like Panama hats. We are all Red Hat now…

Red Hat Open Cloud Tour – Panel Discussion

Peter Keijzer leads a panel discussion Margaret Rimmler, Dick van Galen, +Vincent Van der Kussen, Rob, and Coen from Accenture.

Discussion focuses on the paradigm shift which cloud solutions are causing in IT departments and that the business is more advanced. Coen mentions a Dutch bank where the business is buying cloud services on their creditcards because the IT department is just not delivering.

Discussion of the security fears that the cloud concept causes, Rob causes some FUD by discussing the danger of your current vendor exporting your data to the US. Dick mentions the risk of the fragmented laws in the EU regarding privacy, and says that this will be solved soon. The new role of the modern IT department is to recognize the risk to deploying to public or private cloud.

^{Eric D. Schabell’s OpenShift Primer}

Discussion on setting up your exit strategy, and creating a risk management profile.

Dick says that disruptive technologies or opportunities, a lot of start ups are using the cloud technology to jump into new areas where large companies don’t yet have the agility.

Margaret reminds us that Red Hat is not only working on only their solutions, because of their openness they are actively supporting projects such as OpenStack.

Eric D. Schabell giving a Red Hat OpenShift Primer – get your business into the Cloud today!Great talk, with some links I will be posting as soon as I get them. You can find the slides here.

Not much activity on the G+ stream for RedHat Open Cloud Tour #rhctams, guess that the guests are not early adopters.

Image source: Red Hat, Eric D. Schabell, me

I often get people ask me to develop phone applications based on an idea and with little other input besides the idea itself. I usually ask them to write me a proposal and send that to me, knowing that most people will procrastinate – as it turns a fun idea into work – I rarely hear anything back. Not so in this case, a friend brainstormed a shopping application and we made the following rough mock ups using OmniGraffle.

Image source: me

I believe that violations of terms of services can occur for many different reasons, usually this comes from not reading them. I am the first to complain about unfair terms, or the faulty application of terms to non-violators. Some violations are so blatant that they should be mentioned. And that’s where this tale starts:

This afternoon I got the following mail from Trifork, the organizer of GOTO Amsterdam 2012:

Hi Danïel,

I can see that you have found our great conference GOTO Amsterdam 2012 on Eventbrite.
If you would like to attend the conference you should register here: http://gotocon.com/amsterdam-2012/
We do not use the ticket-sale on Eventbrite – the conference is only there to get attention.

Thank you so much,
Amalie Trifork A/S

This was surprising as the event was being promoted on Eventbrite as a free event, and as you may know Eventbrite is free for free events. So I checked what the price was on the GOTO site, almost €700 for an event which they are promoting as free. Besides from violating the TOS, it is clear they are defrauding Eventbrite in the process and harming their brand. Naturally Eventbrite would be forced to respond in such a case to ensure their TOS is enforced.

“[…] You agree to unconditionally accept, honor, and fulfill all ticketing commitments that have been confirmed by EVENTBRITE through the Services, […]“
–Except from Eventbrite Terms of Service[https://www.eventbrite.com/tos/] § 4.4.b

Trifork is naturally harming its own brand too, together with Basho they deliver a solution to management of all the private health data for the Danish government and their citizens.

UPDATE:

Naturally after being told of this issue they decided to change everything and deny it had ever happened in the following mail, naturally I have the screenshots.

As you can see at the page of our event at Eventbrite – it says that the registration hasn’t opened yet – so at the time you registered you were told that it hadn’t open by then and that the registration is at our site.

UPDATE 2:

Eventbrite has now removed this event:

Eventbrite Customer Support, Mar 29 01:25 pm (PDT):
Hi Daniël,

Thanks so much for getting in touch with this. You’re correct, we are not an event listing service and it is in violation of our Terms of Service to link to outside ticketing platforms. My apologies for any inconvenience you’ve experienced.

For Amalie-

We have unpublished the event page referenced above per our Eventbrite Terms of Service.

We are unable to list events on our site that link to outside ticketing systems. You must be able to sell tickets through Eventbrite in order to use the platform. Your event page can be restored if ALL references outside ticketing systems are removed and you are using Eventbrite as your ticketing service. To ensure that your account remains in good standing, please note that any event page published on our site needs to comply with our Terms of Service. You may reference our Terms of Service at www.eventbrite.com/tos .

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation,

Image source: Eventbrite, me

You would probably not associate a god from the Indian pantheon with an Agile methodological, and there are many things that can be learned for Scrum masters from Ganesh.

In Scrum the Scrum Master focuses on 4 key areas:

• remove impediments
• buffer against distracting influences
• enforcer of rules
• focusing team on tasks

Ganesha is the Lord of Obstacles, both material and spiritually. And is worshiped as the remover of obstacles, although he also places obstacles in the path of worshipers. The Scrum Master also removes the impediments and places obstacles in the path of the team members. Ganesha fans his ears constantly to symbolize that often words are spoken, but one is not receiving inside. This is what happens when the length of the meetings is too long, or it digresses off-topic. This is also what the broken tusk is said to symbolize, with oneness of mind and single-minded devotion you can achieve everything. In your team you can keep your focus by focussing the energies on the ability of the team to create results, and allowing the members to achieve.

Image source: Vijay Bandari – Wikipedia, Anamika S

Using GMail daily I hadn’t noticed the item Create a document in the menu before yesterday, I decided to try it out and I really like it. The function allow you to turn an entire conversation into a document which is stored into Google Docs with the push of a button.

^{GMail menu}

The quoted text contains all the included markup, altough it doesn’t include the sender details, it removes all the quoted text it recognizes. What it doesn’t do is truncate the text below the “sig dashes” (“signature cut line”, “sig-marker”, or “sig separator”), which is what I expected.

I create many post based on conversations I see on mailing lists, or other place. This feature makes it easier to collect all the text of the conversation, as the sender is not included it is necessary to through source text to attribute the quotes to the correct person.

Nice feature!

Image source: VentureBeat, me

A recent Cinch about:

• Android Legend / BlackBerry Curve
• Offline GMail
• TheNextWeb Conference / HackBattle
• Two-Pizza Teams
• and more…

Source: me

Image source: Cinch

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British was the first ebook that I read in its entirety using Cool Reader. I really liked the reader, some of the default tap zone actions were less intuitive than I liked they were very simple to configure.

^{Cool Reader screenshot}

I found Jeremy Paxman an entertaining author, who had apparently researched the book very well. Getting a relatively unbiased view of the impact that the establishment of a British Empire had on the world, which at its hight consisted of 25% of the world’s – I assume – land mass, was extremely informative. Naturally there seems to be some cultural bias, and whether this can be attributed to the author or the lack of source material for the subjugated. After all history is written by the victors. As a nitpicker I could easily criticize certain semantic errors, such as referring to the Union Flag as the Union Jack – the former being the national flag and the later being a naval ensign.

An interesting read.

Image source: Amazon

I happened upon Last Chance to See online, and being a big fan of Douglas Adams’ previous works I thought I would quite like to read it. There is also a BBC radio program for which this book is an accompaniment and a follow up by Stephen Fry – also aptly named Last Chance to See, which I will now need to seek out.

Adams and Mark Carwardine go off on an adventure to visit some of the most endangered species of animals, some which are well known – the White Rhinoceros – and others which I had not heard of – the Kakapo – or had not know that they where on the verge of extinction – the Yangtze river dolphin. They discover that there are species of plants and animals that their numbers can be counted on one hand.

They look like humans, they move like humans, they hold things in their fingers like humans, the expressions which play across their faces and in their intensely human-looking eyes are expressions that we instinctively feel we recognise as human expressions. We look them in the face and we think, “We know what they’re like,” but we don’t. Or rather, we actually block off any possible glimmering of understanding of what they may be like by making easy and tempting assumptions.
–Douglas Adams

A humorous book, from a great author, discussing the plight of many animals and their struggle to exist with their human overlords.

Image source: Amazon