December 2009 Archives
With all the talk about airport security going on, I keep thinking back to my trip to Israel a few years back. They don't make you take your shoes off or worry about liquids. What they do instead is interview each and every passenger with seemingly benign questions. It quickly becomes apparent that they don't really care where you went to nursery school, but instead are interested in how you respond to the questions.
Anyway, I'm glad to see The Toronto Star pick up on the Israeli method, outlining security measures at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport. Here's a nice peak at what it's like as you actually go through the scanners:
"First, it's fast - there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."
I've compared every airport security station I've ever been through to that experience and while it took a little longer and was a bit more invasive, I felt safe and they have a proven track record.
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Tags: airports, security, travel
A few blogs that hit my radar in 2009.
Continuing the year-end festivities, here are my top new blogs of 2009. I'm defining "new" here by whether the site was in my reading repertoire before this year. Anyway, here they are in no specific order:
- Snarkmarket: This one couldn't be easier. Over the year I've gotten to know Robin, one of the site's three writers, and they've managed to churn out one interesting post after another. For whatever it's worth, I linked to these guys quite a few times times: New Liberal Arts (Making Things and Iteration, Everything I Know About Life I Learned from My Search Engine (Are People Getting Better at Search?, The Starbucks API (Starbucks API), Technologies Don't Transform. Societies Do. (Socialness and the Inevitability of Technology) and Spaces Between Words, Spaces Between Souls (The Impact of Space). (Also, as a bonus link, Robin wrote a book called Annabel Scheme via Kickstarter.)
- Tumblr: A bit of a cop-out, but Tumblr became one giant blog I follow this year. A few of my favorites: rafer, msg, peterfeld, adamiss, The Daily Bunch, soupsoup, Jay Parkinson, Mike Hudack and cjn. (I'm heyitsnoah.tumblr.com if you're so inclined.)
- New Math and Learn Something New Every Day: I group these together because they feel like part of the same family (the elder statesman of the family would be Indexed. It's always a treat to see an image from either of these sites turn up in my feeds.
- Cheap Talk and ThinkMarkets: I tend to group these two together because a) they're both about economics and b) they're both hosted on Wordpress with minimal designs. Anyway, throughout the year both sites helped fill my fix for economics information, especially lighter fare "economics of real life" type stuff (like this Cheap Talk post on Ashton Kutcher's Twitter follower strategy).
- The Awl: This will make everyone's list (it's already started). To be honest I wasn't sure about it. I read it, and it was very good, but there were quite a few posts I skipped (I tend to judge these things on how much of a "must-read" something is). Then they did their End of the 00s roundups and they were generally outstanding and there was no longer a question for me.
- NYTPicker: My buddy Dave first pointed me to NYTPicker and I've been reading it ever since. For those that haven't checked it out, it's an insider view of the New York Times. Makes me wish more industries/companies had something equivalent, as reading entries always make me feel like I know something I shouldn't (which is fun).
- The Browser is some sort of weird aggregator. I'm not sure where the links come from (except that they pull links roundups from lots of top economics bloggers) and, to be honest, I don't care as long as the great links keep flowing.
I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones that stand out as hitting my radar in the last twelve months. Hope you find some new reading.
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Tags: internet
My most-visited posts of the last twelve months.
Inspired by Alan Wolk (who was inspired by BBH Labs), here are my top ten posts of the year (at least by number of pageviews):
- Why Did Tropicana Redesign?: Yet another voice in the debate on Tropicana's redesign (which was pulled off the shelf after the post). I argued the other side ... That maybe it wasn't so bad (minus the usability issue). I still stand by my generic point, but clearly the usability issues won out.
- Steve Eisman and Betting on Collapse: To be honest most of these top posts were because of Google (and who says that all traffic comes from Twitter?). The post is mostly a giant link to Michael Lewis's portfolio piece from last year.
- T-Mobile Class Action Lawsuit: I think the title pretty much explains it.
- Abandoned Detroit: Pictures of Detroit's decline.
- A Rant on Branding: With all the Pepsi/Tropicana excitement I needed to get out a full-on rant about why rebranding isn't really that important (and why it's really about a giant media buy).
- Rating Systems and Personal Rules: This post can be summed up in just a few words: Everyone has a different definition of five stars.
- Ekin: Nike Brand Evangelists: Ekin is Nike backwards and apparently it's also the name the company gives its "official storytellers."
- Diverselessness: Is the web actually a diverse place? Discuss.
- Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections: A link and a few quotes from my favorite article of 2009 on neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran.
- Apple's Television Advertising Barrage: My answer to all the folks who hold up Apple as an example of product as marketing. (Basically, they spend a shitload on television advertising.)
Great. Will try and do a better year-end wrap-up with top links of the year in the next two days.
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Consumerology has some interesting thoughts on what the real causes of American obesity may be. Especially interesting to me was this point about the ease of preparing meals:
As the cost associated with food preparation drops, the number of meals (i.e., snacks) increases and the type of meal shifts. (I wrote about this earlier this year.) Microwave ovens make it easier to eat popcorn (or worse), so we do. Frozen tater tots are a snap as a side dish with that meat loaf but not worth the effort if you have to make them from scratch. If you think this is hooey, consider this: nature's ready-made snacks are fruits and veggies. Better food preparation technologies have made it just as easy to open a bag of chips as to peel a banana.
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Tags: food, health, obesity
Was reading this article about Google's move into local search and how it's peaked regulator's interest and one quote in particular jumped out:
"This is not in the 'don't be evil' bucket," said one industry source, who like most asked not to be named for fear of repercussions for publicly criticizing Google. "They're giving preferential treatment to their own content."
Really? "Asked not to be named for fear of repercussions." We are talking about a bunch of nerds, aren't we? But then I thought about it, and I've done the same. Self-censored myself for some fear that big bad Google will come knocking, cutting out my knees in the form of PageRank. This is scary.
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Tags: google, law, politics
A very interesting Palin insight by way of The Washington Independent (by way of Ezra Klein). Anyway, the author, David Weigel, argues that Sarah Palin has created an amazing situation for herself, one in which the media reports her press releases as if they're fact:
I think what Palin's doing here is incredibly savvy. She knows that anything that goes out under her name will be accepted as fact by conservatives -- "Going Rogue" was a 400-page exercise in score-settling that identified, for Palin fans, everyone who ever did her wrong. And she knows that liberals despise her and will pick apart everything that goes out under her name. It was liberals, after all, who obsessed over the "death panel" claim, because for whatever reason they thought it was vitally important to prove that Palin was misleading people about what was in the health care bill.
It's hard not to be amazed by what Palin has achieved (and the way she's been able to manipulate the media to achieve that). Both Weigel and Klein make interesting cases for how she's managed to achieve this.
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Tags: media, politics
The Economist has a very good (and fairly long) piece on immigration in the United States. It's quite interesting to read something positive about America for a change, though the article ends with a strong warning that the country must be careful to keep the borders open.
I especially liked this retort to the argument that today's immigrants (especially Hispanics) are not "becoming American":
As Mr Krikorian concedes, the fear that new immigrants are disagreeably different is not new. In 17th-century Massachusetts, one group of English Protestants (the Puritans) banished another group of English Protestants (the Quakers) and even hanged some of those who returned. Benjamin Franklin doubted that German immigrants would ever assimilate. "Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements?" he asked, adding that they "will never adopt our Language or Customs". Today, there are 50m German-Americans, hardly any of whom speak German. Indeed, they have intermingled and intermarried so much that they are barely noticeable as a separate group.
Reminds me of something I read about how quickly immigrants lose their language. As I remember it (looking for source now) it's something like 1.5 generations until it's gone (and the family is basically fully assimilated).
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Tags: immigration, politics
There's an excellent decade wrap-up article over at The Awl about the hunt for lonelygirl15, an even Richard Rushfield describes as "the finest hour of post-modern journalism." Particularly good are his lessons from the event, including:
The wisdom of the web is a bunch of hooey: The lonelygirl research teams drew professionals from every discipline and field of study known to man, who pooled their talents to crowdsource the hunt. Horticulturists examined the flora dotting some videos and pronounced it native to only a very tiny part of Northern California. Crews from major Hollywood productions drew graphs proving that the lighting on the videos had to be a very expensive, complex set-up only available to professional crews. When I met Jessica and the lonelygirl team, they told me that the lighting in the video had consisted of a desk lamp, turned in different directions and also sometimes they opened a window. And they had never shot anywhere near Northern California. The Web, simply put, is a humongous moron.
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Tags: culture, internet
Fred Wilson points to a piece in The Times about teaching kids computer science.
The article doesn't necessarily point out anything we don't know, though I found this nugget interesting: "Not enough young people are embracing computing -- often because they are leery of being branded nerds." (There is no evidence to support that fact in the article.)
As I've mentioned in the past, this is something I believe in wholeheartedly. I think you can start with really little kids and make it fun (as the article points out, it's important to give them the feeling of "magic" you get when you make a computer do what you told it). What's more, I think it's really important that the teaching of code be approached from the creative side: Introductory courses should be part of the art department, not science. This is about letting kids build what they dream of and code should be treated no differently than paint and crayons (of course it takes a bit more time to get the hang of than those other things).
Bottom line is stop focusing instruction on the code and start focusing on the output of that code. Let kids make stuff and they'll be hooked.
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Tags: education, programming, youth
Brand New's wrap-up of the best and worst logos of 2009 is a good read. Their choice for worst logo of the year is Bing, which I can't say I disagree with. It just sort of looks slapped together, which was probably the point to make it feel a little more cuddly like Google. Also interesting was going back and looking at the comments on the original MSN redesign post Brand New did, which they suggested because of the fight in the comments between folks at Futurebrand, the original branding agency responsible for the MSN butterfly, over who actually did the work.
Leaving the fighting aside for a second (it's just sort of amusing), I found this explanation from one of the designers for how the logo stuck around so long quite interesting:
Ten years is several lifetimes at Microsoft, so for a logo to last that long there is a little miracle. One reason I think it lasted so long was that the next version was designed at the same time as the original. The first version was with flat colors, and the subsequent version was with gradients. In 1999 monitors couldn't handle gradients very well but we knew the advance was just around the corner.
The idea of designing future iterations at the same time you're designing the original is a pretty interesting one. Of course it's much easier when there's a known known, like monitors that can handle gradients, in the pipeline, but it's still impressive.
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Tags: branding, design
Somebody has sued Netflix, claiming that their release of "anonymized" data as part of the Netflix prize allowed her to be identified. What's particularly interesting is how it went down:
just weeks after the contest began, two University of Texas researchers -- Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov -- identified several NetFlix users by comparing their "anonymous" reviews in the Netflix data to ones posted on the Internet Movie Database website. Revelations included identifying their political leanings and sexual orientation.
Putting aside the suit, it's interesting to think about how anonymous any data can be when their is a plethora of non-anonymous data available for comparison. This is more interesting than the AOL search data because in that case the data itself included the clues. (Here's a New York Times article about the AOL incident if you want a refresh.) I suspect we will see a lot more cases like this in the future.
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Tags: data, identity, privacy
I read Too Big to Fail because of this Financial Times review that called it the best account of a "tumultuous financial collapse or scandal" since Barbarians at the Gate
. Needless to say that's what I'm reading now and it's excellent.
All of that is a long way of introducing an interesting quote I read in the book last night about why one stock can be overvalued and another undervalued:
Institutional investors--the big pension and mutual funds who could make or break stocks--typically chose just one tobacco stock for their portfolios, and more often than not it was Philip Morris. With their support, Philip Morris stock had risen 25 percent since the beginning of 1987, while RJR Nabisco's, after spiking up and down, was flat. Portfolio managers liked Philip Morris's predictability. They thought they knew where Maxwell was going. They never knew what Johnson was up to.
This seems like the sort of thing that folks who know about finance already know (so if there are any of you reading this I apologize), but for me it was eye opening. I mean it makes perfect sense that you would choose one, most everyone is aware of the theory of diversification after all. I guess I'm just surprised at how obvious it is that, in this case, a very specific peculiarity of the market, and the way we approach it, is affecting the price. Not sure if I'm really explaining myself properly here, but I'll just leave it at that for now until I can come up with something better to say.
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Tags: finance, stock
rc3.org points to this quote in defense of gift cards:
So why not just give the boy cash? Surely cash would allow an even more efficient allocation of resources? But cash is inferior, I think, because cash, like it or not, carries with it some assumption of responsibility. You don't want to waste your cash frivolously, or you might feel compelled to save it for some greater goal. You might end up, horror of horrors, being forced to use it to buy some other kid a birthday present! But a gift-card to, say, GameStop, is a ticket to freedom. Go be frivolous! Buy a game! Buy whatever game you want! It's better than money because it comes with an explicit, unignorable directive to use it in a way that gives you pleasure.
I, like the quote's author, recognize the scam of gift cards, however, he makes a good point. In fact, I had a similar conversation with someone a few months ago (if it was you raise your hand and I'll credit you properly) about the idea that the best way for the government to stimulate the economy would have been to give money back in gift card form. The money would go straight into businesses that employ lots of folks and us citizens would get to go out and buy a video game on Washington's dime.
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Tags: economics, politics
New Scientist's Short Sharp Science blog offers a 50-point rebuttal to an article from a UK newspaper with 100 reasons why climate change is natural. My favorite response may be the slightly bitchy answer to the very first point, "There is 'no real scientific proof' that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man's activity." To which New Scientist replied:
Technically, proof exists only in mathematics, not in science. Whatever terminology you choose to use, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the current warming is caused the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities.
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Tags: climatechange, science
I just recently finished Too Big to Fail
, which I can't recommend highly enough. (Don't worry, it's not a dense read, much more a story/character study.) Anyway, since finishing I've been pretty curious what all the folks in the book are up to these days. Some of them, like the bank heads who kept their jobs, are easy to track down but then there are guys like Neel Kashkari, who was in charge of TARP that have since left treasury.
Anyway, turns out The Washington Post did a nice profile of Kashkari who has moved to California and is literally trying to detoxify himself from the DC experience by building sheds and walking dogs (he got pretty ravaged by both the late nights and congress). Well worth the read if you're into this sort of stuff.
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Tags: finance, politics
The Economist has a good story that (once again) disputes the long tail. Basically the thesis is that the number of hits have increased and what has been squeezed is the non-descript middle. Or, as they put it, "The stuff that people used to watch or listen to largely because there was little else on is increasingly being ignored."
What I found most interesting, though, was the following explanation for why people tend to prefer blockbusters (versus niche discoveries):
Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In "Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour", William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read "The Lost Symbol", by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
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Tags: business, culture, economics
Aha There It Is finds tennis courts in your area (as long as your area is the Bay Area, which is all they cover at the moment). What's amazing is how the database came to be, which is is explained in this lengthy (and very nerdy) post. While I can't pretend to really understand the process, basically the dude wrote a program to scan Google maps and find images that looked like tennis courts, which is totally awesome.
It also reminds me of a conversation I was having the other night about American cities that look like every other American city of its ilk (think Houston, Phoenix, Vegas, etc. ... basically all the fastest growing places of the last ten years). Anyway, I was wondering whether you could look at the Google Maps aerial view of those cities and recognize them as similar to each other/locate more cities like them based on the footprint. Being that they all share some big similarities, especially around their preference for planned communities, I imagine there must be some patterns. Might be fun.
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Tags: maps, patterns
The FT had a great article last week on all the different ways economists try to use scientific principles to understand their world. It's chock full of interesting insights.
Early in the article they explain that while all these banks were diversifying, they were all diversifying in the same way, something we know all understand. What was especially interesting, though, was that when you think of especially diverse ecosystems, like the rainforst, they're actually not all that strong with "so many interdependent species that it is more vulnerable to an external shock than the simpler ecological diversity of savannahs and grasslands."
The conlcusion also got me thinking, noting that the problem with the use of all the scientific models in finance is that when they're used in the way they are they effect the world they're modeling, something the model does not take into account (in doesn't need to when it's just being used to examine/understand the biological world). "Donald MacKenzie of Edinburgh university says the real problem with models is that bankers tend to view them as 'cameras' that capture how the world works, like the camera that might photograph a physics experiment. Instead, he argues, they should be viewed as 'engines' - since the presence of a model tends to change and drive market behaviour in a way that makes it impossible to assume that the past can predict the future."
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Tags: economics, finance, science
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