I know everyone has read plenty about how awful and stupid aiport security policies are, but this post from the New York Times Jet Lagged blog (which I didn’t know existed) includes a point I hadn’t considered:
The three-ounce container rule is silly enough — after all, what’s to stop somebody from carrying several small bottles each full of the same substance — but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of T.S.A.’s confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly.
Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.
January 5, 2010
This New York Times article about Japanese nerdery is sort of interesting in-and-of-itself, but the description of a Japanese treadmill really got me:
I was on a Japanese treadmill gazing at the usual numbers, speed and calorie count and so on, when I started to get mesmerized by the little images of food and drink on the screen.
At 35 calories, there was a frothy cappuccino, and then at 75 two pieces of tuna sushi, to be followed at 126 by an ice cream cone, at 150 by a beer and at 204 by an elegant glass decanter of sake. The 300-calorie mark ushered in chocolate cake, which segued at 325 to cheesecake. At 450 calories I caught a sweat-drenched glimpse of an egg-topped sandwich suggestive of a Croque Madame. Whatever followed was lost in translation.
I love that so much. I’m one of those people who works out partly so I can eat what I want. I do those types of calculations, spending 30 minutes in the gym so I can eat some pizza without feeling guilty. I just wish my treadmill (or actually stair machine) worked that.
January 4, 2010
I’m sure by the end of the day everyone will have linked to/quoted this Bruce Sterling year-end interview, so I figured I’d jump in on the action.
Sterling on American denial and vampires:
People have stymied sense of denial about the situation. It’s very neurotic, anxious, and repressed. It’s feeding into a strongly Gothic political temperament where popular culture is haunted by vampires and zombies. The population *identifies* with vampires and zombies, wants to marry them, settle down with them. There’s an autumnal hush over the cultural landscape. People really hope they won’t be hit between the eyes with the two-by-four again, but they also know that they are helpless to defend themselves against the sources of the blows.
Sterling on Brazilians:
I don’t understand why Brazilians don’t whine and complain more, because by world standards their country is still awful, with weird crap going on like armed dope favelas that shoot police helicopters and even ethnic pogroms of harmless Brazilian merchants in Surinam, but Brazilians are like, “Wow! I’m big on Orkut! Look at my new haircut!” They’re like the least High-Tech Gothic and most Favela Chic of all the emergent powers. If they’d just grin more and say “have a nice day” they could be the new Norteamericanos.
And there’s a lot more where those came from …
January 4, 2010
No real comment on this one, just think it’s sort of interesting. Apparently an heir to the Lilly fortune (drug company) gave $100 million to a magazine called Poetry. As Slate points out, this might not have been the best way to support poetry (lowercase “p”):
Poetry, which had a staff of four, an annual budget of $600,000, and a circulation of approximately 12,000, is suddenly among the best-endowed cultural institutions in the world. (The Guggenheim Foundation’s assets are $219 million.) There’s little evidence that Parisi will be adept at managing large sums of money or the publishing house he reportedly plans to start; and yet the Lilly bequest means the sun will never set on Poetry’s empire.
The article goes on to suggest a few other ways the money could have been better spent, mostly grants and the like. Not sure those ideas are great either, but I can’t disagree that most anything would be better than giving the whole sum to one publication. Mostly, though, I found the article’s title interesting: “Ruth Lilly’s venture capital for poets.” What the article comes up with is much less venture capital than the way non-profit grants are divvied out at the moment. Since there isn’t really any money in poetry, I imagine it would be quite difficult to “invest” in poets with hope of returns, but it’s fun to try to figure out how a program like that might work.
January 1, 2010
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.
December 31, 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.
December 31, 2009
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.
December 26, 2009
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.
December 26, 2009
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).
December 25, 2009
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.
December 25, 2009
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.
December 21, 2009
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.
December 21, 2009
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.
December 18, 2009
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.
December 17, 2009
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.
December 14, 2009
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.
December 6, 2009
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.
December 6, 2009
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.”
December 2, 2009
I think Aaron Swartz’s explanation of how he hires programmers is pretty applicable to hiring anyone. An excerpt:
There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with.
I think what happens often (at least in the marketing industry) is that people move too far to “can you work with them” side and fail to pay enough attention to the other two buckets.
November 30, 2009
Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital hits the nail on the head with his latest post about the “viral strategy” of startups:
Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That’s why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.
A few points on this: First, I’d add that virality is also partly by chance. Second, it drives me crazy when I hear/read about entrepreneurs talking about the product as if it’s the only thing that matters. Sure it’s important, but if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear …
November 29, 2009
Today’s Learn Something Every Day intrigued me: “NASCAR driver, Tim Flock is the only driver in motor racing history to have to make a pit stop to remove a monkey from his car.”
The full story is over at Tim Flock’s official site. The monkey’s name was Jocko Flocko and actually drove with him for eight races as a publicity stunt. Flock explains the day he finally had to part ways with his monkey co-pilot:
Back then the cars had a trap door that we could pull open with a chain to check our tire wear. Well, during the Raleigh 300, Jocko got loose from his seat and stuck his head through the trap door, and he went berserk! Listen, it was hard enough to drive those heavy old cars back then under normal circumstances, but with a crazed monkey clawing you at the same time, it becomes nearly impossible! I had to come into the pits to put him out and ended up third. The pit stop cost me second place and a $600.00 difference in my paycheck. Jocko was retired immediately. I had to get that monkey off my back!
Awesome.
November 29, 2009
Just last night I was telling my mom how much I love Google Hot Trends. I get the hourly alerts via RSS and am amazed by the insight and grounding it gives me. It’s easy to fall into our world of nerds and forget there are millions of people watching Florida quarterback and wondering why he had Hebrews 12:1-2 painted on his eye black.
Anyway, Danah Boyd makes a similar point in her excellent essay Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media:
Ironically, the one place where I’m finding people are being forced to think outside their box is the Trending Topics on Twitter. Consider a topic that trended two weeks ago: #thingsdarkiessay. Started in South Africa, this topic is fundamentally about language and cultural diversity but, when read in a U.S.-context, it reads as fundamentally racist. Boy did this blow up, forcing a lot of folks to think about language and cultural differences. Why? Because Trending Topics brings a topic that gained traction in a segment of the network to broader awareness. Unfortunately, it’s hard to actually get meaningful dialogue going even if trending topics trigger reactions.
November 29, 2009
Snarkmarket links to a very interesting On Language column and addendum about camel case. In addition to the idea that camel case has been popularized by programming languages (which makes sense), the following insight into the role of spaces between words caught my eye:
In Ireland and England during the seventh and eighth centuries, local priests had so much trouble with Latin that spaces were added to their liturgical texts as a crutch. Clerics discovered that reading became more fluent for everyone, because the eye can recognize separated words as distinctive shapes. Monks were able to copy manuscripts in silence, in accordance with many of their vows, and privacy intensified the experience of devotional reading. The innovation flourished and by the 13th century was standard in Latin everywhere. Angels in manuscript illustrations used to speak into the ears of scribes; now they presented them with books to read for themselves. Clerics tackled more complex texts, in greater numbers, and Saenger argues that silent reading seeded the flowering of medieval theology known as scholasticism.
November 29, 2009
Russell Davies offers up an interesting bit of etymology (at least I think it would count as etymology):
Which reminded me of the origins of the word ‘cliche’ – in the days of movable type it meant a set of letters/words that were used together so frequently that the printer didn’t bother dismantling them. Which got me think about the cliches we’re building, and about one in particular – the screen.
I enjoyed that one. The rest of the post/presentation is worth reading as well.
November 28, 2009
I was listening to the radio in the car this afternoon and something struck me: Of the three songs I heard, two of them were in the new Guitar Hero. This isn’t overly surprising, as the game is full of some of the most popular songs of the last thirty years, but it got me thinking about all the people who will experience those songs for the first time as part of the game. In a way, they become new, leaving their original hair-band or whatever other context and just become Guitar Hero tracks.
Anyway, all of that is a long way to say Brian Eno’s comments on the death of uncool struck me as part of the same trend:
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
November 27, 2009
I just love this entry from Matt Jones about pareidolia, the phenomena that leads us to see faces in things. As he explains, it actually turns out that there is a reason for what happens, as we respond to faces more quickly than other images. Jones quotes a paper called Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects.:
The tendency to perceive faces in random patterns exhibiting configural properties of faces is an example of pareidolia. Perception of ‘real’ faces has been associated with a cortical response signal arising at approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset, but what happens when nonface objects are perceived as faces? Using magnetoencephalography, we found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoked an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas common objects did not evoke such activation. An earlier peak at 130 ms was also seen for images of real faces only. Our findings suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late reinterpretation cognitive phenomenon.
He then goes on to wonder how we can use this knowledge to help people comprehend data, showing some of the work they’re doing with the idea. Be sure to watch the Chernoff Schools sketch. As a side note, there is a lovely American Express commercial that taps into pareidolia.
November 23, 2009
Interesting article from Inside Higher Ed about how Sarah Palin is changing the way politics is done by manipulating the media in completely new ways:
I’m not sure what Sarah Palin’s favorite work of postmodern theory might be (all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction. Other political figures use the media as part of what JB calls “production.” That is, they generate signs and images meant to create an effect within politics. For the Baudrillardian “seducer,” by contrast, the power to create fascination is its own reward.
Watching Palin respond to questions about her book Going Rogue (or not respond to them, often enough) is, from this perspective, no laughing matter. She grows ever more comfortable talking about herself. If no more capable of simulating knowledge of public issues, she is getting her story straight, more or less. And this matters. For now she does not have to be accurate, just coherent. She is consolidating her presence, her “brand.” Teams of professional ideologists can feed Palin her lines later.
The article, which is roughly a book review for a collection of Palin-related essays called Going Rouge (which I just bought) is worth a read.
November 23, 2009
Doug Pfeffer, my supremely talented colleague at The Barbarian Group, has finally launched his newest creation, which I’ve been playing with for the last few months. It’s called Last Night’s Check-ins and it’s an elegantly simple idea/execution. Basically, it takes all your Foursquare check-ins from the evening before and emails them to you the next morning for annotation. You simply reply to the email with details below each stop and it stores them in diary form for you.
I think this is super smart for a few reasons: First off, it takes this data that is actually an incredible diary of your life and allows you to add additional metadata to it. Second, and maybe more importantly, it does so with an interface that allows you to sustain interaction. Everyone checks their email every day (or almost every day) and replying to an email couldn’t be easier. For years I’ve wondered why more people don’t use email for collecting structured data and I’m super excited that Doug made the jump.
Anyway, go sign up and start remembering what you were up to.
November 16, 2009
There is a certain beauty to the contradictory nature of sports analysis. Everyone is sure they’re right all the time. And thank goodness they are, if not what would they put on the radio during the day?
Anyhow, there’s a nice analysis of the analysis from last night’s game over at rc3.org. In case you missed it (like me), Bill Belichick decided to go for it on a fourth-and-two from the Patriots 28-yard-line with just over two minutes left in the game. They failed and the Colts scored and won the game 35 to 34. Belichick has been roundly criticized for the decision, which was clearly a gamble. However, as Advanced NFL Stats points out, the numbers work in favor of the decision:
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You’d have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats’ 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it’s pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.
November 16, 2009
Two articles worth highlighting from the Times this weekend. First, a look at cell phone pricing that’s surprisingly full of interesting points. For instance, when Sprint offered the Fair and Flexible plan in 2004 (“300 minutes for $35, and each additional block of 50 minutes for $2.50″) it would seem like the sort of thing otherwise overcharged mobile customers would jump on. But they didn’t … Because they didn’t like that their bill fluctuated greatly month to month. How crazy is that? Convenience, in this case, was likely worth $20 a month to folks (and calling it convenience is a stretch, after all, autopay is an option).
The second article was a look at Bloomberg (the company, not the dude). They’re especially interesting to me because they’re a media company who is booming while everyone else is struggling/dying. It speaks to something I think will be increasingly important in the media world in the coming years: Journalism as a non-core business. They didn’t buy BusinessWeek to make loads of cash off it (they operate their current magazine at a loss), rather they bought it to extend the brand so that they can build other services that people will actually pay for. Seems to be working so far (the strategy, not the BusinessWeek thing, which just happened).
November 16, 2009
File Under: Spammers are really smart (and funny).
So apparently in World of Warcraft you can’t spam people with commercial messages or you get kicked off. However, there is a lot of money in selling gold to players and there are a bunch of sites that competing to sell it to you. So their solution, as Seamus at Virtual Economics explains is to arrange a bunch of dead bodies in the game to spell out their URL:
Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you’ll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it’s quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere – to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars.
November 15, 2009
The always-wise Russell Davies hits the nail on the head with this one: “As a semi-professional prognosticator I’m always tempted by the rhetorical power of statements like The Internet Is Killing X. But, of course, it isn’t.”
We are all tempted to make statements like this (or at least I know I am). But they’re almost always complete oversimplification’s of what’s really going on, which tends to be that the internet is changing X, maybe to the point where it’s unrecognizable, but most certainly not dead. This also is part of a larger thought I’ve had lately, which is all about us saying things that are wrong because they’re easier to say than actually thinking. I don’t know what to call this behavior (other than lazy), but I feel it constantly. I feel like yesterday’s post about the “changing state of communication” was a perfect example. For all the lip-service we in the marketing industry give to the power of word-of-mouth, when push comes to shove we tend to suggest “blogger outreach” even though we collectively know that if not executed properly it’s a fairly useless endeavor. (Okay, this point might be a little different, but I think there is some connective string there.)
I for one have been struggling with this “internet killing” point with my thoughts around serendipity. The easy explanation is that the web is killing serendipity, pointing us to exactly what we want when we want it. But it’s certainly not that simple, as I run into more stuff that I wasn’t looking for than I could ever imagine without the help of the internet. I guess the problem is that “the internet is subtly changing X” doesn’t make for as good a title.
November 11, 2009
Maybe I’m late to this game, but in a post describing the design decisions behind the new retweet functionality, Evan Williams articulates the Twitter mission in a way I had never heard before:
This last point [the need to have structured data around retweets] is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter’s goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow your friends, organizations, public figures, or strangers you find interesting. … The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about–relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you’re most interested in–even if you don’t follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.
This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, and most obvious, it puts them in direct competition with Google’s stated mission of “organizing the world’s information.” Second, I’ve been fairly obsessed with the concept of discovery and agree that, at this point, Twitter is just about the best discovery engine (as opposed to search engine) that we’ve got. With that said, I have some serious worries about Twitter only showing the stuff I care about because it implies that it’s only going to show me that which I already care about, which to me kills much of the value of the serendipitous nature of Twitter.
November 11, 2009
George Packer has a good short essay where he tries to unpack people’s fascination with Mad Men. I’m not really a fan of the show (I watched the first five episodes or so and was too bored to continue), but I am always interested in the things other people find interesting and Packer does a nice job of offering an explanation:
“Mad Men” shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class American men were little kings–slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant, lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It’s all about to come undone–Peggy is the harbinger of the change–and soon give way to an age of confusion and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching “Mad Men” might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in. You didn’t have to spend your energy inventing a way through the bewildering maze of unfamiliar social relations. It is no longer our world, and a good thing, too–but beneath the makeup and hair, the costumes and masks, this period piece still means us.
Read the whole thing. It’s good (and include no spoilers).
November 10, 2009
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