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anonymous

A Problem Google Has Created for Itself - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274232

jobhacking

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • After Reader's demise, many people noted the danger of ever relying on a company's free offerings. When a company is charging money for a product -- as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync -- you understand its incentive for sticking with that product. The company itself might fail, but as long as it's in business it's unlikely just to get bored and walk away, as Google has from so many experiments. These include one called Google Notebook, which had some similarities to Keep, and which I also liked, and which Google abandoned recently. 
  • do I trust Google with Keep? No. The idea looks promising, and you can see how it could end up as an integral part of the Google Drive strategy. But you could also imagine that two or three years from now this will be one more "interesting" experiment Google has gotten tired of. 
  • Until I know a reason that it's in Google's long-term interest to keep Keep going, I'm not going to invest time in it or lodge info there.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Here's the problem: Google now has a clear enough track record of trying out, and then canceling, "interesting" new software that I have no idea how long Keep will be around. When Google launched its Google Health service five years ago, it had an allure like Keep's: here was the one place you could store your prescription info, test results, immunization records, and so on and know that you could get at them as time went on. That's how I used it -- until Google cancelled this "experiment" last year. Same with Google Reader, and all the other products in the Google Graveyard that Slate produced last week."
anonymous

Social Is Not A Destination - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...social-is-not-a-destination

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 13 - Cached
  • For Facebook, your social network sits on the Facebook site and most of the experience is consumed through the Facebook application; for Google+, social is about a type of glue that ties its services together across search, maps, photos, and more.
  • Google+ is now behind your email (it’s in Gmail), your chats (it powers Google hangouts), your calendar (in Google Calendar), your documents (it’s in Google Drive), your pictures (stealing a big functional element of Facebook by offering it in an integrated fashion with Android devices) and your videos (youTube channels are now managed via Google+); It’s there when you comment on a blogspot site or review a business or restaurant on Zagat and Google map.
  • Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Google+’s approach is much more boring but also much more resistant to long-term changes because it focuses on links between people instead of being a destination.
  • links are also more resilient than destinations: once a series of links has been established, it is harder to undo than trying to switch from one destination to another.
  • While companies like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo (through its more recent acquisitions, including Tumblr) have been busy building destination sites on which they can display advertising, Google has been using destinations as a driver for what advertising to display next.
  • This kind of inference based on previous patterns sits at the core of what Google+ is about and, interestingly, a Google alumni has founded a company that would fit nicely in that vision: Foursquare, with its recent switch to search seems to be the perfect database of location signals for Google to pick up.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 13
     
    "Google+ serves as glue instead of destination, which means that any comparison between Google+ and Facebook is similar to comparing people who love New York with the Empire State Building: One is a group of people, who can do different things based on some invisible association (love of New York) while the other is a destination where those people or other people can gather for a brief period of time before they move on to some other place."
anonymous

I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...merce-how-do-i-measure-success

analytics google metrics engagement

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - Cached
  • My recommendation: Measure the four metrics that are under the "Visitor Loyalty" button in Google Analytics (or in your favorite web analytics application). Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, Depth of Visit.
  • The goal is to use web analytics data to interpret success of a visit to your website.
  • There is one singular reason I loved 'em: they showed distribution and not simply averages for each of the metric!
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?
  • The number you are used to seeing is "average visits per visitor". That is usually one point something. It hides the truth.
  • For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?
  • Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…
  • Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……
  • As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.
  • Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.
  • But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……
  • Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.
  • 1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!
  • Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.
  • You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..
  • Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).
  • Recommendations for all of the above metrics:
  • Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.
  • Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time
  • Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?
  • Segmentation is key to insights that will drive action.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "A vast majority of discourse in the web analytics world is about orders and conversions and revenue. There is not enough of it about non-ecommerce websites, metrics and KPI's."  - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
anonymous

Google Nexus 5 In Review: 5 Ways To Extend Battery Life On The Android 4.4 KitKat Flagship - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/oid-44-kitkat-flagship-1479022

shared by anonymous on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • LG gave the Nexus 5 a 2,300 mAh battery, an increase of less than 10 percent over the Nexus 4. That has left some Nexus 5 owners complaining about middling to poor battery life. Luckily, there are several ways that you can enjoy the Android 4.4 KitKat release without worrying so much about battery life.
  • 1.) Lower the display brightness, turn off auto brightness
  • If you go into Settings and then navigate to Battery, Android 4.4 KitKat offers a list of apps and the percentage of battery that they use.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the single most important thing you can do to improve the battery life on your Nexus 5 is to lower the brightness.
  • However, those who are interested in a better automatic brightness management than offered by default on the Nexus 5 should check out Lux, a third-party app that is well-reviewed by users and professional reviewers.
  • 2.) Turn off Wi-Fi scanning, in addition to Wi-Fi
  • Nexus 5 Battery Tips: How to turn off "Scanning Always Available" in the Nexus 5 (or any Android 4.4 KitKat device) settings menu.  Thomas Halleck / International Business Times
  • 3.) Turn off GPS location settings and Bluetooth
  • Unless you are using your Nexus 5 to drive to somewhere unfamiliar, or are using Waze in the car to avoid traffic, there is no need to keep GPS turned on. It draws a lot of power and offers little for the Nexus 5 experience.
  • Unless you are in range of a Wi-Fi signal that you will use, make sure that Wi-Fi is turned off on your smartphone.
  • Google included a feature in Android 4.3 that allowed apps and Google Play services to determine a user’s location using Wi-Fi, even when the phone’s Wi-Fi is turned off.
  • Please note that on the Nexus 5, Google will scan your location for several services, especially with Google Now. With this option unchecked, you will save battery life, but you may also not be able to enjoy the Nexus 5 to its fullest potential, since Google Now is such a prominent feature, located one swipe to the left of the home screen.
  • 4.) Use a standard wallpaper
  • Animated wallpapers drain battery a lot more than a still image, so if you are looking for the greatest power performance on the Nexus 5, the Rocky Mountains are a better choice than live wallpapers like Sun Beam.
  • 5.) Keep apps up-to-date, but turn off automatic updates
  • Make sure you have the most up-to-date software, including any Nexus 5 firmware, as well as all of your apps through Google Play. Apps that include battery-draining bugs or are poorly optimized will drain your battery unnecessarily.
  • Super-secret Nexus 5 battery life tip: Turn off vibration in the notification settings. It takes more power for a phone to vibrate than it does for it to ring.
  • anonymous on 05 Feb 14
     
    "The Nexus 5 has the largest screen of any of Google's Nexus devices so far, a full HD 1080p screen with lots of new software features. Unfortunately, most of those new features come at a cost, as larger, higher-resolution displays drain more battery life than their smaller, duller siblings."
anonymous

Jeff Dean facts: How a Google programmer became the Chuck Norris of the Internet. - Sla... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ck_norris_of_the_internet.html

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, in the shadows of these giants—all of whom have graduated from day-to-day gruntwork—are legions of faceless developers who tap away at keyboards every day to build the products and systems we all use.
  • In the tech world, more so than in most other industries, those employees are far from interchangeable. A great accountant might save you 5 percent on your taxes. A great baseball player will reach base just a bit more often than a mediocre baseball player. But a great software developer can do in a week what might take months for a team of 10 lesser developers—the difference is exponential rather than marginal.
  • As a high schooler, he wrote software for analyzing vast sets of epidemiological data that he says was “26 times faster” than what professionals were using at the time. The system, called Epi Info, has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and translated into 13 languages.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Google’s founding ideas came from Page and Brin, world-class developers in their own right. In the late 1990s they built PageRank, an algorithm for returning the most relevant results to a given search query. The focus on relevance put Google on a course to surpass Yahoo, AltaVista, and the day’s other leading search engines. But as the upstart grew in popularity, it faced a tremendous computing challenge. “We couldn’t deploy machines fast enough” to keep up with demand, Dean recalls.
  • Ghemawat helped lead a team that built the Google File System, which allowed for huge files to be efficiently distributed across thousands of cheap servers. Then Dean and Ghemawat developed a programming tool called MapReduce that allowed developers to efficiently process gargantuan data sets with those machines working in parallel.
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 13
     
    "The programs that Dean was instrumental in building-MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner-are not the ones most Google users associate with the company. But they're the kind that made Google-and, consequently, much of the modern Web as we know it-possible. And the projects he's working on now have the potential to revolutionize information technology once again."
anonymous

On SXSW 2013: Vanishing Interfaces, Wearable Tech, & AI's - 0 views

ragoodwin.blogspot.com/...2013-vanishing-interfaces.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The last year has presented us with the vanguard of the Wearable Tech revolution.  Faced with products coming out of Kickstarter and perhaps most prominently, the Google Glass project, the equation is about to become very complex.
  • Krishna spoke specifically to the idea that we need to eliminate as many interfaces as we can in clever ways to enhance the User Experience.  The AI panel emphasized the changes coming to the User Experience as predicted by products like Siri and Google Now.  Together, they paint a picture of how building with an eye to streamlining interfaces with AI modules will build a new future for us - a future that is going to be increasingly filled with various devices.
  • what functions do your products have that best fit on those interfaces?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The vanguard is already here in Siri and Google Now.  Each of these represents a type of agent that knows a few things about us.  Google Now will tell you, without your asking, the time it takes to get home from work.  Siri and Google Now both will take your voice input and perform actions that would normally be fairly complicated through a series of interfaces.
  • Not all of us have access to complex and robust voice recognition libraries and a network of camera-equipped cars.  Many of us are, however, in a position to collect or analyze large sets of data.
  • App collects data, sends output to wearable tech.
  • an interface can still exist behind this.  You can open the app and adjust parameters or inputs, but these interfaces become supporting elements, not the primary interface element.  Data that's collected becomes the primary input, done automatically.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Less than six years ago the Apple iPhone blew our minds with a new way to think of something we thought we knew really well:  the cellphone.  A couple years later, tablets crashed the party, giving us a big, rich interface to browse and connect with while leaned back in our recliners.  Technologists like myself have been scrambling all the while to find the best methods to utilize the capabilities of these new interfaces ever since."
anonymous

What I Think About Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

whatever.scalzi.com/...t-i-think-about-atlas-shrugged

objectivism

shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.
  • Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.
  • In a similiar vein Rand seemed to think that all rational thought led to the same conclusion. This is on its face false and simplistic. Scientists can looks at the same data results and draw different conclusions. How do they resolve this difference? They do further experiments, they challenge currently held assumptions that were themselves the result of a rational thought process. Rationality and empiricism inherantly encourage doubt and self examination. I didn’t see any of this in the “converted” Atlases. Once Galt had his claws (or fangs if you prefer) in them they were zombiefied. No an objection raised to the deaths of millions (that could have been prevented), not a doubt uttered as to their own righteousness, not a single second thought about what they were doing. There’s a term for that: cult. We in the real world tend to frown upon such organizations but Rand holds them up of having discovered the one eternal Truth. As Patton once said, “If everyone is thinking alike than no one is thinking.”
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "That said, it's a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn - if you're an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by "going Galt" has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I'll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I'll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can't figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care." By John Scalzi at Whatever on October 5, 2010.
anonymous

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - 2 views

www.salon.com/...net_destroyed_the_middle_class

technology

shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
  • This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways.
  • Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
  • But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”
  • One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.
  • And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.
  • So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.
  • Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
  • And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.
  • So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.
  • the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.
  • The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.
  • If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.
  • And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.
  • So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?
  • And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I think that's a worthy question considering the high-speed with which we adopt every possible technology; to hell with foresight.
  • Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.
  • I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
  • But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.
  • And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Ha ha. Ayn Rand people don't have to admit to *anything,* trust me, dude.
  • It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.
  • But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      This makes me curious. Is he arguing that there are fewer *nodes* because the information access closes them?
  • You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      My understanding was that the U.S. heads of business got the nod to go ahead and start manufacturing things *other* than weapons, because our industrial capabilities weren't anhialated (sp?) relative to so many others.
  • There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
  • In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
  • Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
  • I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.
  • And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.
  • The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.
  • And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Quite true. She's obviously not rolling in solid gold cadillacs.
  • But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.
  • The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.
  • I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.
  • The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
  • We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
  • The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
  • I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.
  • It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
  • You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
  • I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
  • The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
  • I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
  • All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
  • Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Group House. HAH!
  • So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.
  • And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.
  • I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      See, now I like this guy. This is like the political equivalent of aiming for the realist view in geopolitics. We separate what is likely from what is unlikely and aim not for "the best" situation, but a situation where the worst aspects have been mitigated. It's backwards thinking that both parties would have a hard time integrating into their (ughhh) brand.
  • Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?
  • Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
  • I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
  • Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Again, a take I rarely encounter.
  • I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I have had this very thing happen to. I didn't get to have my moment of discovery. I think Google Glass is going to fix that. Hah. :)
  • And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
  • I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
  • So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
  • Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth -- even democracy"
anonymous

We Are All Hayekians Now: The Internet Generation and Knowledge Problems - 1 views

www.petervv.com/...we-are-all-hayekians-now

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Primarily in his The Use of Knowledge in Society but also in his other contributions to the socialist calculation debate, Hayek crafted a brilliant statement of a perennial problem.
  • In the world of human endeavor, we have two types of problems: economic and technological.
  • Technological problems involve effectively allocating given resources to accomplish a single valuable goal.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The choice to build the bridge is a choice between this bridge or that skyscraper as well as any other alternative use of those resources. Each alternative use would have different benefits (and unseen costs).
  • This is not a mere question of engineering the strongest or even the most cost-effective structure to get across the Hudson, this is a question of what is the strongest or most cost-effective possible future version of New York City.
  • “We are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff.”
  • But, of course, Google survived, prospered, and continues towards its apparent goal of eating the entire internet (while also making cars drive themselves, putting cameras on everyone’s heads, and generally making Steve Ballmer very very angry). So, why did Google win? The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, in Hayek’s theory.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 13
       
      Very embarassing videos.
  • “Our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.” Talk about anemic goals, come on Google, show some ambition!
  • So, is this one of Hayek’s technical problems or is this an economic one?
  • Our gut might first tell us that it is technical.
  • Sure, all this data is now hanging out in one place for free, but to make a useful index you need to determine how much people value different data. We need data about the data.
  • In Soviet Russia, failed attempts at arranging resources destroyed the information about the resources. The free market is the best way to figure out how individual people value individual resources. When left to trade voluntarily, people reveal their preferences with their willingness to pay. By arranging resources through coercion you’ve blinded yourself to the emergent value of the resources because you’ve forbidden voluntary arrangement in the economy.
  • This is different on the internet.
  • The data resources are not rivalrous
  • Search used to be really bad. Why? Because search companies were using either (a) content-producer willingness to pay for indexing, (b) mere keyword search or (c) some combination of editorial centralized decision-making to organize lists of sites.
  • These methods only work if you think that the best site about ducks is either (a) the site that has the most money to pay Altavista for prime “duck” listing, (b) the site that has the most “ducks” in its text, or (c) the site that was most appealing to your employees tasked with finding duck sites.
  • If 999 other websites linked to one website about ducks, you can bet that most people think that this site is better at explaining ducks than a site with only one link to it (even if that link was horse-sized).
  • So Google uses the decentralized Hayekian knowledge of the masses to function. Why does this mean we’re all Hayekians?
  • All of the questions of organizing activity on the internet are solved (when they are, in fact, solved successfully) using Hayekian decentralized knowledge.
  • Amazon customer reviews are how we find good products. Ebay feedback is how we find good individual sellers. And, moreover, whole brick and mortar services are moving to a crowd-sourced model, with sites like AirBnB for lodging and RelayRides for car rental.
  • the giant firms of tomorrow will be those that empower people to freely share their knowledge and resources in a vibrant marketplace.
  • Today, the central challenge for a firm is not to develop careful internal management but rather the non-trivial task of building marketplaces and forums to encourage decentralized knowledge production and cooperation.
  • Our generation already understands this on a gut level. We Google everything.  We defend freedom on the internet as if it was our own personal real-world liberty at stake. We mock the antiquated central planners of the early web, looking at you AOL, Prodigy, for their ineffectual obviousness and denial of crowd-sourced knowledge.
  • We all know where the best economic knowledge lies, in the many and never the few.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "We are all Hayekians now. Specifically, the "we all" is not quite everyone. The "all" to which I'm referring is people of the internet-people who've grown up with the net and use it for a majority of their day-to-day activities. And, the "Hayekian" to which I'm referring is not his theories on capital, or the rule of law, but, specifically his vision of knowledge."
anonymous

Eight Silly Data Things Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired. - 1 views

www.kaushik.net/...data-strategy-metrics-mistakes

analytics google analytics marketing

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • It turns out that Marketers, especially Digital Marketers, make really silly mistakes when it comes to data. Big data. Small data. Any data.
  • two common themes
  • 1. Some absolutely did not use data to do their digital jobs.
  • ...74 more annotations...
  • 2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.
  • Silly not in their eyes, silly in my eyes.
  • A silly metric, I better define it :), is one that distracts you for focusing on business investments that lead to bottom-line impact.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      Within the context of my current project, the bottom-line impact would be increased engagement (in the form of donations, clinical study participation, and blood/fluid donation to scientific research).
  • Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • 1. Real-time data is life changing.
  • A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is some REALLY FUNNY SHIT to me. But I'm a nerd.
  • I want you to say: "I don't want real-time data, I want right-time data. Let's understand the speed of decision making in our company. If we make real-time decisions, let's get real time data. If we make decisions over two days, let's go with that data cycle. If it take ten days to make a decision to change bids on our PPC campaigns, let's go with that data cycle." Right-time.
  • Real-time data is very expensive.
  • It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective
  • even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      I get this completely. We get hung up on the tactical and lose sight of the strategic.
  • So shoot for right-time data.
  • That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.
  • (And remember even the most idiotic system in the world now gives you data that is a couple hours old with zero extra investment from you. So when you say real time you are really saying "Nope, two hours is not enough for me!").
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      THIS is probably the best argument for our using Google Analytics and Google Search to collect data instead of paying large costs to firms that will offer questionable results.
  • That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).
  • The phrase "real-time data analysis" is an oxymoron.
  • 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate.
  • The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.
  • Bounce rate is really useful for finding things you suck at.
  • Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.
  • Stop obsessing about bounce rate.
  • From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.
  • Focus on the actual game. Focus on incredible behavior metrics like Pages/Visit, focus on the Visitor Flow report, obsess about Checkout Abandonment Rate, make love to Average Order Size.
  • 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness.
  • it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.
  • many spectacular reasons
  • Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.
  • Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.
  • As no less than three comments mention below, Innocent is 90% owned by Coca Cola. Fooled me!
  • In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.
  • 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success.
  • Not going to happen.
  • as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.
  • When I search for "avinash" on Google I might rank #1 in the search results because I'm logged into my Google account, the engine has my search history, my computer IP address, it also has searches by others in my vicinity, local stories right now, and so many other signals. But when you search for "avinash" your first search result might be a unicorn. Because the search engine has determined that the perfect search result for you for the keyword avinash is a unicorn.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is crucial to understand. I will be sharing this, at length, with my boss. :)
  • Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.
  • Then let's not forget that proportionaly there are very few head searches, your long tail searches will be huge.
  • Oh and remember that no one types a word or two, people use long phrases.
  • There are a ton more reasons obsessing about the rank of a handful of words on the search engine results page (SERP) is a very poor decision.
  • So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.
  • But don't make it your KPI.
  • For purely SEO, you can use Crawl Rate/Depth, Inbound Links (just good ones) and growth (or lack there of) in your target key phrases as decent starting points.
  • You can graduate to looking at search traffic by site content or types of content you have (it's a great signal your SEO is working).
  • Measuring Visits and Conversions in aggregate first and segmented by keywords (or even key word clusters) will get you on the path to showing real impact.
  • That gives you short term acquisition quality, you can then move to long term quality by focusing on metrics like lifetime value.
  • 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!!
  • You should judge the success of that showing up by measure if you made money! Did you earn any profit?
  • Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.
  • 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more!
  • Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.
  • If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views
  • And it will probably get you transient traffic.
  • And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?
  • If you are in the content only business (say my beloved New York Times) a better metric to focus on is Visitor Loyalty
  • If your are in the lead generation business and do the "OMG let's publish a infographic on dancing monkey tricks which will get us a billion page views, even though we have nothing to do with dancing or monkeys or tricks" thing, measure success on the number of leads received and not how "viral" the infographic went and how many reshares it got on Twitter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      In other words, use that odd-one-off to redirect attention to the source of that one-off. I'll have to ponder that given our different KPI needs (nonprofit, we don't sell anything).
  • Don't obsess about page views.
  • Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.
  • 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat!
  • My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.
  • Buy engagement. Define what it means first of course .
  • If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.
  • Now if you are a newbie, measure bounce rate. If you have a tiny amount of experience measure Visit Duration. If you are a pro, measure Revenue. If you are an Analysis Ninja, measure Profit.
  • Impressions suck. Profit rocks.
  • If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.
  • You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.
  • But if you won't do the experiment and you use the # of impressions as a measure of success
  • 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.
  • Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.
  • We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.
  • Did you know 50% of of TV viewership is on networks that each have <1% share? Per industry.bnet.com. I dare you to imagine how difficult it is to measure who they are, and how to target them to pimp your shampoo, car, cement.
  • Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.
  • if you have advertising money to spend, first spend it all on advertising that provides you intent data.
  • Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that
  • The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.
  • There is a lot of intent data on the web. That is our key strength.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    This is a really great read by Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor. Volunmuous highlights follow.
anonymous

Klip.me - Google Reader to Kindle - 6 views

www.klip.me/welcome

shared by anonymous on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • anonymous on 13 Oct 12
     
    "It allows you to send subscriptions that in specific folder of Google Reader Periodical format, include article index"
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Erik Hanson on 15 Oct 12
     
    Blowing my mind here. I'll have to check up on this.
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 12
     
    I'm going nuts trying to figure out how to make a Kindle Paperwhite happen. It gets so much right and it's focuse - like a laser - on what I want: reading and writing and notetaking. I spent (wasted) most of this past weekend trying to get my netbook to become somewhat useful in this regard. What junk. I actually have deep regrets about a seven-hour hole of failure yesterday as I tried all these linux builds that are so desperate for the cloud that you cant' make use of them offline. So that leaves me with... Windows: which is the whole thing I left because it was too slow on the netbook. But it's the best option given how much offline stuff I need to do. Now, the KINDLE, on the other hand... the thing is perfect. Sooo many ways to get data onto it now.
  • Erik Hanson on 15 Oct 12
     
    A lot of the stuff you shared won't work for me, since I'm on the Kindle App mostly (and a Kindle 1). The app on iOS is good, but I don't have a point of comparison against more recent Kindles.
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 12
     
    Totally. The app version (I have it on Android) doesn't begin to cut it. Which is funny, to me, because you'd think the straight-up software version of something would be eaiser... but I'm clueless. In the communications department, we have a very strong need to have a "book" that contains all the relevant information about X right at hand. The scientists could benefit from this, as well, since they're printing 20 reams of paper's worth of stuff they barely read, probably weekly (and that's conservative). I just see the thing on the cusp of becoming a ubiquitous tool. I know that tablets are awesome, but I'm coming at this from a single (or few) purpose device. All that happens when we roll out tablets for people is they start playing Angry Birds.
  • Erik Hanson on 15 Oct 12
     
    I vote for online knowledge sites with dynamic interfaces.
anonymous

T-Mobile, Wireless Carriers, and the Way to Fight Oligopolies - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...gopoly-business-practices.html

shared by anonymous on 16 Apr 13 - Cached
  • T-Mobile recently broke with longstanding industry norms and abandoned termination fees, sneaky overage charges, and other unfriendly practices.
  • Although T-Mobile’s decision is welcome news for consumers, it doesn’t change the fact that the old extortions remained in place for about fifteen years, and that they remain in place for the vast majority of Americans still trapped in contracts with Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
  • If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established—just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is “competitive” and everything is fine.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation’s oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition.
  • Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.
  • The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries.
  • With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies.
  • Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust.
  • In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy.
  • the United States has nowadays nearly abandoned scrutiny of oligopoly behavior, leaving consumers undefended. That’s a problem, because oligopolies do an awful lot that’s troubling.
  • Consider “parallel exclusion,”
  • efforts by an entire industry to keep out would-be newcomers, a pervasive problem.
  • Over the eighties and nineties, despite “deregulation,” the established airlines like American and United managed to keep their upstart competitors out of important business routes by collectively controlling the “slots” at New York, Chicago, and Washington airports.
  • Visa and MasterCard spent the nineties trying to stop American Express from getting into the credit-card industry, by creating parallel policies (“exclusionary rules”) and blacklisting any bank that might dare deal with AmEx. It was only thanks to the happenstance that both put their exclusions in writing that the Justice Department was able to do anything about the problem
  • Here’s a simple proposal: when members of a concentrated industry act in parallel, their conduct should be treated like that of a hypothetical monopoly.
  • Meanwhile, the idea that an industry is nominally “competitive” should not provide excessive protection from regulatory oversight.
  • Consider, again, the wireless carriers. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to insure that the carriers, who are leaseholders on public spectrum, use that resource to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      I will continue to raise my hand at this: corporations were originally 'envisioned' (for whatever little worth that is) as protectors of public trust. THAT'S WHAT THEY GOT IN EXCHANGE FOR LEVERAGE FAR OUTSIDE WHAT NON-CORPORATE STRUCTURES COULD GET. That was the price - and the point.
  • , to quote T-Mobile, “[t]his is an industry filled with ridiculously confusing contracts, limits on how much data you can use or when you can upgrade, and monthly bills that make little sense.”
  • The F.C.C. could have done something about this years ago; the fact that it took a member of the industry to call out more than a decade’s abuse of consumers amounts to a serious failure on the part of the F.C.C.
  • Exploitation of concentrated private power is not a problem that will ever go away. In the United States, it has been a concern since the framing: the original Tea Party was actually a protest against a state-sponsored tea monopoly.
  • it’s important not to become fixated on form, but to attend to the realities that face consumers and citizens.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      Dumbed down: If the problem you have with a bunch of things, it's no different than if that bunch was one thing. The effect is the same.
  • anonymous on 16 Apr 13
     
    "If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established-just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is "competitive" and everything is fine. To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation's oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition."
anonymous

Please Take Out Your Cell Phones | CIRTL Network - 0 views

www.cirtl.net/7723

technology

shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 13 - Cached
  • I have a theory about digitial distractions, a theory that's supported by anecdotes from the mobile learning pioneers at Abilene Christian University and by data from CU-Boulder grad student Bethany Wilcox. My theory is that if all students are expected to do with their mobile devices during class is take notes, then they'll distract themselves with Facebook et al. because notetaking doesn't keep their minds busy enough.
  • Good notetaking is hard work. Listening to a presentation, making sense of the ideas, and recording those ideas in writing in ways that allow one to revisit them later take a lot of brain power.
  • This kind of notetaking doesn't take 100% of a student's mental energy. As a result, they have some spare cycles available for digital distractions.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • If my theory is true, then we can minimize digital distractions by giving our students more to think about and do during class.
  • How might we do that?
  • The term "digital ink" usually refers to the ability to draw using a digital device, typically with a stylus. If I could pass out stylus-equipped iPads to all my students, that would be great. Since I can't, I have students participate in "digital ink" activities on the cheap.
  • On a couple of occasions, I've sent my students a link to a Google Doc spreadsheet and asked them to contribute to it during class.
  • In my cryptography class the other year, I learned how to pipe the contents of a properly formatted Google Doc spreadsheet into an interactive, online timeline.
  • Crowdsourcing is a nice framework for thinking about the use of mobile devices in the classroom.
  • Again I asked students to work in groups, this time to identify arguments for or against various points of view in this debate.
  • I'm a big fan of teaching with clickers. (I did happen to write the book on this topic.) When I teach a course, I ask my students to purchase clickers because I know I'll use them regularly throughout the course.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 13
     
    "When I talk with most instructors about cell phones or laptops in the classroom, I hear great concern about digital distractions. If you let students use mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, or laptops, they'll surely start checking Facebook, watching ESPN, or shopping for shoes. (I don't know what's up, but when this issue gets addressed in the media, shoe shopping is ALWAYS mentioned.)"
anonymous

The Seen, the Unseen, War, and Peace - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...the_seen_the_un.html

criticalthinking geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 10 - Cached
  • If people judged war purely on the basis of its obvious, immediate consequences, then, pacifism would be almost universal.
  • To sell war, you've got to convince people that its non-obvious, distant consequences are positively fantastic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      This is where the fuzzy-promises of war fit into things. There may very well be a geopolitical rationale behind it (good or bad, right or wrong), but that is not how it is sold to the public. As irritating as that makes me, I believe that this citizenry lacks the analytical thinking - especially regarding economics and geopolitics - required to evaluate it on its merits. And then, as I think further, that sort of person is lible to decline engagement if it looks like a minor loss of "empire" could avoid those horrible examples of war's effect.
  • My best explanation is that Bastiat's seen/unseen fallacy is not a general psychological tendency.  Instead, it's an expression of anti-market bias: Since people dislike markets, they're quick to dismiss claims about their hidden benefits. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      As of this writing, I don't quite understand this.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the unseen benefits of war, there's actually a perfect storm of irrationality.
  • Not only do people like government, the institution responsible for running the war.  Support for war also neatly coheres with the public's anti-foreign bias.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      But this "Us Vs. Them" mentality continues to erode in the slow moving churning of years. To half remember a TED lecture I watched - We've come a long way from thinking the people in the next village aren't human - but there's still so very much to go.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 10
     
    By Bryan Caplan at EconLog (Library of Economics and Liberty) on June 21, 2010. Thanks to David Gottlieb for the find: http://www.google.com/buzz/dmgottlieb/PBNvVHN9CDr/The-Seen-the-Unseen-War-and-Peace-EconLog-Library
anonymous

The Stress of a Busy Environment Helps Mice Beat Back Cancer - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...nt-helps-mice-beat-back-cancer

layscience cancer

shared by anonymous on 09 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Whereas most people live in fairly safe environments, with plenty of food and some degree of social interaction, “our data suggests that we shouldn’t just be avoiding stress, we should be living more socially and physically challenging lives,” During says [Scientific American].
  • Mice were then injected with tumor cells, which led to malignancies in all of the control animals within 15 days… The rate of tumor formation in animals living in the enriched environment was significantly delayed, and 15 percent had not developed tumors after nearly three weeks; when tumors were visible, they were 43 percent smaller than the lesions on control animals
  • anonymous on 09 Jul 10
     
    'Whereas most people live in fairly safe environments, with plenty of food and some degree of social interaction, "our data suggests that we shouldn't just be avoiding stress, we should be living more socially and physically challenging lives," During says.' By Andrew Moseman at 80beats (Discover Magazine) on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

Wikileaks Iraq war logs: every death mapped - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...wikileaks-iraq-deaths-map

war military visualization

shared by anonymous on 23 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Oct 10
     
    "The Wikileaks Iraq war logs provide us with a unique picture of every death in Iraq. These are those events mapped using Google Fusion tables" By Simon Rogers at The Guardian on October 23, 2010.
anonymous

The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A 'Big Tent' Can Be Too Big - 0 views

blog.okcupid.com

shared by anonymous on 30 Mar 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Mar 10
     
    From OkTrends. A great article (referenced by Dave Gottlieb) and pointed to from within this Buzz entry: http://www.google.com/buzz/111803955882817854729/QB9Mdp8jY6j/Partisan-Bipartisan-Crooked-Timber
anonymous

The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A 'Big Tent' Can Be Too Big - 0 views

blog.okcupid.com/...-how-a-big-tent-can-be-too-big

partisan politics perspective

shared by anonymous on 30 Mar 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Mar 10
     
    From OkTrends. A great article (referenced by Dave Gottlieb) and pointed to from within this Buzz entry: http://www.google.com/buzz/111803955882817854729/QB9Mdp8jY6j/Partisan-Bipartisan-Crooked-Timber
anonymous

Readefine - 1 views

readefine.anirudhsasikumar.net

tools admin

shared by anonymous on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Jul 11
     
    "Readefine Desktop beautifies Google Reader articles, RSS, plain text and HTML for easy reading. View multiple articles in a fluid, magazine style layout or navigate one article at a time in a book like multi-column layout. Tweak settings like font size, justification, column width, etc. for that perfect look." This is a stunningly pretty way to use Reader - or any other written thing on the web.
anonymous

Why Office 365 and Office 2013 may not be right for you - 1 views

www.pcworld.com/...-may-not-be-right-for-you.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Unlike Office 2010, Office 2013 does not work with Windows XP or Windows Vista. Yet the latest data from NetApplications shows that roughly 45 percent of all Internet users still rock those two aging operating systems.
  • One of the big draws of an Office 365 subscription is Office on Demand, a full-fledged, Internet-streamed version of the productivity suite that Microsoft calls "Your Office away from home."
  • And it really, truly is—if the host computer meets the suite's fairly stringent requirements.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Sync is Google's implementation of Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol. Without it, you can't natively sync your Google Calendar or Contacts to the Outlook 2013 mail client
  • Office 365 Home Premium sounds like a killer deal for SMBs.
  • The licenses for Office 365 Home Premium and Office 2013 Home & Student prohibit using the software for commercial purposes.
  • Don't despair, though: Microsoft plans to launch Office 365 Small Business Premium on February 27, at a cost of $150 per user per year.
  • between Skype, Office on Demand, and SkyDrive storage enabled by default, Office 365 definitely has its head in the cloud—but its feet are firmly planted on the desktop.
  • anonymous on 24 Apr 13
     
    "The next generation of Office is here, and while it's not necessarily an essential upgrade for Office 2010 users, it's easily the best Office suite to date. Editing complicated financial spreadsheets has never been so semi-seamless! That said, with this particular $100-plus investment, you'll want to look before you leap. Whether you're opting for a straightforward Office 2013 installation or the multi-PC, cloud-connected ubiquity of an Office 365 subscription, there are four potentially crippling gotchas to consider before you plunk down your hard-earned cash. I've also identified a supposed gotcha that you can actually ignore entirely."
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