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U.S. Restraint in the Syrian Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...us-restraint-syrian-crisis geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 03 May 13 - Cached
  • U.S. President Barack Obama could be forced to find a way to intervene without putting troops on the ground
  • If this proves to be the case, Obama has three broad options to address the situation in Syria.
  • Obama's three options would not necessarily solve the chemical weapons problem but could demonstrate that the United States is taking some form of action in response to the growing Syrian crisis, albeit with significant associated risk.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The first and most direct form of limited intervention is the establishment of a no-fly zone.
  • this could complicate the transfer of power, which would be affected by a lack of unity among the rebels. It could also lead extremist elements of each major sect to retreat to territorial enclaves and would likely lead civil war to engulf the northern Levant.
  • the United States would likely need to position at least one fleet aircraft carrier in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility in order to support the need for constant aircraft in the air space.
  • Obama's second option is some form of targeted strike campaign utilizing aircraft and cruise missiles.
  • Such a campaign would be reminiscent of Operation Desert Fox (the bombing of Iraq in 1998) and would be designed to send a clear message to Syria without exposing U.S. forces to a sustained operation like a no-fly zone would.
  • Another strategy would be to target the chemical weapons in an oblique manner by focusing on potential delivery systems, such as Scuds and artillery batteries, but this, too, could not be done comprehensively.
  • The main constraints of this option are that the plan still requires direct involvement and has the potential for mission creep, while any action that influences the direction of this fight could have disastrous consequences.
  • The third option, and according to recent reports the one receiving the most consideration from the Obama administration, is direct lethal aid to the rebels.
  • The plan, however, also begs the question of whether rebels can really be vetted, armed and shaped in a way that will achieve a desirable outcome in Syria after the regime collapses.
  • The Syrian civil war is complicated and offers no easy solution to the United States. Currently, the situation is being managed as indirectly as possible, but this strategy might become untenable for Obama.
  • As the war progresses, there are real reasons for U.S. restraint, but the aforementioned actions cover the basic spectrum that Obama is examining as pressure on the United States increases.
  • anonymous on 03 May 13
     
    "The United States has reasons to exercise restraint as the war in Syria progresses, but Washington is facing domestic and international pressure to get involved in the conflict."
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The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...uban-spy-network-us-government cuban spy network
shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004.
  • Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States.
  • Though the Velazquez indictment is several years old, it provides a detailed and fascinating account of Cuban espionage activity inside the United States. It also raises some significant implications about the daunting challenges facing American counterintelligence agencies.
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  • The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.
  • During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.
  • The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people.
  • The friend was an intelligence officer assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations. The women again traveled to New York together in early 1985 and met the Cuban intelligence officer a second time. He arranged for the two women to secretly travel together to Cuba via Spain.
  • In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.
  • Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001.
  • Montes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage charges in March 2002 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.
  • The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States.
  • With Velazquez at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Myers in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Cubans had incredible coverage of the American government's foreign policy and intelligence community. Even after Montes was arrested and Velazquez fled to Sweden, Myers remained at the State Department until his retirement in 2007.
  • The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence.
  • The FBI is probably still looking for potential agents who Myers could have spotted for recruitment when they studied there from 2007 to 2009.
  • MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego.
  • Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology.
  • In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results.
  • It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   
  • Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup.
  • The only reason she was discovered is because of Montes' arrest and confession, which uncovered her activities.
  • This means that her espionage tradecraft was solid for the nearly 18 years that she worked as a Cuban agent within the U.S. government. Furthermore, the background investigations conducted for the security clearances she held with the Department of Transportation and the Agency for International Development did not pick up on her anti-American sentiments -- even the "full field" investigation that would have been conducted prior to her being granted a Top Secret clearance.  
  • It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate.
  • these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline.
  • In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.
  • Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible.
  • Background investigations have become perfunctory bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch a spy who does not want to be caught.  
  • the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.
  • If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "On April 25, the U.S. government announced that it was unsealing an indictment charging Marta Rita Velazquez with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004. Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States. She and her husband also lived in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, so the country was familiar to them."
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How can we boost distributed solar and save utilities at the same time? - 0 views

grist.org/...ave-utilities-at-the-same-time
shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • On one hand, more distributed renewable energy is a good thing. It reduces carbon emissions, increases resilience, stimulates the growth of new industries with new jobs, and gives Americans a taste of energy democracy.
  • On the other hand, it just won’t do to have utilities view the spread of rooftop solar PV as an existential threat. Whatever you think of them, utilities still have tons of political power. If they want to slow the spread of distributed energy, they can. A lot.
  • the utilities’ primary objective, the impetus behind the recent report from their trade group, Edison Electric Institute, is to protect their business model and their profits.
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  •  it’s not clear why protecting utility shareholders ought to outrank other social goals. EEI’s recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.
  • As solar customers pay less to the utility, they contribute less to the maintenance of the electric grid and other utility “fixed” assets. The utility’s fixed costs (as opposed to the variable costs of fuel and electricity) must be recovered from the other ratepayers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 May 13
       
      It's so funny to think that solar was written off by so many, and now it's going to morph from joke to threat.
  • This is always the rap on solar PV programs from critics: They amount to forcing poor ratepayers to subsidize the green indulgences of the more well-to-do.
  • In some ways, EEI’s discussion reflects utilities’ instinctive hostility toward distributed energy. It makes a great deal of the costs of incorporating rooftop solar PV into the system, but says little about the benefits.
  • And there are benefits. In January, energy analysts at Crossborder Energy did a careful study [PDF] of California’s net-metering policy, tallying up costs and benefits.
  • (The study was commissioned by the Vote Solar Initiative.) The costs are those described above — all utility customers pay for credits to solar customers and for the metering and billing necessary to integrate them in the grid.
  • But as utilities get power from solar, they don’t have to get it elsewhere. There are “avoided costs,” which benefit all ratepayers, not just the solar few. Here are the benefits Crossborder considered (and the California PUC has considered in rate cases): • Avoided energy costs • Avoided capacity costs for generation • Reduced costs for ancillary services • Lower line losses on the transmission and distribution system (T&D) • Reduced investments in T&D facilities • Lower costs for the utility’s purchase of other renewable generation
  • Now, obviously this doesn’t mean distributed solar always and everywhere lowers costs for non-solar utility customers. But it does suggest that utilities shouldn’t assume the inverse either.
  • Midwest Energy News (which you should be reading) did a great piece on this subject recently. I thought this bit captured it well: “This is exactly the same as when a private company, an electric utility, for example, is approved by its regulator to build a conventional power plant ‘in the public interest’,” says [renewable energy analyst Paul] Gipe. The costs and benefits are studied, and if regulators think the plant is in the public’s interest, they will approve it even if it results in new costs for customers.
  • However, the prospect of a bunch of utilities going bankrupt isn’t exactly attractive. So what does EEI think it needs for utilities to avoid being swept away?
  • Not surprisingly, the short-term recommendations mostly amount to making rooftop solar customers pay more.
  • First, EEI wants all power bills to include a flat charge for fixed costs, which would apply to all grid-connected customers.
  • Second, they want solar customers charged for the services the grid provides them: “off-peak service, back-up interruptible service, and the pathway to sell [distributed energy resources] to the utility or other energy supply providers.”
  • And third, it wants net-metering programs revised to pay solar customers only the going market rate, not some fancy subsidized rate.
  • All these measures would have the same effect: reduce the economic incentives for rooftop solar and thus slow its adoption.
  • the utilities cannot be locked into a death spiral this far in advance. It’s not healthy for them to be in a pitched battle with their customers and the planet. It’s politically untenable.
  • On energy efficiency, which poses many of the same threats to utilities, the conflict has been somewhat papered over by “decoupling,” whereby a utility’s profits are disassociated from its sales of energy.
  • But decoupling has always struck me as a classic kludge. It amounts to forcing utilities to slowly dig their own graves, strand their own assets.
  • They’ll do it if forced by law, but they won’t do it enthusiastically. They won’t innovate. They’ll do what they have to and no more.
  • What’s needed, then, is something deeper, a more fundamental restructuring of the utility model, a way to escape once and for all the cross-incentives that are pitting utilities against energy democracy.
  • further reading:
  • Over at NDN, Michael Moynihan did a great report called “Electricity 2.0: Unlocking the Power of the Open Energy Network.” It wrestles with exactly these issues in an incisive and comprehensive way.
  • At the Center for American Progress, Bracken Hendricks and Adam James recently put out a report called “The Networked Energy Web” that addresses many of the same questions.
  • The Rocky Mountain Institute has a program called eLab devoted to creating a modern electricity system. Check out this video they made and see if it doesn’t sound familiar!
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "Yesterday I wrote that solar PV and other distributed-energy technologies pose a radical threat to U.S. power utilities and the centralized business model they've operated under for the last century. This is, I hasten to add, according to the utilities themselves."
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Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities - 0 views

grist.org/...ies-according-to-u-s-utilities
shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
  • Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
  • You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
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  • But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money.
  • Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.”
  • The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits.
  • Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
  • First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product.
  • (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
  • It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.”
  • Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
  • This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
  • Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”
  • What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
  • As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
  • One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers.
  • (“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
  • So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
  • The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies.
  • In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
  • Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.
  • This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground."
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The Homer Doctrine - 0 views

www.good.is/...the-homer-doctrine politics geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • For 20 years The Simpsons has satirized the banalities and foibles of American life. From Lisa's precocious insights to Bart's antics, the show emerged as Generation X's reply to Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Brunch.
  • Homer Simpson
  • embodies Americans' naïveté, excess, and basic decency.
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  • As an academic who studies U.S. foreign policy, I often think about what I learned from 1980s sitcoms whenever I go to conferences or review a book.
  • In the hands of many foreign policy specialists, William McKinley might as well be Perfect Stranger's clueless and spineless Larry Appleton, and Lyndon Johnson is BJ's corrupt and scheming Sherriff Lobo.
  • they were human beings who, like Homer Simpson, possessed a full range of foibles and noble characteristics.
  • The same is true of American foreign policy writ large. The range of American international relations over time should reflect the crass, naïve, ambitious, and good motivations behind policy crafted by people.
  • Inspired by The Simpsons, the Doctrine simply explains that even regrettable and downright bad episodes in American history are not products of a scheming Montgomery Burns-like imperialist, but are usually a result of Homer-esque laziness, naïveté, and bumbling good intentions.
  • Similar to individual Simpsons' episodes, the Homer Doctrine allows for very bad endings but also some happier conclusions. Mostly, it reminds me that foreign policy is a reflection of real life, and that historical interpretations of human actions and decisions should bear more resemblance to Homer's befuddled attempts at parenting than J.R. Ewing's machinations on Dallas.
  • Sandwiched between the civil war and the 20th century's dawn, the Spanish-American War reflects the Homer Doctrine's necessity.
  • Aghast at the news from Cuba, middle-class Americans organized and sent foodstuffs, supplies, and the Red Cross's Clara Barton to the island. Even with supplies and the Red Cross, the civil war made Barton's humanitarian task all but impossible. By the mid-1890s, middle-class Americans of all political stripes called for a "humanitarian intervention."
  • McKinley eventually opted for war, but he is not the Montgomery Burns many historians imagine. Like the 20th episode of the Simpsons 16th season, "Home Away from Homer," in which Homer accidentally drives Ned Flanders from Springfield by betraying his own principles and their friendship, McKinley lost control of events once war commenced.
  • Indeed, the lure of empire, geopolitical realities, and the president's racism and blindness to Filipino and Cuban nationalism resulted in America's temporary acquisition of an overseas empire.
  • Whether it is Ned Flanders, Cuba, or Afghanistan, the "Homer Doctrine" remains instructive. American foreign policymakers, from presidents to national security staffers, are guided by a complex mixture of idealism, naiveté, selfishness, and sometimes a zeal for donuts and Duff beer.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "When it comes to American foreign policy, The Simpsons might just provide the lens we need to understand our own history."
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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!
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  • 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
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"Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...-is-not-a-metric-its-an-excuse analytics google metrics engagement
shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • There was so much we could measure and so little. As Marketers we have been frustrated with the near constant 2% conversion rates for our websites. We would like to have another metric that justifies our existence, and of course that of our website.
  • The fervor for measuring engagement is even higher for non-ecommerce websites because there is little in terms of Outcomes to measure there.
  • Engagement, that phrase / name, is not a metric that anyone understands and even when used it rarely drives the action / improvement on the website.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Because it is not really a metric, it is an excuse.
  • Even as creating engaging experiences on the web is mandatory, the metric called Engagement is simply an excuse for an unwillingness to sit down and identify why a site exists.
  • An excuse for a unwillingness to identify real metrics that measure if your web presence is productive. An excuse for taking a short cut with clickstream data rather than apply a true Web Analytics 2.0 approach to measure success.
  • let's try to understand why in the context of web analytics so many efforts at measuring "engagement" have yielded almost no results:
  • Each business is unique and each website is trying to accomplish something unique.
  • It is nearly impossible to define engagement in a standard way that can be applied across the board.
  • At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
  • One of my personal golden rules is that a metric should be instantly useful. This one is not.
  • Most of all engagement is a proxy for measuring an outcome from a website.
  • Conversion is not enough, as mentioned above, so we try something else. The problem that we'll define engagement as a measure of some kind of outcome but we won't give it the sexy name of engagement.
  • In Summary: The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.
  • "So what you are saying is that we should not measure engagement." I am saying you should very very carefully consider the above points, then not take a short cut (or as the American's say, a cop out) and actually define the metric as a Outcome metric (see element three of the trinity ).
  • Here is a process you can follow:
  • Step One: Define why your website exists. What is its purpose? Not a five hundred word essay, rather in fifteen words or less. If it helps complete this statement: "When the crap hits the fan the only purpose of my website is to ……….".
  • Step Two: If you did a great job with it then the above statement contains the critical few metrics (three or less) that will identify exactly how you can measure if your website is successful at delivering against its purpose.
  • Step Three: If you have a ecommerce website then revenue or conversion is probably one of your critical few. But one of the critical few is what your senior management might call engagement. Work hard to define exactly what that metric is (see below for ideas).
  • Step Four: Don't call that metric engagement. Call it by its real name. Don't hide behind a pretty moniker.
  • To stimulate your thought process here are some metrics you can use to measure "customer engagement" (that visitors are engaging with your website):
  • "Are you engaged with us?"
  • Likelihood to recommend website
  • Use primary market research
  • Customer retention over time
  • # of Visits per Unique Visits, Recency of Unique Visitors
  • In Summary : When most people measure "engagement" they have not done due diligence to identify what success means for their online presence. In absence of that hard work they fall into measuring engagement, and then measure something that is hard to action or something that will rarely improve the bottomline. Avoid this at all costs. Think very carefully about what you are measuring if you do measure engagement. If engagement to you is repeat visitors by visitors then call it Visit Frequency, don't call it engagement. Don't sexify, simplify! :) If you want to measure "engagement" then think of new and more interesting ways to measure that (see list above). Engagement at its core a qualitative feeling. It really hard to measure via pure clickstream (web analytics data). Think different.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "Measuring "engagement" seems to be an even longer quest for Marketers and Analysts. There was so much we could measure and so little. As Marketers we have been frustrated with the near constant 2% conversion rates for our websites. We would like to have another metric that justifies our existence, and of course that of our website."
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Turkey's Geographical Ambition - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...turkeys-geographical-ambition geopolitics turkey
shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - Cached
  • Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics.
  • Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus
  • Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.
  • The story begins after World War I.
  • Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France.
  • Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
  • Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes.
  • Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans
  • Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s' Russia.
  • The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East.
  • An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.
  • Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds.
  • Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers.
  • Ozal died abruptly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002.
  • one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period.
  • Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia.
  • Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G. S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing.
  • In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
  • it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision.
  • Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position.
  • In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime.
  • The root of the problem is partly geographic.
  • Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
  • Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds
  • The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey.
  • Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region.
  • He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey.
  • Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism
  • But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable."
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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.
10More

This EULA Will Make You Rethink Every App and Online Service You Use - 1 views

www.wired.com/...ine-and-online-payment-service
shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Can we compare the internet to the road that must precede a lemonade stand?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      On the face of it? No. Unless you're, I dunno, high...
  • The government built the road.
  • The whole idea of a public road is to push entrepreneurship up to a higher level. Without the government there would have most likely been a set of incompatible digital networks, mostly private, instead of a prominent unified internet.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • (Al Gore actually played a crucial role in bringing that unity about when he was a senator, following in the footsteps of his father, who had facilitated the national system of interstate highways.)
  • Without the public road, and utterly unencumbered access to it, a child’s lemonade stand would never turn a profit. The real business opportunity would be in privatizing other people’s roads.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      This looks to be the start of another classic example of why markets are not Perfect. Again, the notion that you can somehow decouple politics *from the near-only way that people have a voice in it* - MONEY - seems a quaint libertarian fantasy.
  • Here’s the EULA no one would read in the utopia they pine for:
  • Dear parents or legal guardians of ___________ As you may be aware, your daughter is one of ______ children in your neighborhood who recently applied for a jointly operated StreetApp® of the category “Lemonade Stand.”
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 13
     
    "We aren't creating enough opportunity for enough people online. The proof is simple. The wide adoption of transformative connecting technology should create a middle-class wealth boom, as happened when the Interstate Highway System gave rise to a world of new jobs in transportation and tourism, for instance, and generally widened commercial prospects. Instead we've seen recession, unemployment, and austerity."
20More

The oldest story ever written - 1 views

www.salon.com/...gilgamesh salon history ancient biblical
shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 13 - Cached
  • David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.
  • Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is.
  • The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut’s tomb: the oldest story ever told — or, at least, the oldest one told in writing.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.
  • If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.
  • Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.
  • Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.
  • much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.
  • The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.
  • Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.
  • The New York Times suggested that the inscription “may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.” (In fact, stories of global floods crop up in all sorts of disconnected mythologies.)
  • Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I love ancient gods. They have such personality.
  • largely because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.
  • The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.
  • Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria
  • Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.
  • To the ancient Mesopotamians, it probably seemed impossible that one day Gilgamesh would be forgotten — for us, that would be like forgetting Heracles or Superman or Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, people stopped telling his story, and if it weren’t for those buried tablets and the men who dug them up, his name would have vanished forever. In a way, Gilgamesh got his immortality after all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I purposely didn't highlight the stories. You have to *read those* on the page to truly appreciate them. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of those stories that I learned about during my difficult recovery from adolescent Fundy-Xtianity. In youthful, rebellious glee, I enjoyed that I could dismiss The Flood. With age, though, I see both - and many other heavily borrowed from stories - as part of a continuum of folklore and wisdom. Quite fascinating.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 13
     
    "There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840." Hat tip to George Station (originally from Hsiao-yun Chan), both on Google+
14More

Ten Responses to the Technological Unemployment Problem - 1 views

declineofscarcity.com/?p=2790 technology unemployment
shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 13 - Cached
  • There are many economists who still maintain that technological unemployment cannot happen
  • Since growing numbers of people won’t be able to earn money from their labor, it might make sense to just give everyone a guaranteed income whether or not they work.
  • Often this idea is characterized as socialist, and in some senses it is, but this characterization overlooks that the goal of a UBI is actually to save market capitalism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 Apr 13
       
      The dualistic nature of this approach is quite incompatible with America's penchant for binary thinking. I think some peoples' heads might explode at the thought.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • By taking advantage of new decentralized technologies and living as cheaply as possible, people might be able to increasingly just opt out of capitalism and consumerism entirely.
  • All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few.” This arrangement is made possible by aggressive use of advanced technologies to create an abundance of resources and thereby negate the need for any sort of rationing.
  • put money directly in people’s hands so they can spend it and keep the market economy going. The main difference is that instead of making the income unconditional, Ford advocates doling out money according to an incentive scheme that encourages behavior society desires.
  • if we can find a way to directly upgrade human minds—such as through the use of brain-computer interfaces—then workers would be able to keep pace with technological change and readily adapt to new jobs and industries as quickly as they crop up.
  • they push for a series of common sense policy fixes, such as fixing education to better prepare people for STEM fields or reforming the patent system to mitigate drags on innovation.
  • Therefore we should try to accelerate technological progress by whatever means necessary so that we can make the painful transition as short as possible—much like tearing off a bandaid.
  • Yes, there will be less jobs available, and certainly people’s incomes will suffer, but technology will simultaneously bring down the cost of living at a fast enough rate that people will survive just fine without the need for government invention or economic restructuring.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 Apr 13
       
      Yup! And all thanks to the LP's consistent explanation for how it all works: "a miracle occurs."
  • Once AGI arrives we will have much bigger issues to contend with, such as will the human race survive being displaced as the most intelligent beings on planet Earth?
  • anonymous on 29 Apr 13
     
    "On the internet and in the media there has been growing discussion of technological unemployment. People are increasingly concerned that automation will displace more and more workers-that in fact there might be no turning back at this point. We may be reaching the end of work as we know it."
2More

Services in Windows 7 that can be Safely set to Disabled or Manual and Speed up Windows 7 - 0 views

www.computingunleashed.com/ces-in-windows-7-that-can.html
shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Application Experience Computer Browser (If your PC does not connect to any network) Desktop Window Manager Session Manager (If you don’t want the aero effects) Diagnostic Policy Service Distributed Link Tracking Client IP Helper Offline Files Portable Device Enumerator Service Print Spooler (If you do not use Printer) Protected Storage Remote Registry (You can safely disable it for more Security) Secondary Logon Security Center Server (If your computer do not connect with any network) Tablet PC Input Service TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Themes ( If you want any aero and good visual appearence (classic theme will be applied)) Windows Error Reporting Service Windows Media Center Service Launcher Windows Search (If you rarely use Windows Search feature ) Windows Time (If you do not want to synchronize system time with internet time automatically)
  • anonymous on 29 Apr 13
     
    "In Windows 7 there are many system run services that we often don't require for our work. So Disabling or not running this service unnecessarily we can save the boot time as well as speedup Windows 7. Here are a list of Windows 7 system services that can be safely set to Manual or Disabled."
17More

Speed Up SSD & Optimize For Performance with 9 Quality Tweaks - 0 views

www.computingunleashed.com/-to-speed-up-ssd-optimize.html
shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 13 - Cached
  • 1) Enable Write Caching in Windows 7
  • This tweak would enable the write caching on your SSD which helps to speed up SSD by a small margin. This tweak would force windows to cache the write commands sent to the SSD, to be stored in the memory which is many times faster and thus would result in a much faster operation.
  • To do this navigate to, Computer > Properties > Device Manager >Disk Drive Now, right click and select Properties of your SSD and click on policies tab and just select the Enable write caching in Windows option, Click Apply > OK and you’re done.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 2) Speed Up SSD by Using RAM Cache
  • Begin the process by downloading Fancy Cache (~2MB) software. After installation and starting up the program, the software interface would list out the storage mediums connected to your pc. Select your SSD from the list and configure a cache size for it (Refer the image). The cache size may be set to suit your needs. We’ve allocated currently 3192 MB of RAM as the cache and the defer caching has been also set to enabled. After setting the cache size for your SSD and related options on fancy cache, click Start Caching and you’re ready with the caching setup for your SSD.
  • Optimizing and Maintaining Your SSD
  • The TRIM Command The very first step after setting up an SSD is to enable the TRIM Command in Windows. Windows 8 has the TRIM command already enabled if you are using an SSD. It is important to have the TRIM command enabled on your system as it helps to maintain the SSD’s life by optimizing the garbage collection in windows.
  • 3) Enabling TRIM Command to Optimize SSD From the Start Menu, type CMD in the search box. Right click the command prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator. Now type fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify and press Enter. If its shows you disabledeletenotify = 0, the TRIM command is enabled in windows and you don’t have to make any modifications. If not, it would display, disabledeletenotify = 1. If TRIM is not enabled, type fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 The TRIM Command would now be set to enabled.
  • 4) Should You enable hibernation while using an SSD in Windows ?
  • Drive Defragmentation in Windows 7
  • Drive defragmentation helps in organizing the fragmented data and helps in improving the performance of a hard disk. But drive defragmentation doesn’t speed up SSD, as these drives doesn’t contain any rotating parts and defragmenting a drive would involve the transfer of data i.e. more read/write cycles which actually shortens the life span of the SSD. So, its always good to disable drive defragmentation in windows.
  • 6) Turn Off Super fetch, Prefetch in Windows
  • So its better to disable them if you have 4GB or less memory. If you have plenty of RAM installed, enabling them might give an iota of boost and would speed up SSD performance.
  • Bring up the Registry Editor in Windows by Typing regedit on RUN Window (WIN + R) and pressing Enter. Now navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSessionManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters“ You’ll see Enable Prefetcher and Enable Superfetch options being list out on the right window pane. Double click each and set the value from 3 to 0. Now restart your system for the changes to be enabled.
  • SSDs are speedier than hard drives and have an access time of 0.1 milli second. Drive indexing results in increasing the number of file write operations doesn’t really speed up SSD and its better to have it turned off. Open My Computer and just right Click Your SSD and choose properties. Just untick the Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties option. You’ll be prompted with warnings just after clicking Apply. Proceed by pressing Ignore All and it would show you a processing window and would take a few minutes for the changes to be applied.
  • 9) Disabling Drive Indexing to Optimize SSD
  • anonymous on 29 Apr 13
     
    "Users who crave for more performance out of their system would definitely consider investing a pretty decent ssd to speed up their PC. Unlike hard drives SSD's work in an different manner. Users who upgrade from hard drives to SSD's often get confounded with doubts whether they need to do the required maintenance which they might have been doing with the hard drives, to speed up ssd and optimize its performance."
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Speed Up Windows 7 - Ultimate Tweaks For a Blazing Fast Windows 7 - 0 views

www.computingunleashed.com/ndows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html windows 7 tweak performance windows
shared by anonymous on 28 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Disabling the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
  • Right Click the “Computer” Icon in the desktop and select “Manage”. Click “Services and Applications” in the “Computer Management” window. Click on “Services”. You’d see a lot of services being listed inside the window. Find “Windows Search” from the list. Right Click on “Windows Search” from the list and choose “Properties”. The “Windows Search Properties Window” will open up. From “Startup type” click on the drop down menu and choose “Disabled”.
  • Click “Apply” then “OK” and that’s it. The Windows 7 Search Indexing Feature is now disabled.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Disable the Aero Theme on Windows 7
  • You may also Apply a Standard or Basic theme from the previous window. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred as its gives a neutral look than the classy windows old theme.
  • Disabling the Unwanted Visual Effects in Windows 7 to Speed Up more
  • Right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu. Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window. Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it. Now un tick all the options (Choose “Adjust for best performance“) and select only the last four options (actually three are preferable  you may un- tick the second option out of the last four). Take a look at the screen shot below.
  • List of services in Windows 7 that can be safely set to manual / disabled
  • Turn off Unused Windows 7 Features
  • Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel. Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane. Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.
  • Speeding Up, Tweaking and Optimizing Your SSD
  • If you’ve got a new ssd for your system, then you’d definitely consider checking out this guide which explains 9 tweaks to properly speed up, optimize your ssd and prolong the life of your ssd, while getting the best performance from it.
  • Disable the Windows 7 Sidebar (The Gadgets)
  • Right click on the sidebar and choose ” Properties “. On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “ From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.
  • Disable the Aero Peek and Aero Snap features in Windows 7
  • Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners. I dont advice to turn it off as the Aero Snap feature really helps to speed up working with windows by arranging them side by side. But, if you are not a regular user of the same, you may proceed by turning of aero snap in windows 7. Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon. Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” . Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “. Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there. That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.
  • Now To Disable the Aero Peek feature in Windows 7
  • The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista. If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not, Right Click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Un-select the ”Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” option. The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.
  • Change the Power Plan To Maximum Performance
  • Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel. Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan.
  • Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it. You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.
  • Disable the Thumbnail Preview Feature to speed up File browsing in Windows 7
  • For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7, Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options” Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.
  • Turn OFF Windows 7 Screen Saver and Wallpaper
  • To Disable The Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7, Right click on desktop and choose “Personalize”. Click the Screen Saver link ” From the Screen Saver drop down menu, Set it to “None” and click “Apply” and then “OK”. Now click on “Desktop Background” link. From the “Location” drop down menu select “Solid Colors” and pick one color and click “OK”.
  • Disable Unwanted Start Up Items and Speed Up Windows 7 Start Up
  • Type ” msconfig ” in the “RUN” option from start menu press [Enter] to open up the System Configuration Utility. Now navigate to the “StartUp” tab. Untick the Entries which are not needed
  • Disable Unwanted System Sounds in Windows 7
  • To disable the system sounds in Windows 7, Type mmsys.cpl in RUN From the Windows 7 Startmenu search box and press [Enter]. Navigate to the “Sounds” tab. Now from under “Sound Scheme:” select “No Sounds” > Click “Apply” > “OK”.
  • anonymous on 28 Apr 13
     
    "Windows 7 is Engineered for speed. Special attention has been given by the Windows team for making Windows 7 faster than the previous operating systems. Windows 7 is much faster than Windows Vista, but even then most of us don't get satisfied with it. There are many who still have their old PC. Installing Windows 7 on them wont be as soothing as they would work with XP and Even with latest hardware's installed some users are still avaricious  for more performance. We could optimize Windows 7 to the maximum possible extent to squeeze out extra performance from it. So, for all the extra performance lovers, here is the Ultimate Guide To Speed Up Windows 7."
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2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes - 1 views

www.coolinfographics.com/...ntinental-climate-changes.html climate infographics data visualization long now long game
shared by anonymous on 26 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Thirty-year mean temperatures for the seven PAGES 2k continental-scale regions arranged vertically from north to south. Colors indicate the relative temperature. The most prominent feature of nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is the long-term cooling, which ended late in the19th century.
  • North America includes a shorter tree-ring-based and a longer pollen-based reconstruction.
  • Each color band represents a 30-year mean temperature found on each continent.
  • anonymous on 26 Apr 13
     
    "Climate change is a complicated, and sometimes controversial, global topic.  I really like this data visualization of 2,000 Years of Continental Climate Changes that was included as part of the report published by the "2K Network" of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) project."
8More

The history of the filibuster, in one graph - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAVHf0RU_blog.html politics filibuster
shared by anonymous on 24 Apr 13 - Cached
  • (Graph: Todd Lindeman; Data: Senate.gov) What you’re seeing here are the number of “cloture” motions in every congressional session since 1919. Cloture is the procedure used to break a filibuster. Between 1919 and 1975, a successful cloture motion required two-thirds of the Senate. Today, it requires three-fifths, or, in cases where all 100 senators are present and voting, 60 votes. As you can see, the majority is having to try and break many, many, many more filibusters than ever before.
  • The issue today isn’t that we see 50, or 100, or 150 filibusters. It’s that the filibuster is a constant where it used to be a rarity. Indeed, it shouldn’t even be called “the filibuster”: It has nothing to do with talking, or holding the floor. It should be called the 60-vote requirement.
  • It applies to everything now even when the minority does not specifically choose to invoke it. There are no longer, to my knowledge, categories of bills that don’t get filibustered because such things are simply not done, though there are bills that the minority chooses not to invoke their 60-vote option on.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • That’s why Harry Reid says things like “60 votes are required for just about everything,” though there are a small number of bills where the majority uses the budget reconciliation process to short-circuit the 60-vote requirement.
  • An interesting implication of this graph: The filibuster has become more common even as it’s become easier to break.
  • Until 1917, the filibuster couldn’t be stopped. And until 1975, you needed two-thirds of the Senate, rather than three-fifths. So as it’s become less powerful, it’s become more common. What that means is that the rise of the filibuster is largely about “norms” in the Senate. It didn’t become more effective and thus more popular. It actually became less effective, but parties chose to use it more.
  • There’s an interesting question around exactly when this change in norms happened. If you look at the graph, you have three major moments of discontinuity. One, around 1972, that appears to provoke reform of the filibuster rules so cloture is easier to achieve. Another, in the early 1990s, that seems covers the latter half of George H.W. Bush’s administration and the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency. And then the practice absolutely skyrockets when Barack Obama takes office.
  • anonymous on 24 Apr 13
     
    "I want to spend another moment on this great graph Todd Lindeman worked up for my column on the constitutionality of the filibuster."
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The Great Mulligan - Esquire - 0 views

www.esquire.com/...the-great-mulligan-042413 politics bush
shared by anonymous on 24 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • However, the opening of the library roughly coincided with the bloody events surrounding the Boston Marathon, and that has prompted yet another revival of the brutally dishonest notion that the presidency of George W. Bush began on September 12, 2001, that he arose, full-grown, from the rubble of lower Manhattan.
  • The best example came from the inexplicably employed Jennifer Rubin, who took to her space in the inexplicably still publishing Washington Post op-ed pre-school to argue the following, as our old friend, Clio, Muse Of History, started guzzling Popov and huffing airplane glue: Unlike Obama's tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.
  • Thus do we confront what we can call The Great Mulligan
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Sorry we lied you into a war, but we kept you safe. Sorry we demolished American values, and just about every shred of American moral credibility in the world, but we kept you safe. Sorry we let New Orleans drown, but we kept you safe. Sorry we allowed the national economy to blow up, but we kept you safe. In fact, if you sent C-Plus Augustus into his own museum, and had him take that interactive quiz, and provided he didn't break a thumb trying to get a Diet Coke out of the exhibit, his answer to everything would be I kept you safe.
  • The historical record is quite clear. Upon taking office, the Bush administration de-emphasized the Clinton team's almost-obsessive search for Osama bin Laden. That's why Richard Clarke got shoved aside. That's why John Ashcroft changed the FBI's focus from the pursuit of international terrorists to the pursuit of Tommy Chong. That's why presidential daily press briefings didn't get read while the president was clearing brush the month before the attacks.
  • as the members of the administration tried to prevaricate their way out of their abject failure to keep anyone safe. It was nine months of misfeasance in office, and inexcusable neglect of duty, that ended in the deaths of more than 3000 Americans.
  • And I am sorry. But you don't get a free one on these.
  • You cannot argue that you kept us safe after your obvious negligence played a role in getting 3000 of us killed.
  • The very fact that anyone, even Jennifer Rubin, would make this argument publicly illustrates that we have not entirely integrated the facts of the 9/11 attacks into their proper place in our history and our memory.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Apr 13
       
      This is MOST KEY.
  • Then, they responded by lying the country into a war of aggression that failed to keep thousands of American soldiers safe, that failed to keep hundreds of thousands of Iraqis safe, failed to keep the rule of law safe, and failed to keep the national economy, and the people who depend on it, which is pretty much all of us, safe.
  • All of the worst parts of that presidency flowed from that simple fact — that we did not really confront what happened on September 11, 2001 but, rather, allowed ourselves and our memory to be seduced by simpleton narratives of collective innocence, which necessarily included the simpleton narrative that our leaders were innocent victims of diabolical agencies the true nature of which — "Nobody could have conceived of using a airliner as a missile."
  • Except, of course, that people had been talking about it for years.
  • Thanks again, Condi. — they could not be expected to understand. Everything that came afterwards, everything that makes the new library a monument to everything libraries are not supposed to be about, proceeds from our granting to these people The Great Mulligan.
  • anonymous on 24 Apr 13
     
    "There has been some low hilarity, and one high crime against history and memory, attending the sudden reappearence on the scene of C-Plus Augustus, the previous president of these United States." I will admit that I'm a sucker for well-crafted gut punches.
4More

The Nord Stream Pipeline's Possible Expansions - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-pipelines-possible-expansions geopolitics energy
shared by anonymous on 24 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Analysis
  • The Nord Stream pipeline project was initially designed by Russia to bypass transit states to supply Russian natural gas directly to Germany, its largest European market. In the mid-to-late 2000s, Russia had a series of energy and political spats with states that its oil and natural gas transited to reach greater Europe, leading to energy cutoffs and intentional pipeline breaks. So Gazprom, in consortium with the Netherlands' Gasunie, Germany's E.ON and Wintershall and France's GDF, built two lines from the Russian coast at Vyborg under the Baltic Sea to the German coast at Greifswald. Once on German soil, Nord Stream's natural gas supplies split into two systems. The first goes through the Opal pipeline system that supplies eastern Germany and connects to Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The other spur goes through the NEL pipeline system to enter northern and eastern Germany.
  • Currently, the first two legs of Nord Stream have a shared capacity of 55 billion cubic meters, though the pipeline carried only 28 billion cubic meters in 2012, since the second leg was unfinished. The 2012 exports also were intended mostly for German consumption. Though the primary purpose of Nord Stream was to link Russia directly to Germany, Moscow has long had further plans for the pipeline system. Since Nord Stream 1 and 2 were conceived, two more legs -- Nord Stream 3 and 4 -- have been considered. Nord Stream 3 would expand Nord Stream 1 and 2 under the Baltic Sea to Germany, while Nord Stream 4 would connect Russian supplies through the Dutch export networks to the United Kingdom. The Netherlands exports natural gas to the United Kingdom via the Balgzand-Bacton underwater interconnector pipeline (with a capacity of 16 billion cubic meters) and via Belgium along the Belgium-U.K. underwater interconnector (with a capacity of 25.5 billion cubic meters). Gazprom has said that preliminarily it would like to export an additional 40 billion cubic meters along Nord Stream 3 and 4 to the United Kingdom -- something BP said it is interested in discussing. If completed, these expansions would bring large amounts of Russian natural gas to Western Europe at a time when regional supplies are in decline and some of Russia's Central and Eastern European customers are diversifying their options.
  • anonymous on 24 Apr 13
     
    "The Nord Stream pipeline project was initially designed by Russia to bypass transit states to supply Russian natural gas directly to Germany, its largest European market."
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