Curious Cat Comments

USA Falls to 47th in Press Freedom Ranking

2012-01-26T16:41:00.002-05:00

Reporters Without Borders released the latest ranking of countries press freedom.The United States fell 27 places to 47th due to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.It is one more indication of the erosion of liberty in the USA.Related: Anti Liberty Sentiment in Congress - Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans

Money Is Corrupting Our Political Process

2012-01-22T20:31:00.000-05:00

I like capitalism. I support those who provide benefit to society (as expressed by the market) being rewarded with money by the market.

We have allowed our politicians in the USA to focus on money instead of doing the business of the people. The corruption is fundamental and endemic. The liberty the founders of the USA gave us an opportunity to enjoy has been greatly impinged upon and the system continues to do harm.

It is hard to appreciate and understand the situation. Those benefiting from the current system are very effective at using every lever they have to continue the current corrupt system. Lawrence Lessig provides an excellent review of where we are.

Related: rootstrikers - Anti Liberty Sentiment in Congress - Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans - Health Care System Needs Much More Reform - Lessig Video: Information Revolution

Anti Liberty Sentiment in Congress

2012-01-18T00:04:00.000-05:00

Written for my management blog blackout in support of those fighting SOPA and PIPA:

This site is participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackout day. Sadly I don't have a simple way to just have this page for the USA and I decided having it show for everyone was better than not showing it.

As this is a management blog, I would like to explain my analysis of this situation. The SOPA and PIPA bills are not special cause results. They are the natural outcome of the current anti-liberty system in place in Washington DC. As such the proper counter-measure is not to band-aid this negative outcome and think you have done well. If you need a band-aid counter measure immediately, that is fine. But if you don't then look at the system creating that result: the bad result will just reappear.

My belief on the systemic cause is the anti-liberty sentiment in congress. This creates the conditions where lots of extremely bad anti-liberty laws are proposed and passed. SOPA and PIPA happened to be so horrible that an huge outcry they couldn't ignore and push through (most likely, it is still possible they might). But that is all. SOPA and PIPA are the natural result of the current system. They are not some special outlier that you can block and then be confident the system is working.

There are a few other systemic issues that contribute to the extremely bad law that SOPA and PIPA would be. A profound lack of basic understanding of technology. A profound lack of understanding of copyright. Those are compounded by a profound lack of respect of knowledge (so ignorance is not seen as any reason to act cautiously or seek expertise). A system where large amounts of cash seem to drive policy much more than anything else. Add those to the anti-liberty agenda of the last decade and you will continue to get SOPAs and PIPAs.

Where we are today
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" - Wendell Phillips
which is often quoted as "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" and attributed to Thomas Jefferson

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Richard Jackson (maybe)

Those outside the USA
Several other countries have already had the USA coerce their governments into adopting legislation desired by those who "donated" (in other words gave cash to) American politicians. I am surprised none of those countries has reversed the decision to harm their citizens as a favor to those paying American politicians cash but I don't think any have. If you live in one of those countries maybe you should see about getting rid of the people that do such things to your country. And the State Department may well be pressuring for SOPA like laws right now.

The USA's Anti-Liberty Agenda
Sadly the USA has been on a kick to reduce liberty and increase government and corporate power over liberty of citizens. I have written about the attacks on liberty on another of my blogs.

SOPA and PIPA are the recent outcome of this mindset of those in congress today. The attempts to payoff a few of the lobbyists that give them large amounts of cash has resulted in many bills; SOPA and PIPA being the current examples. They have become so used to egregious anti-liberty legislation being ignored that they allowed the lobbyists to go so far in writing SOPA and PIPA that even the normal apathy was overcome.

It appears they realize the price of their favors to those giving them lots of cash (for their campaigns) is too high in this case. People actually noticed how egregious the attacks on liberty were. And the reactions by those people have made it seem that the consequences to the politicians of passing the law (that they wanted to pass before the consequences to themselves was made obvious) are now too high.

Given past conduct I would expect them to bow to the current pressure and just sneak in most of the bad policy (to pay back those giving them cash) into future bills. They also seem to be trying to say by getting rid of a couple of the most vile parts of the laws that the rest of the payoffs to those giving them cash should be ok.

I was amazed when the politicians were able to withstand the maelstrom of criticism about he security theater/anti-liberty practices of TSA. So how far they are willing to fight in order to pay off contributors and further the anti-liberty agenda I am not sure. But the evidence seems to be pretty far. I would expect they will not learn from this and continue their normal conduct, which will mean continued attempts to pass similar measures.

Until we refuse to elect people that are willing to sacrifice liberty for their personal short term interests we have risks of such laws passing. Only extraordinary efforts seem capable of rolling back small pieces of the anti-liberty agenda currently being pushed by both parties in Washington DC. But it is only because the public lets them get away with it. So it is really our problem. If we want to stop the anti-liberty agenda (of which SOPA and PIPA are a minor, though dramatically flawed example) we need to stop electing those that support it.

There is an App to Help You Avoid Supporting Companies Actively Undermining Your Rights through their support for SOPA and PIPA.

Librarians Standing Up to the Madness

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Martin Niemoeller

SOPA/PIPA resources:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

App to Help You Avoid Supporting Companies Actively Undermining Your Rights

2012-01-07T22:19:00.002-05:00

Use the power of the internet to avoid supporting companies that actively seek to take away your rights: Android app to scan bar codes and reveal if the company supports taking away your liberty via SOPA.I am all for these kind of transparency initiatives. Shinning the light on the dirty dealing going on is a way to clean things up. Given that we chose to elect people that are more concerned with pleasing those that give them cash that protecting liberty it is more important that we act on our beliefs (or we will see them sold away).With transparency we can then choose what we want to support. I believe, with transparency many will decide they don't really care about principle and can more about whatever is cheapest or easiest. At least we then get the society we chose. I may well not like some of the choices, but I would rather have transparency let people make the choices than the lobbyist written legislation we have slipped into the last few decades.If there turn out to be consequences for trying to remove basic rights from people, companies will stop. Otherwise they will continue.Related: Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans - Liberty Again Denied, It is Sad How Little We Care - Freedom Increasingly at Risk

Liberty Again Denied - It is Sad How Little We Seem to Care

2011-12-13T10:23:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up I knew the world wasn't perfect. The government had plenty of problems. And politicians were often more concerned about their egos than the good of the country. And things like the McCarthy which-hunts, Japanese internment, denying voting rights to blacks, Watergate were not far in the past. But I never imagined how far the government would move to eliminate liberty. I remember thinking how sad it was that perfectly fine books were banned in the past. And yes, some silly little town here or there would remove books from libraries or schools. That was sad but fairly minor. But it seemed to me we now had finally learned how horrid our actions in things like the Japanese internment and McCarthy which-hunts were.

Watergate was something plenty of politicians did to some degree or another but they had the sense to be ashamed and hide it. That is different from endorsing and pushing policies to deny liberty to people.

I remember thinking how strange it was how concerned our founding fathers were with protecting us from government. I understood why historically. But it seemed like those days were long past. Yes, occasionally government would overstep but that was getting cleaned up or just some corruption that is likely to always exist to some extent.

The sad fact is, today I am in the position of our founding fathers and much more worried about what the government will do to us that inspired by what the government provides us. This is sad. The types of behavior Homeland Security has been engaging in can be stopped if we elect people that care about liberty. I am much more disappointed in the last 10 years than Watergate. We are currently on par with Japanese internment and the McCarthy which-hunts. That is in extremely sad place to be. I think we are probably a step below those embarrassments but we are not far from them.

We need leaders that can steer us away from the path we have been taking. I am scared for where we will be soon, if we don't find them.

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details...

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine's offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company's printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building.

Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine's lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that's a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that's been in the making for over a year, and which we're exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year -- with the only difference being that, rather than "a printing press" and a "magazine," the story involved "a domain" and a "blog."

This type of behavior (ignoring liberty, acting like citizens are the constitution don't matter, acting like the governments our founding father's were afraid of) makes it extremely hard to give the government the benefit of the doubt in cases where the issues are more debatable. I'll agree some issues the government has to deal with are challenging. But if you want to have our understanding on the difficult choices and tradeoffs the government has to make you can't consistently trample on our rights for no reason.

Denying the first amendment rights should be an action the government takes in only the most extreme circumstances. But instead we have a government that believes it should be free to deny first amendment rights consistently and if people fight really hard maybe the government will give in after awhile and no-one in government will care about the complete abdication of the bill of rights that is suppose to protect us from a government that could seek to act on the principle that might makes it right. How any politician accepts seeing the constitution shredded like this is beyond me. But then again it seems we don't elect people that care about what our founding father's did. That is our fault. And it is very dangerous.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Martin Niemoeller

Related: Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans - Bikinis For Liberty - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment

Most Popular Post on the Curious Cat Comments Blog

2011-12-08T00:06:00.000-05:00

One of the updates, with the suite of updates earlier this year by Blogger, was to show you the number of views for each blog post (I haven't even bothered to add Google Analytics to this blog though maybe I will soon). Here are the 11 most popular posts on this blog (based on page-views since May 2009 - the latest data Google seems to use):

It is sometimes odd what posts are most popular. Sadly several of these are not the most useful posts (in my opinion - but I guess the oracle of Google thinks otherwise, I would imagine greater than 80% of traffic is from searches on Google).The traffic has actually been building lately (which is nice). I think the post in the last couple of years are significantly better - many of the previous posts were largely just to post a link so I could find it again when I wanted it. Last month had 16% of total page views (in just 3% of the time period). There is a bit of spike last month, but it is mainly just an upward trend over the last 6 months.Popular posts on other Curious Cat blogs: popular management blog posts - popular investing blog posts - popular engineering blog posts

New YouTube Website - Good Progress, But Late

2011-12-01T19:51:00.001-05:00

YouTube is an amazing web service. From Google's purchase of YouTube I was convinced they would do very well with their investment (even with the majority opinion being that they paid way too much). I think most know appreciate how valuable YouTube is (as a service and a profit center for Google).

I have been amazed how poorly done the YouTube web site has been. They have put in place a new site design today. It seems like a big improvement. Still, most of it seems like stuff that could have been done 3 years ago. I don't understand why they have been so slow to improve the website.

The home page is much better for seeing what new content has been added on those channels I am subscribed to.

It will take me some time to see if they have done better at showing me content I might enjoy. I can't believe how bad the existing site had been at doing this - showing me content I might like.

The definitely should let me remove useless buttons like Facebook (connect). I guess the popularity of Facebook makes defaulting to including the button ok, but don't make everyone that has no intention of using Facebook (or linking YouTube and Facebook accounts) have that button in prime navigation location.

I should be able to decline a suggested channel (and get new suggestions).

I can't see that browse has been improved much (it seems a bit of a UI improvement at the top). Which is very lame. This should be extremely valuable - instead it is lame.

Netflix is so cheap now ($3.5 billion market cap), maybe Google should be buy it and use their preference matching and content suggestion technology. At the very least hire a great team of engineers (money should essentially not be an issue - they could have all the money they would need - doing this well should bring hundreds of millions to Google) and have them create a much much much better job of suggesting YouTube content for users.

Related: 6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see - How Google Should Improve (2006) - Web Search Improvements (2005) - YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15% - Google Stock Price Rises 5.7% Today (to $255), Why? (2005)

Netflix is Well Managed - People are Overreacting to Short Term Issues

2011-11-01T05:05:00.000-04:00

Netflix and the Data that Lied

This past summer, high-riding Netflix announced an increase of 60 percent in the price of a combination of data streams and DVDs. Netflix subscribers were upset. Then, the company trumped that by announcing that, henceforth, DVDs and streaming would be handled by two different companies, requiring subscribers to use two different web sites.
The result was a net loss of 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter. Netflix stock was trading at close to $300 in mid-July. Today it's trading around $80.

I didn't get the idea of splitting up the company. And that logic seems even more questionable now that they reversed it. But I still think Netflix is very well run. I tend to believe we make a mistake when jump all over short term issues for companies that have long term positive track records.

Now I don't have a huge number of companies that I think have long term positive management track records. But I think Netflix is one of them. And just like all those jumping on Toyota a few years ago were mistaken (as I said at the time and still believe) I believe those thinking Netflix made huge errors are wrong. Toyota made some mistakes. They still were and are better managed than 98% (or more) of companies.

Netflix has made some mistakes. My belief is the underlying business realities forced difficult choices. Just sitting around doing nothing (and not "angering customers" was not an option. They could have handled it better. But once again I think they are better managed than most all companies - I don't trust them as much as Toyota.

Their stock price (given the business) seemed insane to me. I liked the management wanted to invest with them. Couldn't see doing it based on the stock price. I will be looking at them again.

Today Amazon falls into that camp for me. I love the management and business for Amazon. The stock price just seems way to high given the risks (and limited profits so far). I sold my shares in the last year (below where it is at now). I hope I can buy again, but at these prices I just can't see it. If the business improves a lot and the stock price even increases I could buy (it isn't the absolute price it is the price given everything I know and believe now).

The businesses Amazon and Netflix are in are challenging and full of risk.

Netflix stock price Nov 1, 2011 (when this was posted): $80.09.
Update: Jan 19, 2012 stock price: $103.46.

Related: Amazon Keeps Spending, Sales Growing But Not Income - Reacting to Product Problems

Life Long Science Education

2011-10-27T20:06:00.000-04:00

We need much more outreach from universities. There are many reasons for the lack of scientific understanding in the general population, which allows for political manipulation of science related ideas. But making science accessible to the public is an extremely important countermeasure. There is far too little focus on doing this by universities in my opinion. I realize it is not a historical focus. But today it seem very much in line with the written missions many universities have (promoting education, understanding...) and the technology make net efforts possible, that were not reasonable previously. And the state of society today (including how long we now live, and how important science issues are) make it more important than ever that the public have access to engaging science resources.I think most would also agree we don't want universities supporting closed science by supporting publication of science research in closed access journals. Some universities have taken a stand against this practice, which is good. But many universities have not.My Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog tries to help engage people in science.

2011-10-19T19:15:00.000-04:00

Am I A Complete Hypocrite? Or an Opportunist?

Whether it is when I am complaining about liberals or Congressional ineptness it isn’t hard to find my libertarian political views on this website. So, when I was complaining to a buddy the other day about how ridiculous the Occupy Wall Street people are…he responded that I was a Hypocrite.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable action to me. I think it would be hypocritical if you suggested others don't participate even though the program was ongoing. But there is a huge difference between arguing for a different policy and living with the existing policy.

This seems obvious to me though many don't seem to understand that Warren Buffett can argue a better policy for the country would raise his taxes. They tell him to pay more taxes if he wants. His argument is not having whoever wants to give the government more money should do so, he argues the country would be better off with a tax system that had higher tax rates for multi-millionare earners than those working at McDonald's.

Arguing for the government should have different policies doesn't require you to act as though it did to be consistent.

This can get less clear cut if you argue about the moral failings of those who act in x or y way. If you say those taking welfare are lazy scammers stealing from society or something, for example. Then you are claiming it isn't the government policy that you object to (or it isn't only that) but the character of those taking advantage of the policy. In a case where you accept charity when you disparage others for doing so then the argument for being a hypocrite would exist, I think.

Acting Consiterately

2011-10-06T07:07:00.000-04:00

Comment on: More education needed in Dubai Metro’s Priority Seat

I have never been to Dubai but my guess is like everywhere else, there is a huge dose of inconsiderate behavior. There are some people that are rude and intentionally so (or at least know they consistently are selfish and inconsiderate and don't care to change). There are many more people that like to believe they are a nice person. If you call to their attention some action they can take to be considerate they will be considerate.

My guess is you don't have to demand anything just ask if someone will let you sit. Then some in the "I think of myself as considerate" group will let you sit.

For those in that group, my thought is: it is better to actually be proactively considerate. Considering others gives the impression (to me) that it is a proactive act. Inconsiderate is the absence of that proactive consideration of others. And not being rude after it is brought to your attention, is certainly better than continuing to be rude. But we can do better than that.

Google PageRank and MozRank of Some of My Sites

2011-10-03T21:01:00.000-04:00

Pagerank is a value given to the links coming into a web page on a logarithmic scale. So a PR of 2 is 10 times greater than PR 1 and 100 less than PR 4. MozRank has been round a couple of years now and seems to be a decent addition to looking at PageRank. It is updated much more frequently and for some reason is using a scale of 8 instead of 10***, so a PR of 2 is 8 times greater than PR 1 and 100 less than PR 4. MozRank also shows the result to 2 decimal places, which is nice. A PageRank value of 5 could range all the way from 4.5 to 5.49 - those values are almost 100 times different in their magnitude. In the chart below I round MozRank to the nearest tenth of a point.

Now the visible PageRank is just a way of Google letting other people see the relative PageRanks of web pages. The real pagerank Google updates much more frequently. The real pagerank is what is used as a factor in search results. I also believe Google now includes penalties to visible pageranks that are not actually used in their search rankings. So they can show a visible indication that the site is not as highly ranked as it may be (this is most easily noticeable when pages have a reduction in pagerank with no real world explanation).

PageRank matter but is hardly a huge factor. It is much more important to have links from related pages than just high pagerank pages, for being ranked highly in Google search results. And the link text used in links to your pages is very important for how well you rank in search engines. However a link from a page with a PR of 7 would be much better than and a very similar page with a PR of 1. Pagerank "passed" to the linked to page is divided by the total number of links on the page. So if you had a link from a relavent PR 7 page with 10 links that would provide 5 times more "pagerank" than the same PR 7 with 50 links.

In my last post I said "Another thing I have noticed much more over the last few years is having PR for internal pages is much harder." What I have noticed in the last few months is many more internal pages seem to have decent page ranks (very high, above 4, is still fairly rare): lots more internal pages show ranks of 1,2,3 and 4 than I noticed in the last few years You might get the wrong impression from the table below as I picked out the somewhat rare internal pages with decent page ranks to track.

The displayed pagerank is mainly a fun measure, rather than a measure that can be relied on as an important measure. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-( Now you can take some solace if your MozRank goes up :-)

For those wondering if I take special Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actions to achieve these results, I don't really. I try to create good content and provide value to users. That is what I did long before I ever heard of SEO. I do include links to my other sites when I think it is worthwhile. My sites are almost all created out of my personal interests (or maybe all, to varying levels, a couple of sites are things that kind of interest me but are maybe more experiments then core interests to me). It isn't surprising they link together in various ways. Again long before I heard of SEO (and the term was even used) I wrote others with web sites on similar topics to share what I offered.

With the advent of blogs, I commented on blogs I read. I do make some effort to try and have sensible urls from an SEO perspective. And I make an additional effort to comment on blogs in order to "market" and SEO reasons. But I do so not by spaming blogs but with thoughtful comments. Those thoughts may be lame, but they are mine, based on the topic and meant to add to the conversation. I doubt I average more than 10 comments a week on blogs. It really is more about adding to the conversation than getting links that some computer reads. Also a few (very few) people reading the thoughtful comments will follow the link to my site and subscribe to RSS feeds, add links to my posts... I occasionally suggest links to blog carnival - probably less than 10 times a year. That is about it.

Check the current pagerank on your sites using our related site: Multiple Site PageRank checker.

Site	Oct 2011 [MozRank]	April 2011	Dec 2010	Dec 2008	July 2008
PageRank 6
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog	6 [5.3]	6	4	5	5
PageRank 5 and MozRank > 5
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections*	5 [5.5]	5	4	3	3
Management Dictionary*	5 [5.4]	5	4	3	3
PageRank 5 and MozRank < 5
Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site*	5 [4.97]	5	4
PageRank 4 and MozRank > 5
Curiouscat.com	4 [5.6]	5	4	3	3
CSS 4 Free	4 [5.4]	4	4	4	5
Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog	4 [5.3]	4	3	4	4
externs.com - internship directory	4 [5.2]	4	4	4	4
John Hunter	4 [5.4]	4	4	4	4
Investment Dictionary*	4 [5.2]	4
Lean Management Resources*	4 [5.0]	4	4
Six Sigma Management Resources*	4 [5.0]	4
Alumni Connections*	4 [5.0]	4	4	4	5
PageRank 4 and MozRank > 4
PDSA Improvement Cycle*	4 [4.9]	4
Rocky Mountain National Park photos*	4 [4.8]	4	3	-	2
The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer*	4 [4.7]	5	4	3
Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership*	4 [4.7]	5	4	4
The Future is Engineering*	4 [4.7]	5	5
Curious Cat Web Directory	4 [4.7]	**	3	3	4
Credit Card Tips	4 [4.6]	3
Deming's Management Method*	4 [4.5]	4	4
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father)	4 [4.5]	4	4	4
Curious Cat Code (programming)	4 [4.2]	0	0
PageRank 4 and MozRank < 4
Mortgage Rate Article*	4 [3.8]	4
Reddit management*	4 [u]	7	4	0
PageRank 3 and MozRank > 3
Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog	3 [4.9]	3	-
Multi Site PageRank Checker	3 [4.7]	2	2	1	3
Wordpress Themes for Free	3 [4.7]	3	3	3
Statistics for Experimenters	3 [4.5]	3	4	3	4
Living in Malaysia	3 [4.1]	-
Living in Singapore	3 [4.0]	-
Management Improvement Resources	3 [3.8]	3	3	3
Best Research University Rankings*	3 [3.8]	3	3	4
Good Process Improvement Practices*	3 [3.8]
PageRank 2 and MozRank > 3
Management and Leadership Quotes	2 [5.2]	2	2
Sea World - Australia	2 [4.5]	2	2
Wet-n-Wild - Australia	2 [4.2]	2	2
Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos	2 [3.8]	2	2	-
PageRank 2 and MozRank > 2
Justin Hunter (my brother)	2 [2.9]	2	2	2
No PageRank
My Kiva page	- [4.0]	-			3
Curious Cat Comments (this blog)	- [3.8]	-		3	3
Johor Bahru Real Estate (brand new site)	-	-

* internal pages
** new url as of January 2011, old url forwarded, by Oct 2011 report the pagerank updated
- unranked
[blank] I don't know what the pagerank was, sometimes the site didn't exist yet.
*** Google doesn't say they use a scale of 10 for the logarithmic PageRank. It seems as good a guess and any and is easier to picture so I use that until we have some new evidence.
Related: Web Page Authority - 6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see - PageRank Distribution - Google's Search Results - Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used

Google Analytics is Now Real Time

2011-09-29T20:51:00.001-04:00

Google analytics is a great easy to use tool to track the use of your web site. One missing feature was real time data. When I was getting indications of increases in traffic it was sometimes hard to pin down what was going on. Today Google added real time support. This will be greatly appreciated when I want to obsess over some web details in real time.Whats happening on your site right now

You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week) . You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters. Real-Time does not support profile filters.We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time. If you can’t wait, sign up for early access here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/. We’d love to hear about how you are using (or planning to use) Real-Time, so please share in the comments.

Unfortunately the new interface has a horrible navigation scheme if you have lots of sites. It is just horrible. It prevented me from using the new site until now. I doubt I can put up with it for long.Related: Looking at the Google PageRank of Some of My Sites - 6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see - Search Share Data, Checking the ACSI

Using Sweets and Science to Interest Boys in Cooking

2011-09-27T10:42:00.000-04:00

Deserts can also be a good attraction to getting boys interested in cooking: I remember as a kid myself. I don't know how it happened, I wouldn't be surprised if my parents calculated to figure out what would tempt me. My mom made great chocolate mouse when we had special guests. I loved it. At some point I learned how to cook it.

Also if they are interested in science, like I am, cooking actually has very interesting chemistry going on. Which I never knew as a kid. Showing them this can be fun. I would have taken to cooking more if this was thrown in, I think:

Response to: How To Get Your Boy Interested in Cooking

Related: The Man Who Unboiled an Egg - Science Fair Project on Bacterial Growth on Packaged Salads

The Moral Consequences of Your Decisions

2011-09-21T23:17:00.000-04:00

In response to: Being Wealthy Is Not Ungodly

When you have the power to alleviate suffering and chose not to do so is that acting with Christen charity? I don't think it is so easy to dismiss the contrast of a duty to your fellow man and your choice to live lavishly. Those choices should be taken with care and consideration. I strongly feel we in the USA are far to uncaring about the suffering of our fellow man. It is far too easy to isolate yourself and pretend you can't do anything, or that it isn't your concern.

Those are perfectly valid choices. But, I think it is much more difficult to say those are perfectly valid choice for a Christian to make. Christianity has great variation and there certainly are those that do not believe there is anything wrong with essentially not caring about human suffering you could address if you chose to. To me that is stretching the meaning of Christianity quite a bit but that is certainly people's right.

It is no fun to think that I could save people's lives if I just lived a simple life and didn't indulge. But that is the actual fact. You can chose to save people's lives or chose to live as we do in the USA, very lavishly. I make that choice myself. I give to charity but I could give much more if I just chose to do so. I just don't. That is a selfish choice that as a person I am entitled to make. But it is fraught with moral consequences.

In the USA we tend to want to avoid the stark consequences our actions have. When you are rich (and at least 60% of the USA is, probably much more, but I'll be generous - yes those in the USA don't feel that way, but that is mainly a sign of how much they believe the world owes them) you have the ability to help. Which is great, it is nice to have what you need and the ability to splurge on yourself or help others. But it also means you have to accept the moral consequences of your decisions. And it isn't some simple game. People die because of your decision. People suffer greatly because you chose not to help.

It is your right to make that decision. It is not your right to do so without accepting the moral consequences of the decision. And since I understand Christianity a bit better than other religions I know there is plenty of reason to question whether neglecting others to indulge yourself is acting as a Christian should. Christianity expects good acts, not just the avoidance of bad acts. Therefore, choosing to bypass the opportunity to help is not free from consequences. And morally, outside the Christen perspective, I don't see how you can avoid the consequences of your decisions. You have the right to chose. And your actions will show what you value (helping people in need, or say a new HDTV). You may want to pretend you are not deciding but the consequence of your being rich enough to decide is you are responsible for the choice you make.

Related: They Will Know We are Christians By Our Love - Super Spoiled Brats - Giving More Than Money to Charity - You Can Help Reduce Extreme Poverty - High School Team Project to Provide Clean Water - Appropriate Technology - Financial Thanksgiving

How About Only Enforcing Copyright in Your Country if the Owner Allows Your Citizens Access

2011-09-08T06:34:00.001-04:00

I have seen many title of articles over the last few months talking about how American politicians forced foreign countries to serve the interest of those giving large amounts of cash to the American politicians. Now I honestly haven't read the articles or the evidence presented in the wikileaks releases (supposedly showing the tactics used to push the interest of those paying politicians large amounts of cash).

The extent to which the policies of the USA were naked power plays to serve the interests of large donors surprises me a bit, but it is consistent with the large amount of such dealing for those paying USA politicians large amounts of money. It is fairly amazing how readily other countries sold out their citizens. But then again it isn't hard to imagine the USA offered deals (including not carry out threats) to get countries to go along with the interests of those giving USA politicians large amounts of cash.

In any event the release of the selling out of citizens is a great opportunity for some principled politicians to appeal to voters by saying they will no longer be the lapdogs of the lobbyists the USA government told them to follow. Right now many of the companies that used the USA government to pressure foreign governments into crazy policies even as favors to large USA political donors even when those donors refuse to allow those countries citizens to buy the products.

I suggest saying "our country will no longer enforce copyrights if the foreign country company refuses to allow your citizens to buy the product." For example, I can't watch BBC or USA network TV or use Netflix or buy the Kindle or... in many countries. If you want me to pass laws enforcing your copyrights then you allow my citizens to buy the products in questions.Some details would have to be worked out, my initial thoughts are any organization with sales or expenses over $1 billion must comply. And they may not charge more than double the price they charge others.

And that we don't intent to tolerate lawyer gimmicks like claiming some subsidiary in the Bahamas really owns... and therefore we are don't have to comply. If you play such games and we catch you, you forfeit all copyright claims in our country for that material. Negotiation can take place on the precise details. Until that time we do not agree to restrict our citizens access to material you have copyrighted in your country and refuse to allow my citizens to buy.

It seems like it has been long enough for companies to either start allowing my country to buy your products or quit telling me that I need to enforce your laws against my citizens. I realize the American government has pushed the policies of their big political donors into many international trade agreements. I am suggesting countries rebel from these policies that are treating their citizens as unimportant. We are willing to enforce some copyright rules as long as our citizens have a chance to buy the items. If not, once you do we will.

Amazon won't sell the kindle to many countries. Amazon will let you individually look at the status of every single country. Amazon seems at least somewhat interested in treating a few more countries as worthy of dealing with than many companies do. Still they don't allow those in China to buy it - isn't it made in China? You are good enough to make it but no we won't allow you to use it. Yes, I bet the claim is that those ip lawyers, and the like, refuse to allow Amazon to treat those that make the device with respect. I am tired of that thinking. My guess is Amazon wants to sell them. My guess is the same people paying the USA politicians to twist the arm of foreign governments are not allowing the sale in some way.

It is not ok, to treat most of the world as unworthy and as thieves. Allow them to buy the items or don't expect us to attack our citizens for you.In the information age if you citizens are denied the right to information your country will suffer.

It isn't ok to let those that pay USA politicians well harm your citizens. Now when those politicians just harm the USA that is their business, and the business of those that chose to elect them.

I'm sure many companies will say it is too hard for us to serve your citizens. Fine, then they can consume those goods any way they want. No I am not going to harm my citizens while you ignore them just because you think sometime maybe you will get around to caring enough about them. When you care to make them customers we will enforce reasonable copyright laws, until them the material is in affect open access. You can fix that buy making them customers. My problem, as leader of my country, is not how you make this work for your company, it is serving the citizens of my country. I'm willing to negotiate. I am not willing for you to pay your politicians to have them force us to bully our citizens.

The next thing that will be needed is for countries that have some leaders not so beholden to those paying them large amounts of money to create harmful copyright rules for society put some balance back into copyright rules. I'm sure there are plenty of people that can improve the ridiculously silly system we have now, but Lawrence Lessig would be a good person to talk to.

Then those countries can frame a sensible international treaty that benefits society not just a few people that pay politicians well. Hopefully you can lead the world, including the USA, to a better future.

Related: Copywrong - Deadly disease #9, A broken intellectual property system - What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Lessig Video: Information Revolution - Banks Hoping they Paid Politicians Enough to Protect Billions in Excessive Fees

Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans

2011-08-06T23:13:00.004-04:00

I am disheartened by how our society is being shaped in ways that I don't think most people agree with. The problem is the system that shapes society is not some wonderful system that collects and synthesizes the wants, desires, hope, dreams and hard work of individuals to create an ideal system for peace and prosperity of all mankind. Too bad. But that has never been the case. However, the level to which society is being malformed today by special interests manipulating things for their favor at the expense of society is disheartening.

One of those areas is the legal system that inhibits many positive things for society and encourages many negative things. It is within our power to shape society. But it is not within our desire.

Society is being shaped for us while we are not paying attention.

Here is one small example, of how we have somehow reached a place where honestly providing your opinion of an employee is dangerous to you (this harms: employees [not being able to get references that will speak], companies [not being able to get references on potential hires], society [the inefficiency added to the market is a negative cost with no benefit - just a reduction in everyone's standard of living] and the person not allowed to give an honest reference [not being able to be honest, help those that helped them...]):

What Employers Can Say About You When Giving References

This is why many employers have neutral reference policies, where they only give out dates of employment and job title. This is obviously safe information to give. I would caution employers who have neutral reference policies to apply them evenly. If you give positive or negative references to some employees, you could get socked with a discrimination claim.

Don't you think the huge negative externalities of limiting honest discussion of people's strengths and weaknesses is a sign of the sickness of the legal system? The reason we have a legal system to to help society function. Unfortunately it often does the opposite and makes society avoid activity that is good for society. There are good reasons for things like defamation suits when someone is behaving egregiously. When we force people to self sensor in order to avoid the hugely overreaching legal system that does great damage to our society.

People seem to think bad societal repercussions are inevitable. They are not. If we didn't roll over for run away legal activism we wouldn't have to put up with it. Not being able to be honest is not a good outcome for society. And, in fact, is against the moral code most people would subscribe too. Unfortunately we more an more are concerned not with what is moral, right or good but what is a bother and what pain the legal system will inflict on us for being honest.

Society is being shaped for us while we are busy making other plans.

We need the rule of law. The problem I see is that today the way that is being done (and not done) is harmful to our society. It is not that we need to eliminate the legal system. We need to fix it so it works to make society better and not so often to do damage to society instead.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. - Beautiful Boy, John Lennon, 1980
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." to Allen Saunders, 1957

Related: Bikinis For Liberty - Librarians Standing Up to the Madness - Copywrong - Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Bad Behavior - CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers

Saving for Retirement Globally

2011-08-03T07:13:00.002-04:00

Comment posted to: Does the idea of planning for retirement vary across the globe?

Huge numbers of people in the in the USA and I believe in England too, have done a horrible job of saving for retirement. Many in China save over 20% of their income. Why shouldn't they be confident. Also comparing to your parents in China is a pretty easy comparison to beat. I am still learning about Malaysia (I would imagine they save well - but it is possible they are just optimistic :-)

Saving for retirement everywhere is pretty basic. You have to save 8-12% of your income to have a decent shot at a good retirement. And in exceptional circumstances you need something different. I write about investing and retirement on one of my blogs: Retiring Overseas is an Appealing Option for Some Retirees, In the USA 43% Have Less Than $10,000 in Retirement Savings, Delaying Retirement – Working Longer.

Agile Software Development and Customer Delight

2011-06-15T17:38:00.002-04:00

Agile is about customer delight

If @jeffpatton's point is to emphasize the need to consider the customer more fully in Agile projects, then I am in total agreement. But one thing is for sure, Agile methods are much more directed at Customer Delight than many of the other methods available today

Jeff Patton might be right. I would say though, my belief is it makes customer delight more likely. Having a system of development that is more responsive is more likely to do so. In the agile context it would have a lot to do with the product manager - but I think the agile mindset would make it more likely the product manager could prioritize tasks to delight the customer (for various reasons - such as not having to spend so much time fighting over specs decided 9 months ago, having a mindset focused on what is most important now [rather than following what we promised somebody 6 months ago])... Agile might not directly lead to delight, but it sets a stage where that is much more likely - not only because of system improvements but changes in what people spend focus on.

Related: Curious Cat Management blog posts on customer focus - Involve IT Staff in Business Process Improvement

Current Look at Google PageRank of My Sites

2011-04-23T13:07:00.011-04:00

Google used to push major visible PageRank updates about quarterly and do very little, if any, pagerank changes at other times. Pagerank is a value given to the links coming into a web page on a logarithmic scale. So a PR of 2 is 10 times greater than 1 and 100 less than PR 4. It is named for Google co-founder and current CEO Larry Page. Google doesn't do the quarterly updates anymore (they have been less frequent) and seems to make many more adjustments to PageRanks all the time.

Now the visible PageRank is just a way of Google letting other people see the relative PageRanks of web pages. The real pagerank Google updates much more frequently. The real pagerank is what is used as a factor in search results. I also believe Google now includes penalties to visible pageranks that are not actually used in their search rankings. So they can show a visible indication that the site is not as highly ranked as it may be (this is most easily noticeable when pages have a reduction in pagerank with no real world explanation).

PageRank matter but is hardly a huge factor. It is much more important to have links from related pages than just high pagerank pages, for being ranked highly in Google search results. However a link from a page with a PR of 7 would be much better than and a very similar page with a PR of 1. Pagerank "passed" to the linked to page is divided by the total number of links on the page. So if you had a link from a relavent PR 7 page with 10 links that would provide 5 times more "pagerank" than the same PR 7 with 50 links.

Another thing I have noticed much more over the last few years is having PR for internal pages is much harder. Many sites with PR of 3 or even 4 on the homepage may have no other pages with PR. It seems to me, that this is true far more than the math would indicate, so my guess is Google is reducing PR internal often in some way I have no idea about. Again remember the displayed PR google provides doesn't have to correspond to the real one they calculate and use.

The displayed pagerank is more fun than a measure that can be relied on as an important measure. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-(

Check the current pagerank on your sites using our related site: Multiple Site PageRank checker.

Site	April 2011	Dec 2010	Dec 2008	July 2008
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog	6	4	5	5
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections*	5	4	3	3
Curiouscat.com	5	4	3	3
Management Dictionary*	5	4	3	3
Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site*	5	4
The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer*	5	4	3
Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership*	5	4	4
The Future is Engineering*	5	5
Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog	4	3	4	4
Deming's Management Method*	4	4
CSS 4 Free	4	4	4	5
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father)	4	4	4
externs.com - internship directory	4	4	4	4
John Hunter	4	4	4	4
Investment Dictionary*	4
Lean Management Resources*	4	4
Mortgage Rate Article*	4
Six Sigma Management Resources*	4
Rocky Mountain National Park photos*	4	3	-	2
Alumni Connections*	4	4	4	5
PDSA Improvement Cycle*	4
Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog	3	-
Living in Malaysia	-
Statistics for Experimenters	3	4	3	4
Management Improvement Resources	3	3	3
Credit Card Tips	3
Management and Leadership Quotes	2	2
Wordpress Themes for Free	3	3	3
Multi Site PageRank Checker	2	2	1	3
Justin Hunter (my brother)	2	2	2
Curious Cat Web Directory	**	3	3	4
Best Research University Rankings*	3	3	4
Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos	2	2	-
Sea World - Australia	2	2
Living in Singapore	-
Reddit management*	7	4	0
Curious Cat Code (programming)	0	0
My Kiva page	-			3
Curious Cat Articles and Links (this blog)	-		3	3

* internal pages
** new url as of January 2011
- unranked
[blank] I don't know what the pagerank was, sometimes the site didn't exist yet.

In my experience it is often more telling how the pagerank of internal pages. The sites that have high ranking internal pages are much rarer than site with say a pagerank of 4 or even 5 on the home page.

Also note that a PR of 4 could be nearly 10 times higher than another PR 4. For example if 3.5 is shown as 4 (Google only shows an integer) and 4.4 is shown as 4 given the logarithmic scale used the 4.4 would be 9 times greater than the 3.5. PageRanks are logarithmic and then compared to the other pages on the web. So if a site was very close to 3.5 it might show up as 3 one time then 4 then 3 again... all without any significant change. On the other hand going from the absolute lowest 3 to the absolute highest 4 could be nearly a 100 times increase.

Related: Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008 - Web Page Authority - 6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see - PageRank Distribution - Google's Search Results - Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used

Understanding Technology and Programing is Vital

2011-04-12T20:10:00.002-04:00

In the future, will we *all* have to code?

However, if you want to put together a quick prototype, but use real content, then that kind of implies hooking it into a back-end database.
...
David Haynes from Soundcloud suggest that developers are the people who are shaping the sound of modern music. And there is a constant debate these days in the journalism world about whether journalists need to learn how to code.

So, are we all going to have to learn how to code?
...
[pairing] allows both parties to use their areas of expertise to develop something that is potentially bigger than the sum of its parts, rather than dumbing down software development to a commodity level.

Oh, and just a little something to throw into the mix - the pressure seems to be coming from both directions. Last week Tyler Tate posted “Why developers should become UX designers”

I believe most importantly we will all need to have a coding mentality. The world has changed from 50 years ago. It is hard to imagine making serious decisions about priorities for most any organization without a basic appreciation of coding. Here I am talking about something a bit different than you, I am talking about program managers that are not going to be doing anything related to creating the code behind the effort and executives... I don't understand how people think they can continue to be ignorant about technology and hope to be relevant. I don't think you need to have the knowledge to code yourself but you need to be much more knowledgeable than most people are today. And really if you are under 40 (maybe over that you can hope to slide by into the sunset without suffering too much from your ignorance but that is a dangerous gamble), I think you have to try to pick up coding in simple ways. Not to be an expert but to be able to at least understand the capabilities, the tradeoffs, databases, Ux principles...

My guess is over the next 20 years we will figure out much better ways to let people gain knowledge of coding ideas without having to become coders. But until then I think it is imperative for most people to realize to comprehend the modern world they need to gain an understanding of coding (even if they are not going to be an expert).

I agree strongly with your thoughts on pairing with experts. It is much easier to pair if you at least comprehend the general ideas of the others areas of expertise. I don't think it is great to dumb things down to the level one expert can do the others job. But I think it is critical to understand that your expertise is part of a system. The Ux is part of the solution. Coding is part of the solution. The whole is what matters.

However, if you want to put together a quick prototype, but use real content"

Absolutely. Prototypes without real data lose a great deal. Super quick, first drafts maybe that is ok. But quickly getting to prototypes that are integrated with real data should be the goal.

Related: Management By IT Crowd Bosses - Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work - Involve IT Staff in Business Process Improvement - Internet Access at Work

Making Money from Your Yard

2011-04-06T12:49:00.002-04:00

I don't spend anything on yard maintenance. Though I do occasionally buy new plants and use water. Things grow fine. I put weeds occasionally. And use an electric mower for the lawn.

Not only that I eat from my yard. In reality this doesn't save a huge amount, though it does save some. It is much more about getting yummy food that is also healthy. The amount I spend for tomatoes plants say is easily paid back with the food produced. My favorite is wine berries and those I paid nothing for (a bird helped me plant them, I think). I bought 2 blackberry plants years ago and they keep spreading and giving me yummy food for free.

I also feed the backyard wildlife (which include butterflies, chipmunks, hummingbirds, robins, crows, turtles, rabbits, hawks, love birds, bees, squires, woodpeckers, preying mantises, ants even a fox) by planting (butterfly bush) and encouraging plants (holly trees and bushes - transplanting little ones that sprout, berries that sprout, mimosa trees...) that have food for animals.

I also have plenty of flowers that just return year after year: First Flowers of Spring, Spring Tulips.

Related: Growing Lettuce in My Backyard - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Is the stock market efficient?

2011-03-22T10:16:00.002-04:00

I believe in weak stock market efficiency. I believe that the market does a good job of factoring in news and conditions but that the "wisdom of crowds" is far from perfect. There are plenty of valuing weaknesses that can lead to inefficient pricing and opportunities for gain. The simplest of those are spotted and then adopted by enough money that they become efficient and don't allow significant gains.

And a big problem for investors is that while I think there are plenty of inefficiencies to take advantage of finding them and investing successfully is quite hard. And so most that try do not succeed (do not get a return that justifies their time and risk - overall trying to take advantage of inefficiencies is likely to be more risky). Some Inefficiencies however seem to persist and allow low risk gains - such as investing in boring undervalued stocks. Read Ben Graham's books for great investing ideas.

Related: Market Inefficiencies and Efficient Market Theory - Lazy Portfolios Seven-year Winning Streak - investing in stocks

Productivity Growth and Government Debt

2011-03-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

Who reaps the rewards of productivity?

Productivity matters for the prosperity of children because it measures the amount that an average worker produces in an hour of work. If productivity rises by 10% over three years, that means that we can produce 10% more output with the same amount of work than we could three years ago. The size of the economy was roughly $14tn three years. A 10% rise in productivity means that we can produce approximately $1.4tn more this year with the same amount of work. This would come to an additional $18,000 a year for an average family of four.

Alternatively, a 10% rise in productivity would mean that we could produce the same amount of output as we did three years ago, while working 10% less time.
...
At this point, the politicians start screaming about the debt bankrupting our kids. The problem with this claim is that our kids will own the debt. At some point, all of us will be dead, meaning that the people who hold the bonds that constitute the debt will be our children and grandchildren.

How can holding government bonds make our children bankrupt?

The author dismisses the problem of foreign ownership of government debt erroneously. The problem is if you have to pay foreigners the interest that is essentially a tax on current production to pay for past overspending.

Japan has far more government debt than other countries. http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/10/18/government-debt-as-percentage-of-gdp-1990-2009-usa-japan-germany-china%E2%80%A6/ Yet that is not as big a problem as it seems as they owe most of it to themselves. That is still not a great condition to be in but it means you will just have to pay a portion of yearly production to pay off a segment of society that owns that debt (it stays within your country).

Now all of this gets much more messy nowadays as the borders are much more transparent and movement is much easier...

I agree that productivity improvements are great and will help with the problem. But you have to understand that productivity measurements are extremely unreliable. All economic data has issues (see all the consternation over unemployment and inflation data) but productivity measures may well be the most problematic. They rely on significant guesses about what is really going on and have issues with short term unsustainable 'gains' often due to layoff, cutting maintenance... (things that get better productivity numbers but may well just be measurement issues not sustainable productivity improvements).

The author does correctly point out the problem of foreign ownership of debt is due to us living beyond our means (not in those words though) and borrowing from foreigners to sustain this level of comfort (just like the government is doing itself).

Related: The USA Economy Needs to Reduce Personal and Government Debt - Government Debt, Greece is a Very Small Part of the Problem - Dollar Decline Due to Government Debt or Total Debt? - Economic Measurement Issues Arising from Globalization

Google Rank Patent for Delegation Authority Factors

2011-03-12T16:10:00.000-05:00

Delegated authority evaluation system (patent application)

The evaluation system is managed by a primary authority that designates one or more contributing authorities by delegating to each a specific quantity of authority.
...
Each contributing authority, and optionally the primary authority itself, may evaluate one or more portions of content by associating a rating with each evaluated portion of content. A composite rating for a particular portion of content may then be determined based upon the ratings associated with the portion of content. Preferably, the ratings are combined in a manner that affords a higher priority to the ratings provided by contributing authorities to which a greater quantity of authority was delegated.

The Evolution of Google Ratings (Experts Delegating Authority)?

The important part of the patent is that this rating system involves experts on specific topics, who might delegate some of their authority to others when providing ratings.
...
Maybe elements of this rating system might be incorporated into the social network that Google is said to be launching sometime next year.

Couldn't they also just tweak the pagerank passed to be somewhat more user-definable. I could to pass 40% of the pagerank to x link and split up the rest to all links. And adding it to be specifically targeted to keywords wouldn't be that hard. The bigger problem, I would think, is getting people to spend their time doing that. So somehow meta tools would be needed to make this practical. I am not sure how they would work but I could imagine some such system working pretty well.

There would obviously be all sorts of gaming risks that would have to be dealt with somehow.

Google does now provide search results enhanced by your social network (showing links they tweeted...). My guess is Google increases the rank of those pages - though maybe they leave the rank the same and just add a little note for you to see.

6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see

2011-03-10T23:16:00.004-05:00

A bit over 6 years ago I suggested a few things to improve Google search results (Jan 2005) they have finally adopted the feature:

Ability to restrict sites from the search results in my preferences (Google doesn't seem to be able to restrict certain obvious spam names databases from results, so let me do so myself. It would be best if there could be filter lists that are maintained by various communities that I could choose to apply. I can imagine there are technical hurdles to overcome to make this a reality).

Then I posted about how Google should improve, again a year later

Let me remove web sites from my default searches. I would imagine this could even be used to help Google’s normal search results by getting a sense of sites huge numbers of people “block” The same spam sites show up for searches and I would rather block them if Google can’t figure out how to do so.

Hide sites to find more of what you want

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.

Better later than never. But 6 internet years is a long time to wait.

Related: Google Social Circle Results - Search Share Data, Checking the ACSI - find management content online

Education, Training and Employment

2011-03-05T17:21:00.002-05:00

Education and employment

we ought to have... far more widespread, transparent and effective systems for labour market matching between job-seekers and openings, taking into account what really makes the difference between "just a job" and genuine employee engagement, satisfaction and development.

I agree with this sentiment to some extent. I also didn't expect much of any direct connection when I was a student. I like studying economics but I really don't see the value in many economics students actually being practicing economists. I figured I was getting a education that would allow me to learn and adapt throughout my life - the old fashioned idea of liberal arts education. I think that is great for many people.

But more people seem to want to finish school with skills (using college as a technical school but that they can see as superior to technical schools). And I think the market for these types of customer/students probably exceeds that wanting to be educated in a broad, and not necessarily directly applicable sense.

I also believe that even with a liberal arts education it makes sense to make it relevant. To participate in modern society without an understanding of science and technology is very limiting.

Related: A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers - Applying Lean Management Tools to University Courses - Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education - The Future is Engineering

Health Care System Remains Broken, Neglected

2011-01-31T18:45:00.001-05:00

I think the real problem is decades of resistance to fundamental change. The health care system in the USA has been broken for decades and resisted change to bring costs and other burdens into line with other rich countries. Piling on decades of neglect to a system broken decades ago has left a huge (huge - over 17% of GDP, costs twice as high as many other rich countries and results no better than average rich countries) problem. Trying to reform a huge broken system after the crisis point has been reached (where we are now) is very difficult. I think looking for short term causes of the current problems is deceptive. The real cause of the current mess is decades in the making.

The USA health care system is huge. Tons of great stuff has been done for decades. The problem is with such a huge system enormous problems remain and have festered for decades. I think things will get much worse (difficult to deal with the long overdue needed, improvement) before getting better. The system is unimaginably expensive and wasteful. The fundamental brokenness continues to be ignored. Even the good stuff being done now, seems to be minor compared to the fundamental changes needed.

The USA economy has many problems and strengths. The health care problem remains the largest - larger than investment banking, unemployment, unfunded liabilities (which the health care system is by far the largest factor - unfunded retire health care costs), huge jail population, education system needing improvement... The good news is the USA economy, even with all this, has enough strengths to carry the weak parts of the economy for decades to come. It is true however, that even the USA economy cannot carry huge under performing parts of the economy forever and remain strong. Of all the economic problems we face, failing to address the huge problems in the health care system is the most likely to lead to a dramatic decline in the USA's economic future. We have avoided systemic changes for decades. Year after year the problem grows (even with lots and lots of great things being done - which seem large but are unnoticeable within the enormous scope of the problem) - with the health care system not only costing more but a larger percentage of GDP EVERY YEAR for decades (I may be wrong but I think this is true). Dr. Deming pointed out the system was a deadly disease decades ago. And it has gotten worse (costing more and continuing huge economic problems - huge cost to business and people and huge worry, bankruptcies, focus on disease treatment not health care...).

I'm sorry to say I think things will get much more hectic in the coming decades than they have been as the cumulative effect of putting off needed system improvements for decades come home to roost.

Reaction to, Industry in Crisis

Across the nation delivery systems, policy makers, insurers and consultants are searching for new ways to solve problems or create value. Systems are banding together to form Accountable Care Organizations, we are reorganizing around Value Streams, Value Based Benefit plans are getting created to shape behaviors, large hospital systems are buying practices and consolidating the market etc. The list goes on and on.

The good news is that there seems to be more experimentation taking place than ever before and some ideas are gaining traction (just read Atul Gwande’s article last week in the New Yorker or my own organizations work in the Medical Home and Hospital Transitions). The challenge is that so many things are happening all at once that our current management systems are neither disciplined nor flexible enough to effectively manage this change.

Unemployment - hidden activity?

2011-01-05T11:06:00.007-05:00

I Wonder How Many Unemployed Folks Are Hustling

But the idea here is that "hustling" is any kind of economic activity that you are not reporting to the government; either because you don't want to go to jail or just don't want to pay taxes or for them to know how much you make.
...
Are my hypothetical self and this real life person the majority of the unemployed? Of course not. But you've got to at least wonder how many of them are out there.

Probably the most important part of that measure would be a measure of the change in that during the employment cycle. If it were say 2% of the population every year while the IRS might want to know it isn't a huge factor in thinking about the state of the economy and employment. If it is 8% of the population today, and was 2% 5 years ago, that would be more interesting and let you know the situation may not be as bad as you think (looking just at employment data). I personally doubt it is a significant macro-economic factor (the variation in it during the employment cycle).

Looking at this rate between countries would probably provide valuable information. Some of the Euro and bank scandals have shown the underpaying of taxes by Europeans and also the rich Americans suing to prevent disclosure of their fraudulent tax avoidance aided by large bailed out banks.

Related: How do I Know What Unemployment Statistics Mean? - Another 663,000 Jobs Lost in March, 2009 in the USA - Can Bankers Avoid Taking Responsibility Again?

The TSA doesn’t give a hoot about security

2010-11-28T12:51:00.001-05:00

Jobs I am Glad I Don't Have

So, it appears that the TSA has a choice. Be vigorous in its inspection and be blasted for invasion of privacy, or use less rigorous methods, and face the consequences of missing dangerous materials.

I think you raise the wrong question. I think your question is similar to a CEO saying to Taiichi Ohno:

I care most about quality - providing excellent products to the customer. Either add more inspectors or tell me we have enough inspectors and tell me who we need to replace. The answer Taiichi Ohno would give is to change the way we work to be better, not just add more resources to try and cope with a bad system. More of my thoughts on the topic the TSA doesn't give a hoot about security.

There is another choice - find effective methods to improve quality (better security), reduce waste ($ spent by TSA, people wasting time in line...), respect people. There are many bad things about the current situation at airports they include:

poor security measures (not well designed to reduce risks), and

far too intrusive

Both should be fixed. As well as reducing waste. And the way to do so is to change the system - not either add to or take away from what is done now.

The front line TSA people are in a horrible situation. This is the classic situation where Dr. Deming would empathize with the employees and blast the senior leadership who have failed their customers and their employees.

Related: Bikinis For Liberty - Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Exposing Bad Behavior

Bikinis For Liberty

2010-11-10T22:35:00.006-05:00

The United States Transportation Agency is choosing to take extremely controversial tactics. See the video for details. I am amazed that this hasn't been shut down extremely quickly. Normally such lunacy is not allowed to continue, no matter what fear tactics people try to use to justify their extremely disturbing actions. Such failures to watch the watchmen are often taken when it just seems easier to ignore that bad action because we can hope it won't happen again. This is just a nightmare it seems to me for all those who currently have already failed to stop this behavior. I will be amazed if senior officials are not gone within 1 month for allowing this to last more than 1 day. But I have been amazed before, so...

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Tip/Wag - TSA, Bert & Dogs<a>

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

March to Keep Fear Alive

Reddit, an online community, has a significant number of people that have been galvanized by this attack on liberty and want to take action to bring about change in how our government acts. And the first step is to look at bringing attention to the misdeeds.

A response to this attack on liberty requires a campaign. I ran across an wonderful idea as a comment on We Won't Fly. I wouldn't see this idea as the lead but as supporting campaign. There seem to be some powerfully good ideas that could form the foundation for a campaign, already. The idea is that you have a way to opt out of those 2 degradations (the "naked" scan or being groped) - go to the airport in a spedo or bikini. It seems to me creative ad people could make something good with that.

The idea isn't mine, I saw a comment from Clark:

I wonder, if some brave souls go to the airport in bikini or speedos would they be exempt from both types of searches?

I think it actually is a good option for people to chose. It is sad the government is forcing people to make such a choice, but given the governments options of degradation, this option, it seems to me may well be less degrading for most. And I can't image how they could try and require you to subject yourself to one of those degradations if you did make nearly everything visible.

It also has the advantage of providing some good news footage making visible the lengths people have to go to to avoid the governments heavy handed actions. It would seem to me a whole mass of people could go to the airport dressed like that for flights and it would make a pretty good photo op. Also it is the least confrontational of any of those such ideas (at least that I have seen).

I really am sick of how our country has allowed itself to degrade liberty to such an extent http://curiouscatlinks.blogspot.com/2008/04/freedom-increasingly-at-risk.html

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me."
Martin Niemoeller

I understand there are risks the government is trying to mitigate. The actions they are taking now are not acceptable. They need to think and find much better solutions. And if they can't come up with them they need to resign and then be replaced with some people that can.

Related: Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment - Librarians Standing Up to the Madness - Failure to Address Systemic SWAT Raid Failures - Preaching False Ideas to Men Known to be Idiots - Shining the light on the actions of those in power

Pointless security - Unions tell pilots to avoid body scanners at airports - Growing anxiety over airport pat-downs and scanners

Curious, Joyful, Happy Kids Grow Up: Unfortunately

2010-11-08T22:48:00.008-05:00

I must admit I find the wonder kids have amazingly refreshing. When I was a kid I just took it for granted. Now, unfortunately surround by way too many incurious, blasé, dreary adults I realize the kids really have a much better idea how to live than we adults do.

Have some fun. Have some fun with a cardboard box and a stick. Or a plastic dinosaur and a small firetruck. Or just reading a book, for the 56th time this year, about how some cat goes to the store.

Meanwhile I think an alien could appear on the subway and most of my fellow passengers would only be concerned if it was taking up too much space or blocked their exit, and if not, maybe not even notice it.

Hey, maybe this is why my parents always asked me "what did you do today?"
Me: [Jeez stop hounding me, Dad] "Nothing"
Actually what I did: played in a puddle; landed on the moon with Rachel and Dan and brought some moon rocks back to play with; learned that we named the people in North America, Indians, when Christopher Columbus came because we were completely wrong about who they actually were and somehow never got around to fixing that error (another strike against you crazy adults); and decided that really chocolate ice cream is better than spinach and adults don't have any idea what they are talking about.]

Me: [Why the heck do I want to talk about that stuff, you are an adult you must have done much cooler stuff. You get to do whatever you want, you are not trapped all day being ordered around by big adults who can make you do whatever they want :-(]. "Yuck, spinach" :-( [I can't wait until I get to just eat chocolate ice cream and no spinach]

Well maybe I now finally figured out why adults want to know what kids did every day - they might get some vicarious joy (having nearly forgotten how to find a falling leaf, or cool green shoe joyful). Now why people want to know what their spouse did, I still don't understand that :-)

Just watching the faces of adults and kids is amazing. Adults, by and large show no joy. A kid's face will show more joy when they see their Mom for the 8th time today than an adult will in the entire month. I just have to believe that is not a good sign. As a kid I didn't think adults had much of a clue or very good reasons for why things had to be certain ways. Of course, as a kid, I was unreasonable and had to wait to grow up and then I would understand. I have to say I think my kid self had most of it right.

I didn't get how trapped we become as adults into day to day lives we don't mean to chose - I did get that wrong. But I am not sure I was wrong that we shouldn't do that. But it is harder than I thought to avoid it (especially since I didn't think it was even a risk that an adult would be stuck doing stuff about as fun as being stuck in a chair and being lectured to with a bunch of other people all day long about stuff you often couldn't care about at all).

What is exciting to me now? Refinancing my mortgage at 3.75%. Now that is great. But, I think most 7 year olds have much better things they are excited about.

Photo of my nephews by my brother.

Related: The freedom to act before you have been trained to follow convention, at all costs - Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap - Letting Children Learn – Hole in the Wall Computers - Amy's Halloween Costume

Photo of my nephew at the Staten Island Children's Museum. We need to get back to that time when we spend through life in a blur of wonder and excitement.

Oregon, TCU, Boise State, Auburn...

2010-11-07T13:44:00.003-05:00

Oregon, TCU and Boise State are all great college football teams. If Auburn wins their next 2 games they will be up there with those 3.

I hope we get TCU or Boise State in the championship game and the other versus Auburn, Oregon, LSU, Stanford or Alabama. Boise State v Oregon and TCU v. Auburn would be great. I think Boise State and TCU would beat most other teams badly - and probably would beat some of those teams above badly. On a good day one of the Big Ten schools might be able to be competitive but I think they would most likely be destroyed. I think even with a loss either TCU or Boise State are no worse than 5th. I am a long time Badger fan, we good this year but good about 15th, not good 7th...

Even though I think TCU and Boise State could be the best 2 teams I hope we don't get that as the title game. I really would rather see those 2 teams play and beat the best of the rest of the teams. Or fail to do so. Oregon might have a chance to beat them. Though I would favor TCU and Boise State against whatever team they play.

My ranking
1 - Oregon, TCU, Boise State
4 - Auburn
5 - LSU
6 - Stanford
7 - Wisconsin
8 - Michigan State
9 - Nebraska
10 - Iowa
11 - Arkansas
12 - Alabama
13 - Ohio State

I feel the teams from about 7 - 18 are very closely matched. The SEC is packed with very good teams. Unlike past years where schools that weren't that good were threatening to sneak by without deserving it. I think Boise State and TCU are clearly among the best few teams in the country.

Bad Government, Closed Access

2010-10-25T19:19:00.005-04:00

Charging money for laws that people must follow. Great talk. We really do need to stop allowing special interests to so completely take from the public for very bad reasons. We need to replace dinosaurs that don't understand that closed, proprietary systems are dangerous and should be avoided when possible (and tolerated while continuing to look for better solutions).

Pulic.Resource.Org. Public.Resource.Org is a receipient of the Project 10100 Award from Google.

Related: Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle - What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - The Differences Between Culture and Code

Economic Freedom

2010-10-17T09:53:00.002-04:00

The "Economic Freedom Index" Isn't

For example, by any valid measure of economic freedom, the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would have been considered an upward surge in statism and protectionism unequaled since (at least) the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. But Heritage, a co-creator of the Index, is one of the most strident advocates, inside the pseudo-libertarian beltway establishment, of global “intellectual property” enforcement expansion.

The Economic Freedom Index fails to distinguish between the primary, structural forms of state intervention that prop up corporate power, and the secondary, ameliorative forms of intervention that attempt to moderate its side effects. The state enforces a whole host of artificial property rights and artificial scarcities which serve as sources of economic rent to privileged firms, and maintains all sorts of regulatory cartels.
...
If I didn't know better, if I didn't know that real free markets were the enemies of corporate power, I’d hate them myself.

Very well said. I completely agree with your statement that "real free markets were the enemies of corporate power." I find myself frustrated at those that argue capitalism is bad because... and then they talk about corporate welfare policies, policies aimed at paying off those that pay politicians etc.. That are not capitalism. And the others that claim they like capitalism and basically they just want the government to support big business interests and their policies. Real capitalism does a great job of providing economic wealth to the population. And it must be regulated sensible (that is part of capitalism not some add on). You need to regulate negative externalities (pollution etc.). You need to enforce the rule of law. It makes sense to have patents and copyright (but they need to balance the interests of the parties involved to promote societal benefit and individual reward, to encourage people to invest their time and resources).

Related: Copywrong - Have We Lost Our Capitalist Heritage? - China and the Sugar Industry Tax Consumers

Suicides: Foxconn, Cornell and the Golden Gate Bridge

2010-08-07T08:39:00.006-04:00

Wrong on So Many Levels

Foxconn Installs Antijumping Nets at Hebei Plants. Anti-jumping nets?

Having built safety nets along its employee dormitories after a series of jumping suicides at its Shenzhen production plant, Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which uses the trade name Foxconn, is now installing the same sort of nets at some of its inland factories

...
If things are so bad that people would rather hurl themselves off of tall buildings than work in a Foxconn factory (or even just go find a factory job down the street) it seems like Foxconn should put the nets on the doors of their factories to catch people from going in.
...
The 42,000 employees in the Shenzhen plant assemble nearly 70% of the iPhones and iPads for Apple. There have been 10 factory workers who jumped to their deaths in the first 5 months of 2010 at the Shenzhen plant

It is wrong on many levels. I do think Apple has some responsibility. I do think human psychology around suicide is complex and confusing and cause and affect can be confused by correlation not cause.

Putting the nets there sure looks lame, and like non-root cause problems solving. But if they actually save lives then what? There are nets below the Golden Gate bridge (also to reduce suicide deaths) after quite a bit of debate. It sure takes a long time for them to act. 2 years later and still barely moving forward.

Cornell University has a long term problem with suicide jumpers, 6 this year - and they have installed suicide prevention fences:

Several suicides clustered in a close proximity of time and location, such as what Cornell experienced in late winter, are known to cause an "imitation" effect on vulnerable members of the community, elevating their risk of suicide. No one knows for sure how long the elevated risk can last, but the mental health professionals Cornell consulted said that it is very likely to continue for the foreseeable future and strongly recommended that temporary barriers remain in place while permanent means restriction measures are explored and designed.

I am not at all sure the suicide prevention nets at Foxconn are a bad idea. They certainly "look" (visually, and the image they convey is not being very root cause problem solving like) bad.

If we examine Cornell and Foxconn together what answers might we find? I think there are things to fix at Foxconn, but it is very easy for those of us the USA to just paint management as villainous. I don't think we will paint Cornell professors as villainous. Foxconn absolutely needs to do much more than put up nets. But whether putting up nets is good short term fix (like Cornell's) I think is at least debatable.

Problem solving can be quite complex. Especially with something like suicide where the causes are very likely to be varied and systemic. I doubt you will find one root cause. You may find at Foxcon: low wages (and the pressures that brings on as one factor - Foxconn doubled wages recently), lack of joy in work (to an extreme level - truly feeling like a cog in a machine with no hope), "imitation effect", homesickness (moving to the factor hundreds or miles from home and living in a dorm), youngness (hormones, lack of life experience, exaggerated importance... - similar at Cornell and Foxconn), perhaps abusive practices in the factory, perhaps other psychology in the factory (low light, long hours, painful work...), perhaps bullying of peers...

I think a good systemic solution will look at what I think all management should look at: practicing respect for people and creating joy in work. But that isn't an overnight solution, even if they wanted to pursue that strategy (which I don't see any evidence that they do). It will take time to change the system. It is something that I think can address the systemic root causes.

Related: Auto Manufacturing in 2009: USA 5.7 million, Japan 7.9 million, China 13.8 million - Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation - USA, China and Japan Lead Manufacturing Output in 2008 - China’s Manufacturing Economy

They Will Know We are Christians By Our Love

2010-07-10T14:09:00.003-04:00

Peter Scholtes was a friend. He wrote a great song: They Will Know We are Christians By Our Love (we are One in the Spirit). Here are several versions of the song:

Lyrics to They Will Know We are Christians by our Love:

We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord
We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord
And we pray that all unity will one day be restored

And they'll Know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.

We will walk with each other we will walk hand in hand
We will walk with each other we will walk hand in hand
And together we'll spread the news that God is in our land.

We will work with each other we will work side by side
We will work with each other we will work side by side
And we'll guard each man's dignity and save each man's pride

All praise to the father from whom all things come
And all praise to Christ Jesus his only son
And all praise to the spirit who makes us one.

Related: Books and articles by Peter Scholtes - Company Culture - Amazing Grace - John Dower

War is Horrible

2010-07-04T16:13:00.002-04:00

War is horrible. It may well be necessary at times, unfortunately. But it is horrible and pretending otherwise is a mistake.

Unfortunately governments have taken advantage of several factors to hide the costs of war. We are by and large sheep that take whatever news the government gives (on military and security matters). The government decided to eliminate (or drastically reduce) images that would make us question war and paint anyone that finds this bad as potentially in league with the enemies. That we have taken such treatment is sad. We do have some journalist that write actual news but that seems to be something most news media types object to.

The Hidden Cost of War by Ron Paul

War is dirty and horrible and even in a good war (if such a thing exists, but lets just say it does) there will be tons of stuff that is very disturbing to see. I don't think the solution to that is to stop seeing the disturbing images, data... I believe we should do things that are sensible which can be seen as very bad and openly accept the criticism and explain why it is necessary.

But the government knows this is a bad strategy if your goal is to make people like you. Explaining why horrible things are necessary doesn't get people to like you, by and large. It is much easier to just smile and speak about abstract ideas and hope no-one looks behind the curtain. Most won't. It works well.
I suppose part of the explanation for why we don't demand more is that those that like the unexamined wars are good at selling their views. All the ridicules stuff they do where they try to claim any examination is an insult to the soldiers... Equating support of whatever they believe with patriotism and anyone criticizing those views as unpatriotic... They have learned that manipulating the media to manipulate the populace is much easier than honestly delving into the options, costs, risk and trade-offs that must be considered. But I would say mostly it is because we are sheep. And we don't like to hear bad news and about suffering. So we are perfectly willing to be ignorant of the cost of war.

And above I am focusing on the human costs of war. The killing, injuries, loss of freedom, loss of fathers, mental health problems of returning soldiers... The financial costs are also huge and as a conscious strategy of those who don't want to examine the costs of war largely left out of the debate.

The War on Terror is now more expensive than Vietnam or World War I—but the dishonest way Washington is paying for it may prove costliest of all. - The $3 Trillion War

A Warning from History: Don’t expect democracy in Iraq by John W. Dower, February, 2003.

Related: Iraq: the Human Cost - Preaching False Ideas to Men Known to be Idiots - National Book Award (1999): Embracing Defeat - Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment - The First Amendment - Walter Reed Patients Told to Keep Quiet

Google Voice for Everyone in the USA

2010-06-22T17:57:00.003-04:00

I have been using Google Voice for a couple years now (from when it was Grand Central). It is great. Now it is openly available

The messages "transcribed" and sent to your email is nice (though it is still fairly lame). The ability to force unknown numbers to announce themselves before being put through to your phone is awesome. No more spam calls at all. You can also send calls to any of your phones based on show is calling. Basically it is great and it is free. There are lots of features I don't even use but the best features for me are call screening and emails with the voice messages. I don't have to worry about giving my phone number to business that will then abuse the information they were provided -
Google Voice gives me control over who can ring my phone and who must first leave a message.

Related: Droid Incredible - Kiss Your Phone Bill Good-bye - Save Money on Cell Phone Service, Price Reductions - Google Operating System (Chrome)

Adam Smith Supported Using Markets to Serve Society Not Robber Barrons

2010-06-06T12:29:00.004-04:00

The Beast Unchained: Privatizing Up, Down, and Inside

If we cede our minds "in here" to the beasts of private enterprise, they will hold the keys to our global mind, and it will be to them that we will have to turn when the challenges before us demand that we apply our minds "in here" most keenly.

The fanciful idea behind unfettered free markets and private enterprise — Adam Smith's "invisible hand" — is the law of the jungle, in which we imagine that we can ride on the back of perfect predators, unchained from public regulation and common purpose.

Adam Smith did have great ideas on economics. However, those quoting him now often do him grave injustice. Including those that think he argued for an unregulated market. He was first a moral philosopher who looked at emerging capitalism to document how it markets work and detail that direct intervention was often not the ideal solution. Basically taking a systemic view that markets can react better at meeting some societal needs than individuals making decision.

Adam Smith completely understood businesses would seek unfair advantage in the market. For capitalism to work the market must be regulated. In addition, the externalities (pollution, risks…) are failing in the market – and must somehow be addressed for markets to work.

Adam Smith did not believe free markets were the end (the aim). He believed the greatest good to society would come when the market was allowed to operate efficiently but that those players in the market would attempt to subvert societal good for their own good and that needed to be managed.

We should not allow those seeking to take from society what they don't deserve to claim such immoral behavior (that Adam Smith saw as wrong) to claim support from Adam Smith for their desires.

Related: Monopolies and Oligopolies do not a Free Market Make - What Capitalism Is, And Is Not - There is No Invisible Hand

Erica's Adventures In Saudi Arabia

2010-05-30T16:10:00.004-04:00

Erica has some great adventures in Saudi Arabia, catching Spike the uromastyx (giant lizard), catching a Bufo dhufarensis (toad), and finding Cistanche flowers. Great stuff.

Related: kid in a claw game - Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap - Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly

Earthlink/Covad - Failure after Failure and No Desire to Improve

2010-05-07T20:29:00.004-04:00

Earthlink supplies my internet connection (via Covad). the connection is remarkably bad. Normally it will fail several times a month but for relatively short periods of time when I actually want to use it (under an hour). As I say very bad but given teh monopolistic behavaior of the alternatives I haven't switched. Who actually choses to subject themselves the Verizon or Comcast if they have any way of avoiding it?

For several days the connections has become 3rd world like. Down over 1/3 of the time for 3 days.

Here are some example ping results from teh last few days
8562 packets transmitted, 5621 received, 34% packet loss, time 8570442ms
135 packets transmitted, 3 received, 97% packet loss, time 134157ms
140 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 139189ms
346 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 345519ms
281 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 280259ms

Calling up for support I have learned over the years is useless. they force you through all sorts of obvious steps to waste time that I have already told them I tried and failed. Every time they go through the same steps of forcing you to remove your router, test out this and that and every time it does nothing. The connection is somehow broken, having nothing to do with my local setup but they never will explore that problem. All they will do is go through the steps and find out wow the connection doesn't work. No kidding. They now add an amazingly horrible push button hell that fails to provide sensible options - press 1 if you service works, press 2 if you want to check on your email.... repeated over and over - no actual option.

Yesterday - since the service is obviously broken I gave up and spent 2 hours trying to deal with them. the sum total of that was 2 hours wasted and the "support" person just hung up after getting tired of seeing that the options they were trying failed as I told them they would. Not surprisingly Earthlink just dropped the matter. No follow up by them on the "service" they were providing. I called back twice and asked for them to tell me what had been done, what steps they took after hanging up (or if the call really was just disconnected... in which case we all know no-one interested in service would then just abandon the service because the call was disconnected...). Nothing is the answer. And again, I asked. Again more nothing.

They have devolved to be so bad that I have to consider using 2 companies that have "service" records only rivaled by soviet era collectives. What a sad state of affairs we have created that we force people to rely on such horrible service if they want to have a connection to the internet.

What fixes the problem of the broken connection Earthlink and Covad provide me. Wait. That is it. The only thing that helps is waiting. Normally that means every month or two I just don't get to use the internet when I want. The last 3 days it has meant I don't get to use it for many hours on end (over 6 yesterday) or it is repeatedly interrupted for 2-25 minutes and then comes back then breaks then comes back. All the fiddling with settings and rebooting and... accomplishes nothing. Just behave like a soviet citizen in 1979 and be happy you have electricity occasionally is Earthlink/covads answer. Unfortunately my options are to use some other soviet style customer service company. How sad for me.

Related: Customer Service is Important - AT&T's Attempt to Take Away Consumer's Rights Denied - Is Poor Service the Industry Standard?

Hulu Desktop for Ubuntu

2010-04-17T14:13:00.004-04:00

I have been having all sorts of trouble with Hulu on my new Ubuntu desktop. When it does work it has a great fullscreen display. But the fullscreen mode would not work quite often. And when it did work it would always choose the smaller of my two monitors no matter what I did. The Popout option was nice and I could move it to the monitor I wanted but the control (pause, restart etc.) wouldn't work.

In trying to find solutions to these bugs I stumbled across Hulu desktop for Linux (including an Ubuntu 64 bit option). It works very well. The interface for Hulu desktop is flashy and nice in some ways but in some ways it is not easy to navigate. For example, it is much easier to see a list of the episodes you have subscribed to and their expiration dates.

And I get to watch programs like Caprica that I couldn't otherwise, since I don't have cable TV.

Related: Embedded YouTube Videos Won't Play - Using Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time in Ubuntu

Problem: Hulu full-screen mode fails on Ubuntu in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Hulu popout screen controls fail - Ubuntu 9.04, 64-bit. How to move a Hulu fullscreen to another monitor (using Hulu Desktop you can choose which monitor to use).

Our fiscal practices have been irresponsible for years

2010-04-15T21:22:00.002-04:00

Thoughts At Tax Time: Big Bill Coming Due by Emily Anstaett

We all agree on the facts: the national debt is closing in on $13 trillion and our fiscal practices have been irresponsible for years. With that starting point, we can all come to both an understanding of the gravity of the situation and the realization that difficult decisions and sacrifices will have to be made to get our economy back on track and restore the overall satisfaction of Americans to comfortable levels.

Unfortunately we don't all agree we have been "irresponsible for years." We have lots of politicians acting like the huge debt problem is some new issue. Every time times are good they want to give favors to their friends. And when times are bad they want to give favors to their friends. And we keep electing politicians that don't care about ruining the country so long as they can give their friends big amounts of cash favors. Until we grow up and realize we are selling out the future of our country by electing those they seek to put favors to the friends today above the interests of the country we will fall further and further into debt.

I am pretty cynical about the ability of us to vote for ethical, competent, intelligent leaders. Or for the type of people we elect to take sensible steps. I can be surprised though. The ability of the Clinton administration to pass a balance budget (even if you say that it wasn't really balanced given the funny accounting Washington uses it was still pretty amazingly good).

I would love to be wrong and see our politicians put the well being of the country 1st or even 3rd or 4th but I don't think that is very likely. I believe we will have to show them we expect them to put the country first and I don't think we, as voters, will. And even if we did we have to elect people that have the skills to know what is right and the leadership to put the right policies in place.

John Hunter

The Boom in Adult Interns

2010-04-08T14:30:00.001-04:00

The great recession and huge loss of jobs has created a growth in internships. Working for Free: The Boom in Adult Interns

When you hear the word intern, you probably don't think of people like Kristina Shands. For starters, she's 38. And she had notched 10 years of experience as a fundraiser at a nonprofit in Tennessee before she was laid off last year. But now that Shands is considering moving into sports management, she's interning with the Knoxville Ice Bears hockey team, writing game summaries and handing out stats on game day. She devotes about 10 hours a week to the Bears, and she does it for free. "I'm getting to see the inner workings of a professional hockey team, learning about the business side of sports, and I get to watch hockey," Shands says. "I'm having fun."

The increase in internships, however can go to far: The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York's labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department's top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

Embedded YouTube Videos Won't Play

2010-04-06T10:04:00.002-04:00

On my Ubuntu machine embedded YouTube videos won't play (in any browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera) but videos from the YouTube site play fine.

Lazyweb: What is causing this? How can I fix it?

Health Care System Needs Much More Reform

2010-04-01T10:58:00.000-04:00

Why is every other rich country able to provide universal health care for far less than the USA can provide partial health care? Are we just less capable than every other country? The only other area I know of we are so universally worse than every other country is in the percentage of the population that is free (not locked up in jail). All the health care system performance studies I have seen show the USA on the low end of performance and at a cost 50-100% higher than other countries. If the system we have used in the last 30 years is so great why are we do we have bad to mediocre results at a huge cost?

I don't think the current health care reform bill does anywhere close to enough to address the huge problems with our current health system. It seems that yet again (they have been doing so for decades now) those trying to restrict changes have successfully stopped much in the way of reform.

I am not sure how anyone can believe the new law changes to a new cycle of increasing health care costs. Health care costs have taken an increasing percentage of the GDP every year for decades. The worst that can possible happen is the continuous cycle of costs increases are increased.

This heath reform failed to do enough to stop the increases. But we can see how good a job of those against reform did to stop reform. Until more people refuse to accept the continued extremely poor USA health care system results those against reform are going to continue to stop attempts to fix the system that hugely damages our economy year after year, decade after decade. There is no question reform will happen it is only a matter of how long we wait.

Special interests can maintain systems that harm the society to maintain their special interests to an extent. But the health care system failures have grown so large the economy cannot sustain the special interest favors without drastically reducing economic performance for everyone else. Currently we waste easily $500 billion a year (compared to what other countries can do). It is sad we have to through so much money away year after year. Unless we are just not capable of matching even the 2nd most inefficient health care system in the world, in which case we are going to suffer a great deal. But I don't believe we are incapable of being say 30% worse than the next poorest run health system. So now we tax the rest of society some hundreds of billions each year (and increasing). So far the rest of us are willing to accept this. But at some point the increased demands of those against having the US even perform much much worse than the 2nd worse country in the world will be too much and reform will happen. And it already happens in lots of small way. Companies move jobs offshore due to the poor health care system in the USA...

My blog post on health care system economics - health care system improvement

Preaching False Ideas to Men Known to be Idiots

2010-03-26T15:23:00.007-04:00

Re: Yes, Debt Matters

Over the last several weeks I've been contemplating how things have changed in my still relatively short lifetime... how the word "freedom" has somehow morphed to mean "I work so others get free stuff" or perhaps even better "I better stop working so I can get free stuff." Personal accountability has gone out the window, an increasing number of people pay no taxes - coming dangerously close to the 51% tipping point where tax policy will be set by those who don't pay anything, and somehow all kinds of new "rights" have magically appeared in the Constitution."

A huge amount of debt is bad, like the amount we have taken on. Those that have continued to elect politicians that pour on the debt the last 30 years should be ashamed of ourselves, but we do not seem to be. We shouldn't elect people that year after year pay out money they don't have with the (unspoken) promise of future taxes.

Saying people don't pay taxes when they often pay much higher proportional taxes than the rich is very misleading. Pretending that income taxes are the only taxes is just not true. When people try to say a small percentage of people pay taxes, usually they mean there is a significant portion that don't pay federal income taxes. Which is, of course, not the same thing as not paying taxes.

I'm not sure where your claim of 51% pay no taxes comes from but it sounds like the extremely misleading "data" presented by those that think the poor are somehow responsible or to blame and we should be doing more to support the lifestyles of the rich.

Buffett Slams Tax System Disparities

Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.

Interview with Warren Buffett:

Most of my income is taxed at 15 percent, and-- and doesn't pay a payroll. Mainly it's dividends and capital gains. And if you look at the For-- Forbes 400, a bunch of my fellow rich guys-- they will-- their tax rate overall to the federal government will be less than that of their receptionist.
...
I'll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges-- me that the average for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists. So, I'll give 'em an 800 number. They can call me. And the million will go to whichever charity the winner-- designates.

Criticize the politicians that have for decades passed budgets that hike the taxes in the future to give their current voters a false sense of well being (because they know the voters won't think about the future costs the largess [big tax cuts now without spending cuts, for example, are not in fact tax cuts in any real sense, they are just shifting taxes to the future. But that is not what the marketers peddling those giveaways say, of course] today costs). Criticize the voters for mortgaging a significant amount of future economic wealth of their country to such charlatans. I concur with such criticisms.

But I get frustrated with attempts to distort people's perceptions with misleading data. The debt problems are not because the poor are paying too little in taxes.

We spent like crazy in the last 10 years. That is a huge part of the problem - almost no-one disagrees with this. We reduced taxes on the rich. That is another huge part of the problem - some disagree with this. I can understand people feeling differently, that is their choice. But I see any attempt to market giveaways to voters today, that sticks a huge bill to those in the future as poor policy. Cutting taxes is fine as long as you cut spending a the same time (and you don't rely on fake financial projections to justify your current largess, of course).

We blow hundreds of billions a year in a very poorly run health system (again a problem that has existed and grown for decades). One can argue the current attempts makes it worse. One can't argue we elected people that have done nothing significant about it for decades.

No one must buy our debt. I have, for more than a decade, thought the main reason Japan and China buy so much of our debt is not because it is wise investment but for other economic reasons (and some political reasons). They wish to keep the dollar value high and allow the USA to buy their goods. I think they would be wise to massively reduce those purchases. And I suspect they shall. But we shall see.

It isn't tricky. Those of us that have elected politicians that created huge debt loads (by increasing spending or reducing current taxes) created the need for huge taxes for the future to pay off that debt. We continue to elect them so it is just playing out the way we chose.

Unfortunately we suffer a great deal from

1) the inability to think beyond the current year with any degree of sense. We act like 8 year olds. That isn't a good thing for adults to do on matters such as long term saving and debt. We not only do it with those we elect but also in our own retirement accounts.

2) the intellectual discourse on the most important and complex decisions our country makes is about at the level of a Coke commercial. Again this is something we chose. If we didn't acknowledge/accept ill informed campaigns on matters of pubic policy then talking heads would actually be replaced with thoughtful people that detailed the cost and benefits of options and provided alternatives they support. Instead we want simple minded marketing minds to set the policy landscape so we get decisions based on fear, rhetoric, oversimplifications, marketing gimmicks, manipulation, demagoguery...

H. L. Mencken said it well, a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." I can't tell how many of our politicians are demagogues and how many are the idiots that demagogues play for fools. But an awful lot of them are in one or the other camp. I imagine many think they are demagogues, but I bet quite a few are really fools.

Ubuntu and Linux Resources

2010-01-24T11:20:00.004-05:00

Ubuntu Kung-Fu

order book from Amazon

Ubuntu Pocket Guide - paper book from Amazon

Linux-Unix cheat sheets - The ultimate collection

Real Journalism Exposes Bail Bond Corruption

2010-01-21T18:56:00.004-05:00

It is far to infrequently that I actually find real journalism. Here is a great example of a journalist doing their job and informing the public of how corrupt the bail bond system is in practice. It isn't surprising NPR is behind this journalism as they actually run their organization in a way that allows true journalism unlike so many other "news" organizations. Sponsor NPR.

Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates

"Follow the money," Henderson says. "Usually whenever you've got questions of money, you follow the money and they'll tell you the reasons why some things operate."

He says the bail bondsmen don't want to see his program receive anything more than limited funding. The bondsmen "make money and they contribute their influence," Henderson says. "I would do more if we had the funding to do more." It's not that Lubbock's bondsmen want Henderson's clients. They don't. Henderson's clients can't afford a bondsman's fees.

But Henderson says the bondsmen lobby to keep his program as small and unproductive as possible, so that no paying customers slip though — even if that means thousands of inmates like Raymond Howard and Leslie Chew wait in jail at taxpayer expense, because they never find the money to become paying customers.

"The bonding companies make a living," Henderson says. "That's just the nature of Texas and Lubbock."

But it's not just Texas and Lubbock. Industry experts and a review of national lobbying efforts by NPR show that pretrial release programs across the country are increasingly locked in a losing battle with bonding companies trying to either limit their programs or shut them down entirely.

As Henderson walks back downstairs, he stops and reads the sign above the door in the lobby. It says: Protecting our community by changing lives. "Jail doesn't do anybody any good," he says. "The only thing that jail is good for is to keep the dangerous people in the community away from the people who don't pose a risk."

But that is not who is in the nation's jails. According to the Justice Department, two-thirds of the people in the nation's jails are petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason: They can't afford their bail.
...
Bondsmen's main responsibility is to bring defendants back to court if they fail to show up. But it turns out that many bondsmen aren't doing this job.

Statistically, most bail jumpers are not caught by bondsmen or their bounty hunters. They're caught by sheriff's deputies, according to Beni Hemmeline from Lubbock's district attorney's office.

"More often than not, the defendants are rearrested on a warrant that's issued after they fail to appear," Hemmeline said.

Asked if the bondsmen are fulfilling their end of the deal, Hemmeline says, "Well, it may be that [the bondsmen] can't find them. They can't camp at the door 24 hours a day. They do the best that they can, I think."

If a defendant does run, the bondsman is also supposed to pay the county the full cost of the bond as a sort of punishment for not keeping an eye on the client.

But that doesn't happen, either, Hemmeline says.

Hemmeline says Lubbock usually settles for a far lower amount than the full bond. In fact, according to the county treasurer in Lubbock, bondsmen usually only pay 5 percent of the bond when a client runs.

Consider that math for a minute. The bondsmen charge clients at least 10 percent. But if the client runs, they only have to pay the county 5 percent. Meaning if they make no effort whatsoever, they still profit. Hemmeline says asking for more might put the bondsmen out of business.

"Bond companies serve an important purpose," she says.

NPR found bondsmen getting similar breaks in other states. In California, bondsmen owe counties $150 million that they should have had to pay when their clients failed to show up for court. In New Jersey, bondsmen owe $250,000 over the past four years. In Erie, Pa., officials stopped collecting money for a time because it was too much of a hassle to get the bonding companies to pay up.

It is possible to skip the commercial bail bonding business entirely by just paying cash. Show up for court and you get your cash back. But it turns out that this is not as easy as it sounds. It takes hours longer to post a cash bail. And many people, like Sandy Ramirez, don't even know that it's an option.

Ramirez came to Lubbock Bail Bond for her 18-year-old son, who was arrested after getting into a scuffle with his friends. They were charged with public mischief. Her son was given $750 bail.

She says neither the district attorney's office, the judge nor the court clerk told her she could leave cash with the court as a deposit and get it back when the case was over.

"I never knew that," Ramirez says. "That's awful not to know that."

Lubbock Bail Bond tacked on some additional fees for, among other things, paying on a payment plan. In the end, she owes the company $260 — more than half the cost of the bond. Two weeks after the scuffle, prosecutors dropped all the charges against the teens. But two months later, she's still paying the bail bondsman.

Lines of Confusion Illusion

2010-01-11T13:04:00.000-05:00

Cool illusion. I like to remind myself that such examples show that what you think it true is not always true.

Related: Albert Einstein, Marylin Monroe Hybrid Image - Fooled by Randomness - Seeing Patterns Where None Exists

Site to Share Pasted Code

2010-01-04T13:25:00.000-05:00

Nice tool to quickly share code: Pastie

Related: Create Instant Screencasts - Regular Expression Cheat Sheet

Life is Short. What Do You Have to Show for Yourself?

2010-01-01T12:58:00.002-05:00

I think there are 2 good points here. One is doing work that you believe makes a difference. To me that is the more important factor. Will 5-10 years from now you be happy with what you accomplished in that time? Are you glad you spent your time that way?

The second issue of owning what you have produced is nice. But it is not easy to create very valuable content that can be converted into cash. Some can and then it is great.

I think really, more often, it can be the freedom that your own work gives you that is rewarding. Not so much the monetary value it brings. I do have quite a few web sites (Curious Cat Management Improvement Site, The Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter, Management and Leadership Quotes, Curious Cat Economics and Investing Blog...) that I really enjoy working on and I think are worthwhile. And they get lots of visitors (when I compare it to people I meet or train in seminars or the like). But they are far from properties I can sell for any significant amount of money.

Comment on: Life is Short. What Do You Have to Show for Yourself?

Think about it: a decade goes by, and I don’t have anything to show for it.

Man, that sucks.

How much of your last 10 years do you own?

2009 is different.

I own – outright – 99% of what I’ve done in 2009.

Photo Essay: Longwood Gardens, Delaware

2009-12-27T14:06:00.000-05:00

See photos from my visit to Longwood Gardens in Delaware.

Google's Wonder Wheel

2009-12-19T10:09:00.002-05:00

I found out about this cool search tool via Powerful Seo tool all bloggers should know about. Google's Wonder Wheel lets you view related search terms. It is interesting to follow the path for a few steps to see where it leads.

Related: Viewing Unpersonalized Google Search Results - PageRank Distribution

Photo Management and Web Gallery Creation Software

2009-12-13T12:07:00.005-05:00

What suggestions to people have for photo management and web gallery creation software. I don't need anything fancy. I have been using Picasa and it is ok. It does take me a long time to do some things though. And the latest version (Picasa 3.0 for Linux) seems to eliminate the main function I liked (replaced with only letting you upload photos to their web site).

Essentially what I have been doing is

putting the photos I want in this gallery in one folder (these are the high resolution unedited photos)

cropping the some of the photos

using Picasa's make a web page feature (which automatically created thumbnails and let me set the maximum size of photos [say 800 pixels] and it reduced the image size - for web display)

it also created pages for each of the photos (the idea is you could just upload the resulting files (html and jpg) to your site and you had a live web page

I like this model. I want to keep the photos on my Curious Cat Travels site - not some third party site (like Picasa Web, Flickr...). The most annoying thing about old process was I had to manually edit each page and the html Picasa generated wasn't really what I needed - so I just cut out a portion of the html from each page and pasted it into the template I had for my photo galleries.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best tools to do this using Linux?

I am installing digikam, now and will try it out.

Related: Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog - Using Your Digital Camera

Interactions and Data Analysis

2009-12-05T14:00:00.003-05:00

Re: Context Matters

Multivariate testing is great. And it a great way to determine interactive factors - which are essentially not possible to determine with one variable at a time testing (though a smart person can see indications within this type to view them).

Your example though seems to largely be about properly stratifying the data for optimization. While it is always difficult to tell with short examples it seems like it may well be that you have 2 different audiences and a solution that, for example, intercepts the search engine traffic and gives them some context might help a lot (you see this on many blogs where they say - "I see you find us search on X - you may also be interested in Y...

But the biggest point I think your story illustrates is the importance of the experimenter. They need to think. Their role is not just to calculate some numbers and whatever number is higher wins. George Box: "it’s not about proving a theorem, it's about being curious about things. There aren't enough people who will apply [DOE] as a way of finding things out."

Related: YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15% - Using Design of Experiments - Statistics for Experimenters

Stonefather by Orson Scott Card

2009-11-08T17:00:00.003-05:00

Stonefather by Orson Scott Card is a novella and prelude to a forthcoming fantasy saga: Mithermages. I found it enjoyable and reminiscent of his previous fantasy work especially the Alvin Maker series. I don't read hardly any fantasy, other than that by Orson Scott Card.

Another recent publication (2008), Keeper of Dreams, collects 22 short stories and novellas by Orson Scott Card, not found in Maps in a Mirror:

The Elephants of Poznan
Atlantis
Geriatric Ward
Heal Thyself
Space Boy
Angles
Vessel
Dust
Homeless in Hell
In the Dragon's House
Inventing Lovers on the Phone
Waterbaby
Keeper of Lost Dreams
Missed
50 WPM
Feed the Baby of Love
Grinning Man
The Yazoo Queen
Christmas at Helaman's House
Neighbors
God Plays Fair Once Too Often
Worthy to Be One of Us

Both are well work reading in my opinion.

Related: Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card - The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman - Reading in 2006 - Create Your Own Book

Disregard for People by FedEX and UPS

2009-10-24T11:02:00.003-04:00

My comments prompted by UPS: Disrespect for People? by Dan Markovitz

I consistently see UPS and FedEx park in traffic lanes, in front of a fire hydrant, in no parking zones meant to provide pedestrians view of the traffic to cross the street safely... when there are available parking spaces less than 20 feet away (and actual loading zones not much further away).

It would seem they must do this hours every day (based on the level of abuse I see). I often see the illegally parked vehicle from UPS or FedEx, park legally, get done what I need to do, and drive away and the illegally parked vehicle is still there.

It is obvious that UPS and FedEx systemically violate traffic laws and make the roads more dangerous. The extent of the abuse make it obvious to me they design their work process with full knowledge that they endanger and inconvenience others for their convenience. I am not sure why such consistent intentional systemic dis-rearguard for laws is allowed to continue, but obviously it is.

Maybe in Manhattan parking in traffic lanes is the way things work, but that is not the case in most places. Only UPS and FedEx chose to systemically endanger inconvenience others for their convenience (well, and others such as chemical companies dumping toxic chemicals into the water supply, here I mean only UPS and FedEx do so with an obvious policy on how they use the roads). Society doesn't work when you allow those that just don't care about anyone else to do whatever they feel like and force others to suffer the consequences (for the actions they take based on their disdain for the rest of us). Ethics obviously have lost the ability to influence a significant number of people - whether they chose to park illegally hours every day or loot "their" companies. The government is suppose to enforce laws to punish those that have disdain for others rights. When that is not done everyone suffers so a few rude and disrespectful can do whatever they feel like.

Arguments like we have to break the law to deliver packages make no sense to me. If package delivery is important then buildings need to provide parking or delivery companies drivers drive around drop of packages to employees with carts to deliver a few blocks worth of packages then meet up with another truck... Or whatever else will work, I would sure hope a multi-billion dollar company can figure out better solutions than I can in 5 minutes. If you can't figure out how to meet a customer need without violating the law that means you don't have a viable business - not that you have to violate the law. You can't say, oh we dump the toxic chemicals in the river. Yes, it is against the law but, we have no other option but to violate the law so don't blame us for our disdain for those of you who must cope with our actions.

Related: Don't Excuse Immoral Looters - Manners - Why Pay Taxes or be Honest - Violations tagged as ups were caught parked in a bike lanes around the world 50 times

Double Parked Delivery Trucks

I'd go with a carrot and stick system. I like the "FedEx" loading zone idea. Let delivery companies purchase a special parking permit (Ex:a "D" permit) that lets them park in any of these loading zone spaces and then put them in all the logical places with consultation from the delivery companies themselves. Charge a price that will keep those who don't really need one from buying one but keep it cheapish.

Then enforce double parking and escalate tickets for it. After the 5th ticket, they double, ad infinitum. If UPS starts getting some $12000 parking tickets, they'll rethink their strategy.

I Love xkcd Animated Clip

2009-10-22T19:27:00.002-04:00

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Awesome. The xkcd comic is great.

Related: What Makes Scientists Different :-) - Comic About Programming - Friday Fun: Correlation - Home Engineering: Reading in Bed

Create Instant Screencasts

2009-09-14T17:59:00.001-04:00

Screenr - create instant screencasts. Looks pretty cool.

Wordpress Plugins: Super Cache and Bad Behavior

2009-09-05T08:54:00.003-04:00

Wordpress is a great blog platform. I started with blogger but switched to using Wordpress for my blogs (other than this one) several years ago. One great advantage to Wordpress are the great Plugins that are available. I have continually had problems with Super Cache and Bad Behavior, however. Getting errors including:

Cannot modify header information

[function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php on line 49

They are great plugins but seem to have not played together too well. They have tried to work out the problems and searches find explanations that this problem has been fixed. However I continued to have the problems when I upgraded a blog today. I tried various things that didn't help. I deactivated both and if I reactive super cache after bad behavior the errors seem to persist. However if I activated Super Cache and then Bad Behavior things seem to work fine.

Related: Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - 50 Wordpress Tutorials - Wordpress Admin Page Not Found - The First Blogger

Death at the Hands of Others Today is Actually Historically Low Now

2009-08-24T15:18:00.002-04:00

Why is There Peace?

When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is.
...
The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others.
...
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

It is good to remember that statistically things are often much much better today than 100 years ago or 200 years ago. We still have much to be ashamed of. We need to do much better for the future of humanity but in many many ways we have made great progress.

Related: Leading Causes of Death - Global Cancer Deaths to Double by 2030 - Too Much Stuff - Water Wars Break Out in India

Still Young Contrary to Appearances

2009-08-16T08:00:00.003-04:00

Great comic from the great xkcd comic. "I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking it ever since"

Mountain Dew

2009-08-03T09:15:00.003-04:00

I actually like Mountain Dew. That alone isn't worth mentioning but I like it enough to be tempted by new flavors. Now I know that likely these flavors will be lame. But I am tempted enough to try. Most sounded bad but I decided to try the orange Mountain Dew. It is as bad as you would expect. I was hoping maybe it would be good, but instead the odds (that any brand knock off add-on product is going to be horrible) turned out to be accurate again.

You would think companies could do better than this type of product addition. Granted sugar water is not exactly the hotbed of innovation. But this attempt to just slap a brand name on some slight alternative in the hopes it will sell seems pretty lame to me. And the items I have tried have disappointed far more than they have succeeded. I don't try them often but do occasionally.

I guess these ad-ons work though since we see them so often. I would think they will be bad in the long run as you create tons of bad products that you try to sell by claiming a tie to a liked product. Then people associate those lame products with your good product. But I can believe in the short run you get more of a chance to get people to buy your add-on product.

Water Wars Break Out in India

2009-07-14T07:30:00.002-04:00

India prays for rain as water wars break out

In Bhopal, which bills itself as the City of Lakes, patience is already at breaking point. The largest lake, the 1,000-year-old, man-made Upper Lake, had reduced in size from 38 sq km to 5 sq km by the start of last week.

The population of 1.8 million has been rationed to 30 minutes of water supply every other day since October. That became one day in three as the monsoon failed to materialise. In nearby Indore the ration is half an hour's supply every seven days.

The UN has warned for many years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with one report estimating that four billion people will be affected by 2050. What is happening in India, which has too many people in places where there is not enough water, is a foretaste of what is to come.
...
He and a group of friends slapped Gyarasi, 35; Raju tried to stop him. Someone produced a sword and, a few minutes later, the Malviyas lay dying. "We were too afraid to do anything," said a woman who gave her name as Shanno. "Dinu didn't want them to take any water. He wanted it for himself."

Everyone stood around, looking down at the hole in the ground. The pipe is dry. "It is a terrible thing, that people should be fighting over water," said Shanno.

Bad Security on Government Required RFID e-passports

2009-07-12T14:23:00.004-04:00

Those that understood security and RFID said from the beginning embedding RFID chips in passports was a very bad idea. Now the Feds are saying you need to make sure you completely encase your e-passport inside something that blocks RFID transmission or take security risks. That sure is a recipe for disaster - how many millions of people are going to fail to do that. We sure do need the government to start making better technology decisions now that such decisions are so critical to the functioning of society.

Insecurity of Homeland Security RFID passports shown by researcher

The current EPC Gen 2 RFID tags used in the wallet-sized Homeland Security passports use no encryption, and are unable to selectively transmit any data. Instead, the RFID tags broadcast sensitive information, enabling anyone with the proper equipment -- such as Chris Pagent -- to collect information that could potentially be used for identity theft, or other nefarious purposes. "The passport card is a real radio broadcast, so there's no real limit to the read range. It's conceivable that these things can be tracked from 100 meters -- a couple of miles," he was quoted as saying.

Chris had no trouble collecting -- and copying -- information from the RFID passports of six people, in a half-hour of driving around.

Google Operating System

2009-07-08T07:48:00.003-04:00

Google Chrome Operating System

the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.
...
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
...
The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Interesting.

Related: Ubuntu 7.1 - Viewing Unpersonalized Google Search Results - Google's Search Results: Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used - Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

Police Failing to Enforce Law If Lawbreaker is a Police Officer

2009-05-11T18:57:00.003-04:00

APD officers caught running red lights

Dozens of Austin police officers have been caught on camera running red lights since the city first installed red light safety cameras in May 2008. The city has installed nine red light cameras since last year and issued more than 6,000 citations to red light runners.

In that same time, more than 36 local police officers have also been caught on camera. The officers are not running on calls and do not have their flashing lights on, as is required by department policy. The videos below clearly show the violations, which include running through red lights or failing to stop before turning right on a red light.
...
"If they're going to enforce the law, they should also abide by the law, I mean no on should be above the law no matter if you wear a badge," said Austin driver James Thompson.

Unfortunately we seem to have many people that believe the more authority you have the less you have to be held accountable for. That is the reverse of what is needed for a civil society. You need those with authority to be held to a higher standard not a lower one. Such continued evidence that even on the obvious minor items (that are easily visible) provides good reason to question the underlying corruption of those responsible for regulating society.

These failures extend from police abusing power to try and prevent liberty (taking photos etc.), not enforcing laws against those in power and regulators failing to regulate financial markets. Those responsible for watching society need to do a much better job. As long as the watchmen seem to support those in their ranks that break the law and see questioning of their refusal to practice fair justice when those with authority violate laws the entire profession is tarnished. The solution is not to get mad at those that expect those in authority to behave and be held accountable but to reform the system and stop tolerating corruption.

Just like the media needs to do more reporting like this (where they act as the watcher of the watchmen, performing a valuable service to society) and less of non-news they seem to be partial to in the last few decades.

Related: Watching the Watchmen - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment - SWAT Raids - Systemic Failures?

Eliminating Regulation Led to Our Financial Crisis

2009-04-29T19:02:00.003-04:00

Response to: Note to Regulators: Beware the Montana Paradox

Understood. My point is that the regulators were not empowered. Congress eliminated the regulations that held things in check at the behest of those given them large cash contributions. In addition, regulators can be greatly hampered by the leadership of the organizations they reside in. Regulators are prevented from regulating by the political appointees at the top of their organizations (or by politicians not funding the organization - think FDA food safety failures...).

There certainly is a difference of opinion over what is appropriate regulation. And then once the appropriate regulation is agreed to, what are appropriate response to real world situations is still an open question. I find that many today still don't understand how much a failure of proper regulation is response for our current situation. That failure took at least 4 forms: failed policy of removing appropriate regulation, failed political appointments of regulatory bodies with those that believed regulation was by its nature bad and fought to not enforce even the regulations still in the law, restricting funds to regulatory agencies (this is a common strategy when eliminating the laws that required regulation, still did not satisfy those that wished to eliminate the governments proper regulatory role in a capitalist system) and fourth, the failure of regulators to act properly after those 3 failures were in place.

To me the system problem was above the people problem of regulators failing to act well. It seems to me blaming the regulators is equivalent to blaming the workers. After policy had managed to strip huge amounts of sensible regulation to then blame the workers is not the best way to look at the cause of the failures in my opinion. After crippling regulatory organizations (by changes to the law due by politicians), starved for resources (again by politicians) and led by those fighting the regulatory role of their organization and instituting policies prohibiting sensible regulation (aging by politicians) to then blame those workers (regulators) who failed to properly regulate just seems the wrong analysis in my opinion.

The system was changed to eliminate regulation at the behest of those proposing that regulation was bad for the economy. The results of removing regulation do not seem to support their contention.

I agree politicians made poor policy decisions to encourage more home ownership. That was a part of the problem. To me the main thrust of the problem was not that but the continued erosion of the restrictions on excessive risk taking by financial firms and the removal of regulation that had been in place since the great depression, after a collapse of the financial system.

Anyway, those that appose regulation of financial markets control DC, even now. So there is very little danger (for those that see it as a danger) of putting regulation of financial markets back into the shape it was before the recent few decades created the unregulated current environment. The amount of cash those benefiting from the current system have to give to politicians to continue to the current system is in no significant danger.

I must say Phil Graham is not someone that has much credibility on financial matters with me. He was as responsible as anyone else for eliminating the regulation that was in place previously and received huge amounts of donations from those in the financial community to pursue strategies that benefited them.

So, I guess we disagree on the main causes of the failure of many financial firms until they were bailed out by the government. Thankfully, we are allowed to have our own opinions.

Related: Failure to Regulate Financial Markets Leads to Predictable Consequences - Monopolies and Oligopolies do not a Free Market Make - Too Big to Fail - Sound Canadian Banking System - posts on economics

Librarians Standing Up to the Madness

2009-04-25T16:42:00.004-04:00

"You are ordered to comply and you can tell no-one of this investigation." FBI to librarian. The librarian said I think this is unconstitutional and I will not comply. Listen to the story of what can happen if some brave souls stand in the way of government trying to suppress liberty.

Related: Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Watching the Watchmen - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

2009-03-28T16:15:00.003-04:00

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, is a great, fun, read. It was awarded the Newberry medal (awarded annually by the American Library Association, to the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children).

Related: Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle - The World at the End of Time - Hugo and Nebula Award Books

Don't Excuse Immoral Looters

2009-03-22T10:15:00.005-04:00

I believe those that loot should held responsible for their actions. It is not the fault of international aid donors that Mobutu Sese Seko (widely credited with behavior responsible for inspiring the term: kleptocracy) looted the money meant to help starving people. It is not the fault of government that they don't manage to outlaw and then enforce those laws against all unethical and immoral behavior.

There are too many in the USA to determine which CEOs and board members are most responsible for the current corporate kleptocracy mentality. There are legal boundaries (widely broken in recent decades) where that kleptocracy so far exceeds the self serving behavior of many CEOs that legal action is obviously correct. However, prosecution of CEOs for stealing millions seems to be less supported by those who golf with them than prosecution some kid who stole a few hundred dollars. But even more important is the failure of those that support the unethical and immoral behavior regardless of legal action.

Yes government is partially responsible for not policing corrupt dictators better. And yes government is partially responsible for not enforcing laws in support of regulated markets that capitalism requires (regulating negative externalities like systemic risk, exploiting monopoly profits, pollution...). Looting corporations is mainly a problem of the entitled elite conspiring to take what isn't theirs. In my opinion this huge failure of our society is mainly a problem that needs to be addressed by not accepting such immoral and unethical behavior, not laws against excessive taking by CEO's and executives of the wealth created by companies.

Those responsible for encouraging the moral and ethical failures of our "leaders" are those "leading" citizens sitting on corporate boards and approving the looting. And those lawyers arguing for, approving, and defending such unethical pay for big pay in return. And "experts" making cases for such ludicrous pay packages in return for big pay. And those that encourage the looting by including the looters in their high society in ways that they probably would not include Mobutu Sese Seko (though honestly their behavior makes that highly questionable - maybe they would include him).

I image those that welcome the looters would not support those using child labor in factories (even if say that was not illegal in some country in which they exploited the laws for their benefit). Plenty of things are unacceptable even if they are not illegal. Yet these supporters of looters want to be forgiven for welcoming looters since, well all their buddies at the exclusive country club loot, so I can't possibly expect ethical behavior for any of them.

Even more dis-heartening are foundations, charities, educational institutions that welcome looters without any question of their ethical and moral failures. Those supporting the looters are responsible for their behavior. They are not excused because others also support the immoral behavior. And we should make it any easier for them to excuse themselves for their encouragement of such unethical behavior.

In response to: Stop Blaming AIG

Related: CEO's Plundering Corporations for Personal Benefit - Why Pay Taxes or be Honest - Obscene CEO Pay - Businesses Tell the IRS They Are Not American but Executives Stay in USA - Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses - Super Spoiled Brats

Little Watchmen

2009-03-20T18:34:00.004-04:00

Little Brother is the novel by Cory Doctorow about individuals using technology to turn the tables on Big Brother. It was an enjoyable read, but I think the enjoyment will have much to do with your political views. If you believe in putting your trust in government (like the mode was for at least 6 of the 8 years of the Bush Presidency) you probably won't like it. If you prefer free speech and freedom from government control, and big brother style spying by government you probably will enjoy it. It also has a dose of techno-geek culture.

Corey Doctorow understand the new possibilities technology allows. The content of the book is also available for free online

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.

A particularly nice little lesson on the paradox of false positives from the book:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify *one* person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify *10,000* people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent *inaccuracy*.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for.
...
This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere *close* to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems

"I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year." - Neil Gaiman

I wouldn't agree with that but it is a fun read, though with quite a strong worldview that some will find overwhelms the story. I myself and tired of tired of incompetent government harassment, so that wasn't a problem for me.

Related: Watching the Watchmen - Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Systemic Failure of SWAT Raids - Photographers are not a Threat

Terrorist watch list hits 1 million

2009-03-11T17:55:00.000-04:00

Terrorist watch list hits 1 million, doesn't that seem a bit high? It seems to me the processes being used to provide safety are faulty.

The government's terrorist watch list has hit 1 million entries, up 32% since 2007.

Federal data show the rise comes despite the removal of 33,000 entries last year by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center in an effort to purge the list of outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations.

It's unclear how many individuals those 33,000 records represent — the center often uses multiple entries, or "identities," for a person to reflect variances in name spellings or other identifying information. The remaining million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, according to the center.
...
About 95% of the people on the list are foreigners, the FBI says, but it's a source of frequent complaints from U.S. travelers.

In the past two years, 51,000 people have filed "redress" requests claiming they were wrongly included on the watch list, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In the vast majority of cases reviewed so far, it has turned out that the petitioners were not actually on the list, with most having been misidentified at airports because their names resembled others on it.

There have been 830 redress requests since 2005 where the person was, in fact, confirmed to be on the watch list, and further review by the screening center led to the removal of 150, or 18% of them.

Without specific rules for who goes on the list, it's too bloated to be effective, says Tim Sparapani, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Tips for Your First 24 Hours with Ubuntu

2009-03-02T17:00:00.001-05:00

Ubuntu Newbie Guide: First 24 Hours With Ubuntu

Q: How do I find and install new software?

A: Here comes the fun part. Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, type in your password when prompted, and welcome to the world of finding new software! At this point, you can either browse or search. Browse around just to get an idea of what’s available. Search if you know what you want.

Let’s go ahead and install one nice little utility right now, so you can see how it works. Type “sysinfo” (without the quotes) into the Quick Search box. You see one or more listings come up, with a checkbox to the left of each. If the checkbox is empty next to the sysinfo listing, you can check it by clicking on it, and choosing Mark for Installation from the resulting drop-down box. This often brings up a box letting you know that in order to install this app, you’ll need to also install a list of other things. Just agree by clicking on the Mark button. Now that you’ve chosen to install sysinfo, click on the big Apply button (with a green check mark in the menu) and when asked if you want to apply the changes, click Apply.

50 Wordpress Tutorials

2009-02-26T14:14:00.001-05:00

Glen Stansberry provides some nice links in Top 50 Wordpress Tutorials including: Multiple Wordpress Installations Using a Single Database, How to Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 Minutes, Dynamic Sticky Pages, How to Write a Simple Wordpress Plugin and How to Add Photo Captions.

12 Good Ideas for Scaling Rails

2009-02-23T18:21:00.003-05:00

Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way

The HTTP protocol lets you tell browsers what static content they can cache. You set this in apache. Rails automatically will put timestamps in the IMG / javascript / CSS tags, assuming you're using the helpers. The Firefox plugin YSlow coupled with Firebug are your friends here. The improvement is significant and well worth your time, especially if you add gzip'ing. 100KB initial page load can be brought down to 5K (just the HTML file) on subsequent clicks around your site.
...
Fix your DB bottlenecks with query_reviewer and New Relic
This basically saves your ass completely. Everyone complains that Rails is slow. Rails is not slow, just like Java Swing is not slow. Rails makes it easy to shoot yourself in the face. If you do follow-the-textbook-example bumbling around with Rails ActiveRecord objects, you will end up with pages that drive 100 queries and take several seconds to return.

Very good post, definitely worth reading.

Related: Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Joy in Work for Software Developers

Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle

2009-02-12T09:48:00.004-05:00

Once again publishers are talking a stupid stand on copyright. They are claiming the ability of Amazon's Kindle 2.0 to read aloud the text on the screen violates copyright. Neil Gaiman, provides a Quick argument summary of his discussion with his agent:

When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Publishers really seem to be out of touch with the way the world is moving. Pretending the world doesn't change and holding onto outdated ideas is not useful.

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Innovation and Creative Commons - Recent Reading - Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science

Why Copyright Extention is a Very Bad Idea

2009-02-01T12:58:00.002-05:00

Watch the Full I Have a Dream Speech

2009-01-19T11:16:00.002-05:00

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the USA. Watch the entire I Have a Dream Speech.

Death of Newsprint

2009-01-11T10:44:00.000-05:00

End Times by Michael Hirschorn

The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting. But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?
...
And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
...
Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

The benefit of a free press that also has resources to investigate is very important. I would think it would make sense for Google, Microsoft... to buy trophy media outlets if they were in danger. My guess is setting up some type of foundation might well make sense. The company that buys it would want to benefit from the purchase by having content to make money on, but I don't think they would want to manage the media outlet as part of their organization.

The exactly solution going forward is not easy to see. But some solution that provides for a free press with funding is important to any country and so we need to find a solution.

I also have no doubt the value of this to society is lost by many watching what passes for our free press today. With all sorts of useless, superficial, stories that mainly seem to just be splashy graphics, exciting sound effects, and almost no content. There is no loss to society if that goes away. There is a great loss to society if work of those like Bill Moyer's went away, Here is an example David Heath and the Seattle Times exploring congress hiding earmarks while claiming reform. This is the type of free press the founding fathers had in mind to check the power of corrupt government officials paying out public dollars to award those giving them checks and hiding those favors from public view.

Related: Programmable New York Times On the Way - Deming and the New York Times - Washington Paying Out Money it Doesn't Have - Time to start a newspaper by Seth Godin - Lobbyists Keep Tax Off Billion Dollar Private Equities Deals and On For Our Grandchildren

PageRank Distribution

2009-01-09T18:12:00.003-05:00

Continuation of Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

I see very few pages with a PageRank of 1. This doesn't make that much sense, logically. The vast majority of pages should have a page rank of 1. Now it could be those are pages that no one (or at least I) never see. I would think, roughly, the distributions of 211,111 pages would be

no pagerank 100,000
pagerank 1 100,000
2 10,000
3 1,000
4 100
5 10
6 1
7 0
8 0
9 0
10 0

Now this isn't exactly true because there would be natural clumping... So a higher number of high page rank pages would make sense to me. But I think that means if you had say 2 more pagerank 6 pages that you would lose hundreds of pagerank 2, I would think.

Also my choice of 100,000 at no pagerank and pagerank 1 is basically arbitrary. But the whole area of no pagerank I find confusing to reconcile with the logarithmic scale. Some pagerank 0 could be so low a pagerank it is less than .5 and so not displayed as 1. However, some are also penalized to that "rank"... Anyway I just made it up completely. The rest I am just making up to but based on the idea if a logarithmic scale were used a very quick estimate that is at least better than no concept of just saying well 211,111 and 11 possible "ranks" means each rank should have about 19,192. I think the above estimate I made are at least more accurate than the true distribution than a estimate that each pagerank has an equal number, even if my rough guess isn't very accurate.

Well part of the problem in trying to figure this out is that I don't think Google ever confirms it is a logarithmic scale. But I think it is (or something close to it). I'll try to do some research on this - just because I find it interesting.

Related: Multi Site PageRank Checker - Google's Search Results - Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used

Ruby on Rails Tutorials

2009-01-05T18:38:00.003-05:00

Nice post with a bunch of Ruby on Rails Tutorials

Ruby On Rails Tutorial: The Basics A two-part tutorial to getting up and running on rails by Huw Collingbourne.
...
Catching rails error messages An easy example of how to use the 2.x approach to catching errors in your rails applications.
...
Stop Rails from sending email A useful way to check that mail is getting sent, without actually sending it.
...
Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial Gregg from RailsEnvy again running through how to make the most of rake. If you’re not already writing your own custom tasks in rake you should definitely take a look because there is probably a handful of things your could (and should) be doing in it.
...
Ruby on Rails Security Guide Storing and protecting the session, user management, projecting from injection, and more.

Follow the link for many more.

Related: What Does This Error Mean - ruby on rails posts - Ruby on Rails Job Opportunity

Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

2008-12-31T17:17:00.006-05:00

Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google has again updated the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar. Looking at my blogs it seems to be effective approximately Dec 16th. I have some blog posts from the 15th and before with pagerank. On the 16th I have one post with a pagerank and several without. On the 17th none of my posts have pagerank. This means while the pagerank was displayed today, the data used is from about December 16th, I believe.

The displayed pagerank is more fun than a measure that can be relied on. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-(

Check the current pagerank on your sites using our related site: Multiple Site PageRank checker. Updates from our Google PageRank Update, July 2008:

Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - 4 (July 2008), 4 (December 2008)
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog - 5, 5
curiouscat.com - 3, 3
externs.com - internship directory - 4, 4
Statistics for Experimenters - 3, 4
CSS 4 Free - 4, 5
Wordpress Themes for Free (new site from November) already a 3 Google pagerank.
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections (one of my most popular pages since 1997) - 3, 3
Multi Site PageRank Checker - 1, 3
John Hunter 4, 4
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father) ?, 4
Justin Hunter (my brother) ?, 2
Curious Cat Articles and Links (this blog) - 3, 3
Curious Cat Management Improvement (v.1) I started the blog on blogger and then moved it to my own domain using WordPress in 2006, still it retains a pagerank of 3
My Kiva page ?, 3
Reddit management (new in September) 0
Curious Cat Web Directory 3, 4
Rocky Mountain National Park photos ?, 2
Boston Museum of the Fine Arts, Glacier National Park Photos, Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos, The Cloisters Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky ? , 0 ( much of the Curious Cat Travels seems to be without pageranks - which seems odd to me but...)

The Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog has actually been a pagerank 6 before, but I think it is a high 5 (of course I may be biased and that is just wishful thinking). Many brand new posts for example have ranks of 4, likely because they were on the home page when the snapshot was taken - Bird Brain, Passion for Mechanical Engineering, High School Inventor Teams @ MIT...). Another thing this means is those pages are really not pagerank 4 even today. The toolbar snapshot from Dec 16th shows them that way but only because that was the value on Dec 16th.

Now, I would guess they are probably really pagerank 2 or so. If I just look back at say random posts in August 2008 (or really any month) they will be between 0 and 3. I really don't understand the differences between say 0 and 2. While there is some difference, most of those pages have 0 links from external sites. And then I will have a small number of posts that get significant external links that maybe be 3,4 and even 5 pageranks: The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer, Sep 2007, pr 3, Best Research University Rankings, Sep 2008, pr 4; Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership, Jul 2007, pr 4

In my experience it is often more telling how the pagerank of internal pages. I find it that there are many sites with say a pagerank of 3 or 4, or even 5, on the home page but almost no pagerank on internal pages. While other sites with a pagerank of 3 or 4 have many internal pages with pagranks of 1, 2, 3 and 4,

Related: Google's Displayed PageRank - Web Page Authority

Festivus

2008-12-23T18:52:00.000-05:00

Festivus airing of the grievances.

Don't Forget Your About Page

2008-12-20T09:29:00.002-05:00

The about page of a blog is often neglected. There are different options for what to emphasize, but I think it is wise to include an overview of the blog and links to some posts you would suggest for first time visitors. Think of it as a way of helping someone decide if they want to subscribe to the blog feed. Here are some of my blog about examples:

Curious Cat Engineering Blog - Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog - Free CSS Web Site Templates Blog

Related: Build Your Online Presence - Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet

Is The World Finaly Growing Wise

2008-12-18T00:12:00.002-05:00

16 Useful .htaccess Tricks and Hacks For Web Developers

2008-12-14T19:11:00.000-05:00

16 Useful .htaccess Tricks and Hacks For Web Developers

6. Hotlinking protection with .htaccess is very important because anyone can hot link to your images and eat up all your bandwith of your server. The following code will help you to prevent that.

Options +FollowSymlinks
# Protect Hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domainname\.com/ [nc]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://domainname.com/img/hotlink_f_o.png [nc]
...
11. Block access to your .htaccess file - By adding he following code to your htaccess file will prevent attempts to access your htaccess file. This extra layer of security protects your htaccess file by displaying a 403 error message on the browser.

# secure htaccess file

order allow,deny
deny from all

To Do List

2008-12-11T11:11:00.002-05:00

I think that is pretty funny. More funny political cartoons.

Related: Fun Rant on Arguments - Code Monkey - Kids on Scientists: Before and After - Quantum Teleportation

Watching the Watchmen

2008-12-09T19:00:00.005-05:00

Unfortunately I have grown to question the trustworthiness of the system of justice. This doesn't mean I think it is totally corrupt but I think the amount of lawlessness by those given the responsibility to serve society has grown too large. It seems to me more oversight is needed. And unfortunately those with such responsibilities are doing the opposite. For example, the despicable political actions by the Justice Department undermine the public's confidence in honest government just when we need to have a government we can trust to protect us from terrorism and increasingly well armed criminals.

Cop Busters is a program that is headed by a man that is most likely in it significantly for the publicity. I would wager the vast majority of those in the law enforcement community are honest and law abiding, in general. However, the community seems to be far too tolerate of abuses by those in their ranks. Given that shows like cob busters may help. Why doesn't the law enforcement community itself find the corruption and illegal practices and eliminate those involved themselves?

Gotcha!

There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn't lie to get a warrant.

Cooper chose the Odessa police department for baiting because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She's currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.

What we need are watchmen inside the government that are trustworthy and vigilante. What we need are people at the Justice Department that put the safety and security of the public first. What we need are people that put the rule of law above the rule of their personal desires.

10 years ago (whether I was right or wrong) I would not have said the abuse of law enforcement authority was a huge concern. Yes, any time you have many thousand of people involved in something, some are going to abuse their authority. But I thought on the balance that abuse was minimal and the danger from such abuse was much less than the danger from actual criminals. Now I am sadly much more inclined to side with the founding fathers worries about the unchecked power of the government.

As those in law enforcement fail to address these problems they make the situation much worse. People are losing the ability to rationally believe the law enforcement community is most interested in enforcing the law. Seeing so many examples of abuses of power by the watchmen is a dangerous thing for society. And when the law enforcement community is more interested in protecting those inside their ranks engaged in unlawful behavior than in upholding the law it is very dangerous for society.

It is not acceptable for those with the awesome responsibility to protect society from criminals to behave as too many are now.

Related: Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment - Photographers are not a Threat - More SWAT Failures

Gallery of Free WordPress Themes

2008-12-06T13:00:00.000-05:00

WordPress Themes 4 Free is the newest curiouscat.com site. Find great, free, designs for your WordPress blog.

Build Your Online Presence

2008-12-04T11:48:00.001-05:00

My comment on: Promoting Your Services (from PoeWar - I very good site on writing and resource for writers)

I think another great way to promote your business is to write and post to your own site. I encourage management consultants (the people I most deal with - example: Peter Scholtes) to create an online presence that illustrates what value they offer. And for writers it should be an even better fit (you can show exactly what you offer - your writing). Setting up a blog is a very easy way to do this. You can use Wordpress to set up a free blog without any technical knowledge.

Then you can market by doing what you want to do: writing. You will have to take some other steps to market yourself also but a home on the web highlighting your writing is an excellent tool.

This next tip is probably most suited to someone getting started as a professional writer, or one just getting started online, but really can work for anyone. Basically unless you are so busy with paying work that you can't fit it in, I think it is a good idea (and at that point continue your blog by linking to the paying work).

I also think writing guest posts for other blogs could be a useful promotion strategy. You will increase those that know about you and gain links back to your site which will help your site grow. And, another benefit, for writers is you get to practice. You can experiment, and try new things. While I don't think of myself as a writer, I have written a great deal building my web sites. The sheer act of writing for different audiences as a guest blogger I think would be good experience for a writers.

I tend to favor thinking about marketing differently - especially for small businesses. Amazon spends very little advertising. Instead they see free shipping as marketing. They see paying referral fees to websites that provide them paying customers as marketing. Very smart, in my opinion. So for writers think of writing posts for your site and for some others as a form of advertising. Plenty of very successful people market using their free writing online: (example: Neil Gaiman, Joel Spolsky...). And some turn that free writing into a platform to sell ads and then make a living just doing that: Dooce.

Another good example of innovative marketing: Giving Away Your Service for Free on Weekends (from Joel Spolsky mentioned above).

Related: My web home - John Hunter - Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet - Your Online Identity - Innovative Marketing Podcast

2,700-year-old marijuana found in Chinese tomb

2008-12-01T09:28:00.002-05:00

2,700-year-old marijuana found in Chinese tomb

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.
...
Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.

The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

ISTJ

2008-11-27T12:37:00.003-05:00

This blog seen as an ISTJ (introverted, sensing, thinking, judging) blog by Typealyzer. The site analyzes the blog and provides a Myers Briggs type personality categorization. Some other blogs categorizations:

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog - ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers (I am the author)

xkcd blog: ESTP - The Doers

Dooce: ESFP - The Performers

Engineering &... (I am one of the authors): INTP - The Thinkers

Daisy the Curly Cat: ESTP - The Doers

Signal to Noise: ISTP - The Mechanics

CSS4Free (I am the author): ESTP - The Doers

I don't give the categorization much weight but you might find it fun. I am not convinced it isn't almost totally random. A similar site guesses whether the author is a man or woman: "We have strong indicators that http://dooce.com/ is written by a man (99%)." "We guess http://blag.xkcd.com/ is written by a woman (50%), however it's quite gender neutral"

The categorization software seems to only use the home page (the exact url you use) to categorize the site. If it is effective at all (which I could see it being - for some categorizations anyway) increasing the pool of data used would likely help a great deal. My guess the current method also means the categorizations for sites could vary a great deal over time.

Notice how the Myers Briggs type "names" (for each group) are given a positive spin. Nothing like ESFJ - "The Lazy Couch Potatoes."

Google SearchWiki

2008-11-21T08:21:00.003-05:00

Google now lets you customize your search results. You can move results around (change the order in which they appear) add your notes and remove sites you don't want to see. Others don't see your notes by default but they can choose to look at all the notes for a search.

Suggestions for Improving Google (Jan 2006)

1) Let me chose the type of files searched (exclude pdfs, word, power point..). Then if I can’t find what I want I can expand to include them. At the very least give me some way of making the type much more visible (I realize it is there now but I often click before my mind notices...).

2) Let me remove web sites from my default searches. I would imagine this could even be used to help Google’s normal search results by getting a sense of sites huge numbers of people “block” The same spam sites show up for searches and I would rather block them if Google can’t figure out how to do so.

3) Let me create site search lists, where I create lists of sties I want searched

The third one Google did a year or two ago. I have created several search sites based on that capability: investing search - science search - Management Search.

Related: Google Knows it is a 2.0 World - What Factors Should be Used to Determine Search Results - Google PageRank Update - Yahoo's Open Approach to Search

Manners

2008-11-20T17:16:00.003-05:00

Re: Bad manners

One of the things I have grown to appreciate the importance of is some shared sense of manners. As a kid I thought worrying about which fork was used for salad was silly. Actually I still think that is silly but I didn't appreciate the annoyances caused by people that just don't care about how there selfishness impacts others when I was a kid.

Now I understand how a shared sense of common courtesy is important - to hold back people from being overly selfish (how about the idiots that insist on yelling into their cell phones in libraries, or when they are being waited on in a store, or wherever else they happen to be doing, for example).

And if I must comply with a few rules I find silly so I can exist in a society where others have a shared sense of unacceptable behavior that is ok with me. I now appreciate the idea of acceptable codes of conduct that people are encouraged to follow. I really didn't understand how selfish so many people would be without rules telling them not to interrupt others, or eating with their mouth open, or treating others with respect, or realizing you must share with others (toys, when you are a kid or time with other speakers...).

I tend to be a bit cantankerous, refusing to accept things just because that is the way things are. But I have grown to appreciate the wisdom of good manners. Within that acceptance there is still room for me (and those like me) to quibble with some of the rules of good manners, but the concept I now appreciate.

Monty Python on You Tube

2008-11-18T19:01:00.000-05:00

Related: Ministry of Silly Walks

NORC

2008-11-09T19:21:00.002-05:00

I heard a new acronym recently that I thought was amusing: NORC: Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. Essentially these are similar to "strange attractors" in chaos theory where retired people are naturally drawn to live. Perhaps areas with good medical facilities, near recreation and shopping areas, community centers, libraries... that can be walked to.

Related: retirement planning posts on the Curious Cat Investing blog - How Walkable is Your Prospective Neighborhood

What Does This Error Mean

2008-10-23T07:59:00.001-04:00

What Does This Error Mean - paste in an error message and read comments on what it means and how you can fix it.

Curious Cat Comments

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