The End of Pax Americana

The End of Pax Americana by Robert J. Samuelson:

In World War II, an estimated 60 million people died. Only four subsequent conflicts have had more than a million deaths (the Congo civil war, 3 million; Vietnam, 1.9 million; Korea, 1.3 million; China's civil war, 1.2 million), reports the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. Under the U.S. military umbrella, democracy flourished in Western Europe and Japan. It later spread to South Korea, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In 1977, there were 89 autocratic regimes in the world and only 35 democracies, the center estimates. In 2005, there were 88 democracies and 29 autocracies.

Prosperity has been unprecedented. Historian Angus Maddison tells us that from 1950 to 1998 the world economy expanded by a factor of six. Global trade increased 20 times. These growth rates were well beyond historic experience. Living standards exploded. Since 1950, average incomes have multiplied about 16 times in South Korea, 11 times in Japan and six times in Spain, reports Maddison. From higher bases, the increases were nearly five times in Germany, four in France and three in the United States.

Test Your Internet Speed

SpeedTest - gives an estimate of your download and upload internet connection speed.

1hp car

1 horse power car

507 hp car

The Increase is Evidence of a Decrease???

Two consecutive sentences from a Washington Post article, Mortgage Rates Drop to 6.14 Percent:

Home prices grew 0.86 in the third quarter of this year, the slowest pace since 1998, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise reported today.

This slow growth "provides more evidence that the long-forecasted national depreciation in housing prices is occurring," the agency's director, James B. Lockhart, said in a statement.

So the increase is evidence of the decrease? What!!!!

Related: Coming Collapse in Housing? - 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Rates - Financial Literacy blog posts

Ad Supported Laptop Purchase

Help Me Buy a Laptop!

My computer just turned six years old! Banquo survived five years of college (three in dorms), twelve relocations (one cross-country), two operating system upgrades.
...
Unfortunately I'm completely broke and can't afford to replace him.
...
For $150 a square inch, I'll etch (almost) whatever you want on the top of my new laptop. Your ad will be shown all around the Bay Area coffee shops, start-up offices, and Web2.0 conventions! I now work at Instructables, a how-to/DIY website full of cool projects. Instructables is located at Squid Labs and I have access to their laser etching/cutting machine. Click here to see other laser etched laptops.

And it worked. Cool.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything from Google. And Douglas Adams: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Compete Toolbar

A new (to me at least) toolbar is available. The Compete Toolbar seems nice. It seems to be trying to see its Trust Scores (can you trust this site) and Deal (which tells you about deals on teh site you are visiting). Both seem decent. Trust I would bet will leave off a bunch that are trustworthy but so what. If it indicates tusted sites that seems worthwhile. I like the site profiles feature.

Other popular toolbars: Google, Alexa, Yahoo.

CSS Navigation Bar Tutorial

Nice simple tutorial to create a CSS nav bar with mouseover changes: Turning a list into a navigation bar

Google Customized Search

We have setup several Google Customized search sites which seem to give good results very quickly.

Try our custom google search engines for 1) Management 2) Economics and Investing and 3) Science and Engineering.

Nice HTML color chart

HTML color chart

Stop Earthlink Spam

Earthlink has taken a spamy practice from verisign to show there ads instead of the proper response to a domain that is not found. Here is how youas the customer can fix your computer to stop being spamed by earthlink. It sure would be nice if we had some options that actually believed in customer service instead of this kind of junk.

Earthlink Redirecting Failed DNS Queries?

The practice Earthlink copied from Verisign was shut down by the administrators of the internet when Verisign did it.

Don't They Know

Don't They Know:

Howard Yermish reports:
This evening, my 4-year old daughter came downstairs for some ice cream. When the commercial for the Little Mermaid DVD came on, she said, "We don't need to see that commercial. Don't they know we already bought that movie?"

Awesome.

The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters by Eric Wargo, discussing a speech by Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell cited a mid-1980s study (Genius Revisited) of adults who had attended New York City’s prestigious Hunter College Elementary School, which only admits children with an IQ of 155 or above. Hunter College was founded in the 1920s to be a training ground for the country’s future intellectual elite. Yet the fate of its child-geniuses was, well, “simply okay.” Thirty years down the road, the Hunter alums in the study were all doing pretty well, were reasonably well adjusted and happy, and most had good jobs and many had graduate degrees. But Gladwell was struck by what he called the “disappointed tone of the book”: None of the Hunter alums were superstars or Nobel- or Pulitzer-prize winners; there were no people who were nationally known in their fields. “These were genius kids but they were not genius adults.”

NCAA Basketball

The NCAA basketball season has not started yet so there isn't much news to report. Still look at the headlines (see graphic) from ESP today: 4 are criminal and 3 others are about players being suspened or kicked off teams, 2 are about coaches. At least the 2 aobut coaches are fine. Couldn't they have some positive stories, how about writting about the success of student athletes those students that are academic stars or did some great things over the summer or explore what past basketball players are doing... Or how about stories about basketball: discuss the pick and roll or explain the swing offense or explain the effect of 3 point shooting on overall field goal percentage or discuss what the effects of relying on 3 point shoting are for a team... We just accept that the "news" of crimal activity and the like is what we should expect. I think we should expect better from the sports web sites.

Blogging Tips

What Studio 60 Can Teach Us About Blogging by Tom Schmitz. Fun post with some good tips on blog management (aimed at professional blogs not really blogs for fun).

Remember those 3x5 cards at Studio 60? Studio 60 always has more cards than will fit on their board. If something does not meet your blog's standard for quality or interest do not publish it. You might send something back for rewriting or additional work. You may decide that an article does not belong. You might even decide that an article has a bigger future somewhere else on your website, in your printed newsletter or in an industry publication.

Studio 60 is a good show by the way.

Google Pagerank Update

Google is in the midst up updating pageranks across their datacenters. Yes Google pagerank is not the holy grail some used to see it as still it is a very easy shorthand to get some idea of how much significance a page has. In concept it

You can track the progress using SEO Chat's tool. We moved our management blog from blogger (where this is hosted) to a wordpress blog a few months ago. It is nice to see that the new pagerank for our management blog is 5. We seem to have no trouble getting pages with pagerank of 5 but getting to 6 is rare. The lowest 5 site would also be nearly 10 times less than the highest 5 site (so the single pagerank number is a very rough guide indeed).

Pagerank is a logrithmic scale (so a pagerank of 6 is 10 times a 5 and 100 times a 4). Still it is surprising how easy it is to get to 5 and how difficult it is to get to 6.

Original paper by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd: The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

Wordpress Copyright Feed Plugin

Angsuman's Feed Copyrighter Plugin

Unfortunately some people use technology to steal content. The current state of affairs makes it much easier for thieves than those trying to contract thieves. This plugin at least makes it obvious the thieves are intentionally being thieves. Unfortunately that is about all it does.

I would expect over the next few years trusted sources will emerge that categorize thieving domains as such. Then those who wish can have browser plugins that notify them a site they are viewing (or even links they see are to) steal content.

A good post on dealing with thieves: What to do when someone steals your content.

Home futures: Price-drop seen for 10 top markets

Home futures: Price-drop seen for 10 top markets

Trading in housing futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange point to declines by next August of at least 5 percent for 10 leading markets; speculators are betting the biggest decline will be in Las Vegas, with a drop of 8.2 percent.
...
According to Shiller, the numbers may exaggerate the extent of the decline because there is a risk premium that has to be taken into account. In other words, more traders are interested in protecting themselves against loss than are interested in investing in a growing market.

Related: Housing and the Economy - Real Estate Investing articles - more investing articles

The Scientific Method

The Scientific Method comic strip

Bad Amazon Unbox

Bad Amazon Unbox:

Amazon's new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the "agreement" you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I've ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer

Amazon does many things right, but they need to fix this problem quickly.

Amazon Unbox better left off your box - My fight with Amazon Unbox

Database of Federal Grants and Contracts Bill Passes Senate

Senate OKs Coburn bill on spending:

Frist said in a press release, "A tremendous effort from the blogosphere and our constituents, and the patience and cooperation of colleagues, led us to take this healthy step forward when it comes to responsible federal spending."

The release said, "The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 will create a single, easily searchable database capable of tracking approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans."

Coburn cited the vote as proof that government works when people demand change.

It is true that if the public demands change something usually is done. Whether what is done "works" is not so definite though. Still, so far, so good on this effort of some to shine light on bad behavior and force those who often tolerate and encourage such behavior to take positive action.

Bad Behavior

Shining the light on the actions of those in power:

Robert Scoble, who rose to fame as Microsoft blogger and recently left for a small company, is adding his voice to those blasting HP:Corporate hypocrisy by HP

Check this out: testimony in front of the U.S. House of Representatives by HP's Scott Taylor, Chief Privacy Officer. What did he tell them? “First and foremost is that privacy is actually a core value at HP. As a company, HP is 100 percent committed to excellence in consumer and employee privacy…

Now compare that to what Patricia Dunn, chairwoman at HP apparently did. Lying. Breaking the law. And invading people's privacy.

If Patricia Dunn is ever hired to a company I'm working for I'm instantly quitting.

My comment on his blog post:

The best most of us can do is expose such bad behavior. It is up to those who control the votes of shareholders to act (which includes those representing most posting her probably - as anyone with an index mutual fund or large cap… probably owns some HP stock). If there are board members that were not in on it, they can either try and oust those that knew, or resign, or face the consequences.

Most likely the consequences won’t be much, but if the behavior is not accepted and publicity continues eventually action will be taken. As soon as most significant thought leaders turn away though the effort will likely stop. Keep up the good work publicizing such bad behavior.

One potential area for pressure against those who take such action is through other boards they sit on. And through places they might want to speak. If a business school brings her in to speak what does that say about their commitment to ethical behavior. I’m sure the school has classes on ethics but what do their actions say?

From HP's web site: "She also serves on the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, as well as the conference board’s Center for Corporate Governance, and serves as the director and a member of the executive committee of Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco." You might ask the conference board’s Center on Corporate Governance how to oust a board chair that has broken the law and violated the policies of the company and see what they suggest. I can’t imagine they would respond to me. But they might get enough pressure if you ask them (and others take on your cause) to be compelled to respond. I think that question is exactly the type of thing they are in business to address.

And here discussion of the "anonymous hold" used to block a bill to provide the public a simple way (modeled on the search engine concept) to find out how tax dollars are spent:

Spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) confirms that Stevens is the one with the hold and called the move "unexpected." "We met with his staff last week," he said, "and provided a detailed cost-benefit analysis of our bill. Senator Stevens then lifted his hold. Only Senator Stevens can explain why he reversed his position and reinstated his hold."

WiFi Security Tips

Coffee shop WiFi for dummies

If your company provides you with VPN access on your laptop, use it. That's a sure fire way to ensure that everything you send and receive is encrypted, and it makes your surfing much safer.

sudo read

If you get this, you're a geek - if not read the comments.

Lessig Video: Information Revolution

Lessig speech on Information Revolution (read/write culture) at wikimainia 2006. He talks about his belief, which I share, that we need to improve our copyright practices.

• The Public Domain
  
  
• Innovation and Creative Commons
  
  
• 
  Open Access Science
  

Map Test

Drag and drop map of the Middle east and Northern Africa

The High Cost of Free Parking

The High Cost of Free Parking by Ryan McGreal

The benefits are potentially tremendous: with less parking, there is more room for both people and businesses, and the right balance between supply and demand means less congestion from cruising, less noise, and less air pollution. Reduced parking requirements also ease entry for investors who might otherwise build elsewhere. As the area becomes more appealing to pedestrians, it attracts both visitors and investors.

This post reminds me, to some extent, of Dr. Russ Ackoff's ideas on systemic traffic problems.

The Pre-Steal

The Pre-Steal

"Oh, he didn't. It's just that a month before his book came out, I started thinking about this cool idea, and just after I finished the first chapter... boom. A pre-steal!"

They happen all the time, and for a really good reason. Ideas are a product of their time.

Cube Door

Get some time to concentrate at work: Cube Door.

Actually interesting SEO study

There are many articles claiming to have valuable insight for webmasters trying to understand how search engine's rank there sites. This study actually is pretty interesting. They claim inbound link quality (not quantity) is the most important "off-page" factor (factors other than the page itself). And in, fact inbound link quality is 42 times more important than link quantity.

Inbound link relevance is next at 11.6 times more important than link quantity (which shows how important link quality is).

via: searchblog

Ticketing corruption

Ticketing corruption

The paper ranks country corruption according to the number of parking violations per country diplomat, and finds that the results match up remarkably well with findings from rough survey-based estimates on the topic. Who are the worst violators? Kuwait blew away the competition with a whopping average of 246 unpaid parking tickets per diplomat over a 5 year period. Diplomats from countries famed for their good political behavior like Canada, Sweden, and Norway didn't have any unpaid tickets.

Interesting data on who would break the law if they could get away with it. Diplomats are granted immunity from prosecution so therefore can break the law without being punished. This isn't actual true as I imagine most countries that respect the rule of law do not tolerate diplomats that flaunt laws of the countries they visit.

I believe in addition to having ethical diplomats the countries that are behaving well have senior government officials that would not allow such poor behavior from their representatives. Which explains why Foreign Policy magazine found such a correlation between corruption and those diplomats behaving irresponsibly.

Social Isolation Growing in USA

Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says by Shankar Vedantam:

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent.

Social Isolation in America (pdf) - full report by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears.

Connect to IT Experts

Qunu is a new service to connect you to an IT expert to answer your questions now. It is free and uses any jabber enabled IM client to enable you and the expert to communicate. I have not used it yet but it looks promising.

More Government Giveaways

Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm

The checks to Matthews and other landowners were intended 10 years ago as a first step toward eventually eliminating costly, decades-old farm subsidies. Instead, the payments have grown into an even larger subsidy that benefits millionaire landowners, foreign speculators and absentee landlords, as well as farmers.

Politicians claim to support capitalism and then create these anti-capitalist socialist policies. Then then vote to eliminate tax on the mega rich inheritances... No wonder they spend more than $1,000 more than they collect in taxes for every single person in the United States every year. Capitalism is not against government regulation, there are many cases when regulation is needed (natural monopolies, public safety, anti-trust, taxation, child labor laws, environmental protection [and other negative externality related regulation]...). But farm subsidies to political friends is just about taxing some citizens (and currently taxing those in the future since the politicians don't pay for what they spend with current money) and giving it to others for political gain - not capitalism.

What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.

What an idiotic policy.

USA Government Debt Updated Daily:

06/29/2006
Federal Debt $8,340,008,565,191 $8,340 Billion or ($8.340 Trillion)

or for every one of the 300 million people in the country $27,800.

For more on the huge debt see the Concord Coalition site.

• China and the Sugar Industry Tax Consumers
  
• Estate Tax Repeal
  
• Drug Prices in the USA
  

Corruption

Anticorruption for a better economy from the World Bank:

The Bank has identified corruption as among the greatest obstacles to economic and social development. It undermines development by distorting the rule of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends.

The harmful effects of corruption are especially severe on the poor, who are hardest hit by economic decline, are most reliant on the provision of public services, and are least capable of paying the extra costs associated with bribery, fraud, and the misappropriation of economic privileges.

Economics related articles

Net Neutrality: This is serious

Net Neutrality: This is serious by Tim Berners Lee the inventor of the internet:

I blogged on net neutrality before, and so did a lot of other people. (see e.g. Danny Weitzner, SaveTheInternet.com, etc.) Since then, some telecommunications companies spent a lot of money on public relations and TV ads, and the US House seems to have wavered from the path of preserving net neutrality. There has been some misinformation spread about. So here are some clarifications.

Hopefully some politicians will listen to those that innovate and not just those that donate (huge amounts of money to the politician).

8.7 Million millionaires

Global millionaires grow to 8.7M

To be counted as a millionaire in this study, one needed $1,000,000 in net assets not including their primary residence.

Those with financial assets of more than $30 million -- known as ultra high net worth individuals -- grew 10.2 percent to 85,400.

South Korea saw the biggest rise in millionaires last year, with their ranks swelling by 21.3 percent.

It was followed by India, up 19.3 percent, and Russia, up 17.4 percent.

South Africa, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil all posted double-digit increases. Numbers in China grew 6.8 percent

The USA has 2.67 million millionaires.

Bear Napping in Hammock

A week after a bear was cased up a tree by a tabby cat here is a video of a bear climbing into a hammock for a short nap, and then falling out of it.

Rocketboom Interviews George Soros

Rocketboom interview of George Soros.

Investment articles

Leta: Month Twenty-eight

Month Twenty-eight:

One of our favorite parts of the day with you is bath time if only because you are never more excited. Each time I mention that it’s time for your bath you take off running, and when I catch up with you in the bathroom you’re trying to throw your leg over the side of the bathtub even though I haven’t started running the water or taken your clothes off.

Google Dilbert Style

Dilbert Google Logo Comics

Xooglers posts on Scott Adams and Google: There's no story, yet the plot thickens - If a logo changes every day, is it still a logo?

Richer Than We Know

Topic: Economics, Wealth

The $10,000 Light Bulb Or, why it's so hard to measure inflation by Tim Harford:

A highly influential paper by Yale economist William Nordhaus made the point forcefully. He studied not commodities like bicycles or spoons but a service: light. By tracking lighting technology from campfires to oil lamps to today's energy-saving light bulbs, he estimated that the real price of light had fallen 10,000-fold in 100 years. Partly because of Nordhaus' work, many economists believe that the official statistics on wages underestimate how much richer we have become.

I have trouble seeing with confidence what the future holds economically for workers in the USA. I think people in the USA have much more reason to be fearful of maintaining high paying jobs decades into the future (than they did say in 1960).

I actually believe the most likely way to maintain a high standard of living is that the world gets so good at producing that the cost of living well is very low (along the lines of what the article above makes a case for). I also think this is true already in many ways we just don't seem to realize it. The wealth of the middle class of the United States today (in terms of houses they live in, comfort [heat, A/C, electricity, plumbing], health, food, transportation, communication [cell phone, email], access to learning [schools, the internet, libraries, books], physical safety...) is extraordinary but seems to be taken for granted. Most of what is taken for granted today was not available to the rich 50-100 years ago (and much worse alternatives had to be accepted, even by the very rich) and most of the rest of the world today (while the geography based economic gap is shrinking incredibly rapidly it is still quite large for most of the population of the world).

Another alternative future is that the society generates massive excess wealth that then allows the society to subsidize large parts of the society (not exactly the traditional American way - but if the "tax" is minor because of the massive excess wealth this may work). Another alternative is that we don't live as well (or at least large portions (say over 1/3) don't.

And another alternative is I am just wrong about all this things just continue as they are and everything works out well. Predicting into the economic future is difficult to do accurately.

Stupid Interview Questions - IT

Stupid Interview Questions

Q. What if the destination file already exists?
A. It won’t.
Q. So the caller ensures that?
A. Right, sure.
Q. So if it does exist, I can just terminate the program, then? Obviously this would be a violation of preconditions, and who knows WHAT is going on.
A. Sure, whatever you want.
Q. What about alternate data streams?
A. Do whatever you want!
Q. Look, I’m sorry if you feel put-upon here, please don’t get hostile. I’m just trying to get a clear picture of the specs I need here. Obviously if I’m going to write a file copy method, instead of using one of the many extant file copy routines in various libraries and frameworks, it’s going to be fulfilling a specialized set of requirements, and I’m going to need to have good answers for these questions. If you want, I can hack something together in a minute, but I’d have to note that there were many unresolved issues as to requirements and purposes.
A. AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Mission accomplished.

Anti Competitive Lobbying

Crushing Competition by Lawrence Lessig

Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient?
...
Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax?

But what is surprising is that their "arguments" are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its "concerns" about the program - for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient "violates the proper role of government." Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

Related:

• Innovation and Creative Commons
  
• The Public Domain
  

Unlikely Pandemic?

The silliness of bird flu panic by Gregg Easterbrook

This article makes the case that an avian flu pandemic is unlikely.

All this for a disease that since 2003 has killed 113 people worldwide. During the same span, about 4 million have died worldwide in traffic accidents. The number of these deaths is rising steadily in most nations, with road fatalities on track to become the world's third-leading cause of death - —that is, traffic accidents look exactly like a pandemic. Also since 2003, at least 6 million people worldwide have died of diarrheal diseases, with about 1.5 million of those deaths attributed to rotavirus, which has spread in pandemic fashion. Yet the panic button has been pushed only for bird flu.

Interesting statistics. It would be nice to have been provided the source for them. Also seriously doubt the traffic deaths look like a pandemic. I find it very unlikely that traffic deaths include the rapid increase over time portion of the pandemic description - even without seeing the statistics I would be very surprised if the increase was not fairly small compared to the underlying total. But data showing the deaths over time would show whether a pandemic comparison is sensible.

How to Save Gas (and $$$)

What Really Saves Gas? And How Much?

Our tests showed that the most significant way to save gas is: you. And we're talking massive fuel economy gains. Think you need a hybrid? Chances are you've got hybrid-style mileage in your gas pedal foot. Don't mash the gas when you start up. Take the long view of the road and brake easy.

Other tips include: lower speeds save gas (average: 12% savings), use cruise control (7%).

Stanislav Petrov?

Do you know who, Stanislav Petrov is? He may have saved your life, or allowed you to be born. His decision was made in private and at the time few knew of his actions. He is

is a retired Russian Army colonel who, on September 26, 1983, averted a potential nuclear war by refusing to believe that the United States had launched missiles against the USSR, despite the indications given by his computerized early warning systems. The Soviet computer reports were later shown to have been in error, and Petrov is credited with preventing World War III and the devastation of much of the Earth by nuclear weapons. Because of military secrecy and international policy, Petrov's actions were kept secret until 1998.

• Washington Post article on Stanislav Petrov
• How I stopped nuclear war, BBC

Engineers and Technicians

How the techno-geeks kicked my ass for my own good by Pamela Slim:

So the first time I walked into a conference room populated almost entirely with engineers, I was in for a very rude awakening. I don't remember the subject of the first class I taught, but it must have been something along the lines of career development or management skills. Before the first word was out of my mouth, a student flagged my attention:

"Excuse me, but do you know that the percentages don't add up correctly on the graph on page 27 of the workbook?"

I must have mumbled something like "Oh - ok, thanks for telling me" while inside I was thinking "Who the hell cares, and why are you skipping so far ahead in the workbook before we even begin?"
...
Highly technical people like engineers detest made-up numbers, especially when they are used to support an argument.

Also see: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

The English Tongue we Speak

Another word related post:

When the English tongue we speak,
Why is "break" not rhymed with "freak"?
Will you tell me why its true
We say "sew" but likewise "Jew"?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Beard" sounds not the same as "heard";
"Cord" is different from "word";
"Cow" is cow, but "low" is low,
"Shoe" is never rhymed with "foe,"
And since "pay" is rhymed with "say,"
Why not "paid" with "said," I pray?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And in short it seems to me
Sound and letters disagree.

Pretty cool, but even better when you read it on the web site of the Simplified Spelling Society. I just accept that spelling makes no sense and I can't spell. These people actually want to do something about it.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, Revolutionist's Handbook

W00t

W00t, from Wiktionary: We Owned the Other Team - "Whoot, there it is" - "wonderous loot" used in Ultima Online - "woot, I have root!"

Urban Dictionary also defines it.

Slot Canyons and Raging Rivers

Narrow Escapes in The Southwest by Gary H. Anthes:

Dividing eight days among Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and an area along the Utah-Arizona border that includes the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, I aimed to try my hand -- and feet -- at "canyoneering," hiking along streambeds in narrow canyons.

Zion and the other parks in Southern Utah are great. I have to get around to posting some of my photos to Curious Cat Travels - John Hunter.

Are Software Patents Evil?

Are Software Patents Evil? by Paul Graham

A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee. You don't do that if you can still reach the ball, even if you genuinely believe you've been fouled. So a company threatening patent suits is a company in trouble.

Because there's so much scope for design in software, a successful application tends to be way more than the sum of its patents. What protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors is not just their patents, but the thousand little things the big company will get wrong if they try.

And on the topic of companies in business just to sue others he gets to the point that patent law exists not for some abstract purpose. Patent law exists for the greater economic good (by rewarding inventors with a chance to profit from their invention for a period of time we encourage people to invent). As he says:

The American way is to make money by creating wealth, not by suing people.

Related posts:

• The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved
  
• The Pending Problem With Patents
  

Etymological Dictionary

Etymological Dictionary - "This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."

The Gettysburg Address: Powerpoint Presentation

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

Patent Law

This Essay Breaks the Law by Michael Crichton

If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that's your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn't be.

He is right. The faulty rules the United States has been slipping into greatly harm society.

Is the US Patent System Endangering American Innovation? (pdf format)

See previous post:

• The Pending Problem With Patents


• The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved

Tags: Patent

Good Neighbors

Amish neighbors take just one day to rebuild home destroyed by twister by Steve Koehler:

Debris from the destroyed house was spread for hundreds of yards. Some still hangs in the nearby groves of trees. Fences were torn down. Wash lines snapped. Two other buildings and an outhouse were wiped away.

All were rebuilt in about a morning.

It is a remarkable testimony to the Amish spirit and credo that neighbors help neighbors in times of need.

NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge

Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat basketball fans.

To play, sign in to ESPN and register, if you need to, or sign into your account (using the link at the very top of the page).

Once you create your entry, you will see a link to "create or join groups." Click that link. Then enter curiouscat in the find group box. Then enter cat as the password.

Good Luck,

Recent Reading

I have been reading quite a few interesting books lately. I just finished Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (the main theme is global warming).

I think he is a great author but this was not my favorite book of his (that would be: Escape From Kathmandu). It was enjoyable but I really most enjoyed that he mentioned the Food Factory a hidden, great Pakistani restaurant a few blocks from the National Science Foundation (a central location for much of the action), and other such details.

Other books I have read recently:

• The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (great)
• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (historical look at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and National Book award winner
  
• Magic Street by Orson Scott Card which I enjoyed a great deal but I enjoy everything of his so I might not be the best judge.
  
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson quite good.
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaimain (great)
  

Panda Kindergarten Webcast

Can you get much cuter than this? Panda kindergarden webcast

Simpsons 'trump' First Amendment

Simpsons 'trump' First Amendment

Americans know more about The Simpsons TV show than the US Constitution's First Amendment, an opinion poll says.

Only one in four could name more than one of the five freedoms it upholds but more than half could name at least two members of the cartoon family.

Great way to make a point and jab at the Americans: published by BBC. I named 4 of the freedoms but all 5 Simpson's so I guess it is true I could name more of the Simpsons than freedoms. I think it is good to poke some good natured fun at how little attention we pay to important things: including the Constitution.

By the way those 5 freedoms are: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and petition.

You have to love that "about one in five thought the right to own a pet was one of the freedoms."

Also see: John Simpson

Customer Un-Service

Budget Rent a Car Topping Off Some Bills With Fuel Charge by Keith L. Alexander, Washington Post:

To help offset gasoline prices, Budget Rent a Car is imposing an additional $9.50 charge on all vehicles driven fewer than 75 miles.
...
"This is a convenience and time-saver for our customers," said Susan McGowan, a spokeswoman for Cendant Corp., Budget's parent company. "This is being done to recoup the cost of lost fuel."
...
"It ticked me off that after I told them I bought the gas, [the fee] still showed up. I had to go in and show them the receipt and everything," he said.

Does anyone believe the Cendant spokesperson? Given that they say make sure obviously self serving false statements why would any customer believe Cendant is interested in anything but tricking customers out of money? This type of behavior in my experience shows exactly why customers feel like they are being hustled by most large companies.

I would imagine all customers realize if a company wants to offer convenience to customers they don't impose mandatory fees then require customers jump through silly hoops to get there money back. Obviously imposing mandatory fees is done to take money from customers they would not chose to give you if you offered the "service."

It is so frustrating that companies behave like this, so much more often than in a honest open way.

Does anyone doubt that what most customers would like it for you to return the car and be charge the wholesale gas rate for any gas that must be added to the tank. The rental fee can include the time this takes just like it includes the cost of washing the car. Companies providing this un-service don't deserve to be in business. I just expect rental companies to try to rip me off every time I deal with them.

Google News out of beta

Google News out of beta. I am amazed at how good a job it does using alogrithms instead of editors to decide what news stories to highlight. It certainly could be improved but it is quite good. I would like it if I could rate news sources and give them more or less weight in my results (make them more or less likely to be returned).

Facing the CEO Pay Crisis

Solving a $122 billion problem by Marc Gunther, Fortune:

A strong believer in free markets, Cox said it's not the government's job to decide how much companies should pay CEOs, or whether pay should be linked to performance. But he also said that, if markets are to work, investors need "comprehensive but also comprehensible information" about the amount and structure of executive pay. These rules represent the first major changes in pay disclosure since 1992.
...
What's more, new research by Lucien Bebchuk, a Harvard Business School professor who studies executive pay, indicates that pay as a proportion of earnings is growing. From 1999 to 2003, the top five execs at the 1,500 largest public companies, as a group, took home $122 billion in salary, bonus and stock. That's not chump change.

Related posts:

• CEO Pay: Obscene
  
• The 5 most Outrageously Overpaid CEOs
  
• Excessive Executive Pay
  

Google for the S&P 500

Google: S&P 500 wallflower, Only 15 firms in the benchmark are worth more than Google. So how much longer will it have to wait?

Well I certainly thought they would add it last year, I was wrong obviously. I think S&P also made a mistake in not adding it. So now, I think it will be added in 2006, we will see.

Google Braille

Google's famous logo in braille - they made it the logo on their site in honor of Louis Braille's birthday. Pretty cool. They are getting some bad publicity recently but still they continue to manage to get an amazing amount of great publicity.

10 Stocks for 10 Years - GOOG, TM, PTR...

Ender's Game: Back to the Drawing Board

Ender's Game: Back to the Drawing Board, quoting Orson Scott Card:

Warner is still strongly committed to making Ender's Game into a great movie, and we agreed to another year or so of option, starting with a new script written by me (a page-one rewrite not based on any previous script, including mine).

Curious Cat Orson Scott Card Books

Google and AOL

Yow. Don't Jump the Shark, Google, by John Battelle:

First, I can't believe Google actual did what is claimed (my guess is, that it is a misunderstanding).

If Google is going to give certain AOL ads different treatment (showing them when their best algorithm shows other ads have a higher value), that would be stupid (the degree of stupidity would depend on the degree of favoritism they give, in my opinion - and not a linear scale).

It is possible to give AOL a better deal without altering the algorithm - such as Google taking a smaller slice of the profit on AOLs adds. So if normally the advertiser has to pay Google a 30% fee and Google made AOL only pay a 20% fee for the same dollars from AOL and the same ranking algorithm (if it were maximized for showing the highest overall value ads - as opposed to the highest Google profit ads) then AOL would get "priority" placement but within an overall optimized system. In this case you keep the algorithm in place for showing ads as if Google were taking their normal cut but then when "charging" AOL a discount is given (or Google "pays" the normal charges to the advertiser as the Washington Post article seems to indicate).

Essentially Google accepts less. They could also optimize the algorithm for Google's profit but I imagine they don't do this now. Otherwise volume discount agreements would not be worth much. Of course, I haven't given this much thought I might be missing something obvious.

But even if Google made that decision, stupid moves are not all "jump the shark" stupid. I agree that it is not the right term to use.

Also see: Google to Buy 5% Of AOL for $1 Billion

Very Cool Illusion

See this amazing illusion. Maybe you shouldn't believe what you see with your own eyes.

Sissel Ball Chairs

Sissel SitFit Plus

SitFit-Cover 13"/33cm

Or the more radical: Ball Chair
shown in photo. This might be a good gift for someone who has almost everything, what are the chances they have one of these?

Sissel exercise ball

The New Rich-Rich Gap

The New Rich-Rich Gap by Robert B. Reich:

In recent years, the top fifth of American workers has held 85 percent of the country's wealth. What I didn't predict was that the three tiers would change shape so dramatically. The top and bottom tiers are growing, and the middle shrinking, much faster than I expected. Symbolic analysts now make up more than a fifth of all jobs in advanced economies, up from about 15 percent 15 years ago. Their incomes in developing economies are soaring, relative to other workers'. In China, the wealthiest 5 percent now control half of all bank deposits. India's symbolic analysts are becoming a new national elite.
...
Yet unless the advanced economies invest more in education and basic R&D, they could lose their global lead in science, engineering and high-value-added production within a few decades. China and India are now graduating more engineers and computer scientists than are emerging from American and European universities. At some point, national symbolic analysts in advanced economies will lose ground.

The changes are happening much faster than I thought they would. And I think the predictability of what will happen going forward is becoming much more difficult. The system has a capacity for huge and rapid change.

Ireland Saving Microsoft $500 million in Taxes

US Multinationals Overseas Profits: Ireland's patent income tax-exemption may fund over 5% of Irish Government annual spending in 2006

houses an obscure subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. that helps the computer giant shave at least $500 million from its annual tax bill.
...
The Wall Street Journal said in its report that a Microsoft Dublin-based company that is used for routing patent a royalty income from overseas operations, paid the Irish Revenue $300 million in taxes last year.
...
In 2002, US companies reported $149 billion of profits in 18 tax-haven countries, up 68% from $88 billion in 1999, according to Tax Notes, which analyzed the most recently available Commerce Department data. This compares with a 23% increase in total offshore profits earned by US multinationals during the same period-total profits of US multinationals'’ foreign subsidiaries around the world stood at $255 billion in 2002.

Wealth of Nations

Quoting Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, emphasis added:

But in the present state of Europe, when small as well as great estates derive their security from the laws of their country, nothing can be more completely absurd. They are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died, perhaps five hundred years ago. Entails, however, are still respected, through the greater part of Europe; In those countries, particularly, in which noble birth is a necessary qualification for the enjoyment either of civil or military honours. Entails are thought necessary for maintaining this exclusive privilege of the nobility to the great offices and honours of their country; and that order having usurped one unjust advantage over the rest of their fellow-citizens, lest their poverty should render it ridiculous, it is thought reasonable that they should have another. The common law of England, indeed, is said to abhor perpetuities, and they are accordingly more restricted there than in any other European monarchy; though even England is not altogether without them.

Blind Search Results Test

Blind Study Finds Google Really Does Offer Best Results, by Nov 21st:

Google offered the overall most relevant results for 41% of searches, Yahoo Search for 33%, and MSN Search trailing behind with only a 27% most relevant share.

As of, Novemeber 26th the results were very similar: Google 42%, Yahoo 32%, MSN 26% (see graphic). This is a nice idea. I think it would be improved if more results were shown (only 3 were shown for each search engine). I am also a bit unclear on if it keeps the same letters for each search you do. The results were very close for the searches I tried.

One other note is the display of the results at the search engine naturally effects people's opinion. MSN and Google were showing 3 ads above the results for each search I tried while Google showed none above (or 1 above in one case). So I can believe Google gets an extra bump in real life practice due to the better display they provide users. I also believe Google used to have much more superior results than they do now. I think MSN and Yahoo have improved and Google has gotten worse (I imagine due to concetrated effort by those attempting to fool Google into showing less valuable results higher in the returned list than they would without the extra effort put into fooling Google.

Future Expenses as the Baby Boomers Age

The Debate We're Not Having by Robert Samuelson:

By 2030 the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare could easily consume - via higher taxes - a third of workers' future wage and salary increases. Toss in Medicaid (which covers nursing home care and isn't included in the trustees' reports) and the bite grows. We're mortgaging workers' future pay gains for baby boomers' retirement benefits.

It seems so obvious that the age at which benefits are paid needs to be raised drastically (in addition to other reforms - increasing the cap rate, not paying monthly benefits to the wealthy...).

The idea when social security was setup was those few people who lived past the expected life span would get benefits (and those benefits would only require a minimal tax (2%, I believe, with the 1935 law from the outset rasing the rate to 6% by 1949). Now the expected lifespan is well past the retirement age. The model does not work the way it is now (even with increasing social security tax over 15% of earned income - remember the employer and employee both pay social security tax on every employee's earnings). Also the elderly were the poorest age group then. Now the elderly are the richest age group.

On an unrelated note, why are so many large, well financed, sites (like Newsweek in this case) so full of links on their own sites that link to other pages on their own sites that don't exist? It really should not be too much to expect that internal links actually work. They have a link to the authors bio:

"Our web servers cannot find the page or file you asked for.
The link you followed may be broken or expired."

Another link to something titled "more aritcles by this author" and you get sent to a search page with 16 boxes of info to fill out. What? Just show the articles by this author. Such an poor implimentation. What a shame. And many sites that probably spend millions a year on content, advertising, design... are also very poorly designed in 2005! Crazy.

Innovation and Google

Google: Lessons for America's Innovation Policy:

What is not widely known is the contribution that federal research funding played in creating Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin – two computer science graduate students at Stanford University. Stanford was one of a number of universities that received funding under the "Digital Libraries Initiative" – supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (DARPA is the agency that funded the ARPANET in the late 1960's, the computer network that led to today's Internet).

The goal of the initiative, launched in 1994, was to "dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks - all in user-friendly ways." Larry Page was funded under the DLI as a graduate student researcher, and Sergei Brin was supported with an NSF graduate student fellowship.

Page and other Stanford researchers created an algorithm called PageRank. It ranks the importance of each Web page based on the number and importance of other Web pages that link to it. This technological advance enabled Page and Brin to develop a search engine that found useful and relevant information, which was critical to Google's popularity. Google was also prototyped on equipment paid for by the federal government's Digital Library Initiative.

Innovation: Science, Engineering and the Economy

Let's rally around innovation, Des Moines Register:

China and India each turn out thousands more scientists and engineers every year than the United States does. All of the fast-rising economies of the world recognize the connection between science and prosperity and are making huge investments, while the United States rests on its laurels.

This sums up a key point that has been overlooked in much of the discussion in the blogosphere about Innovation in America.

Related blog posts from technorati

Innovation and Offshoring

Expensive Water

Once again the Dilbert blog has a great post, Expensive Water:

competing bottled water company noticed my choice and insisted on knowing why I wasn’t picking her lower priced water instead. The clear inference was that I’m not too bright. Water is water, she noted.

The first defense that came to mind went unsaid, but it would have gone something like this “If I’m dumb enough to buy water, I’m certainly dumb enough to pay too much for it!”

Manufacturing Job Losses: USA 2 million, China 15 million

Paul Solman: from October 14, 2005 Transcript on the Online News Hour (PBS):

Trade based on cheap manufacturing, cheap labor. But manufacturing is becoming more and more mechanized -- in China like everywhere else. In fact, between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with a loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

This figure surprises many people. China has lost 7 times the manufacturing jobs the United Stats has from 1995 to 2002.

For more see, our post on: Manufacturing and the Economy

Related: Manufacturing Employment Data: USA, Japan, Germany, UK… 1990-2009 - Global Manufacturing Employment Data from 1979 to 2007 Manufacturing Jobs Data: USA and China (1990 to 2005) - Top 10 Countries for Manufacturing Production in 2010: China, USA, Japan, Germany…

Modern Day Pirates

Pirate 'mother ship' spotted:

he northern and southern coastline of Somalia -- Africa's longest -- links trade routes for key commodities like oil, grains and iron ore from the Gulf and Red Sea region down to the Mozambique Channel. Thousands of merchant ships snake down the Somali coast to the Cape of Good Hope every year.

Some of the world's leading shipping bodies called on the U.N. to urgently address the issue.

Pirates storm Indonesian tanker:

The narrow Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and has long been a haunt of pirates.

Some 37 acts of piracy were recorded there last year but there has been a sharp fall in reported attacks after December's tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Malaysia-based bureau says.

Dilbert Blog

Scott Adams has started a Dilbert Blog that is great so far.

How Certain is Certain?:

I had to weigh a 20% chance of not getting a timely wiz versus a .00000001% chance of a fireball-related death.
...
My only solace is that if this puppy goes down, the headlines will read “Plane Crashes. Dilbert Cartoonist is turned into Charcoal.” That’s called Top Billing, baby. Take that, rule breaker! I hope he’s not the new Chairman of the Fed or something. That would really suck.

Dangerous Donuts:

Luckily I have 16 years of corporate experience, and I know how to navigate my way around group decisions. What you need is a solution that could only appeal to a committee. I suggested a compromise. I would keep everything the same, except the gun would be replaced with a donut… that fires bullets.

USA not Number 1?

No. 1? by Michael Ventura

An empire without a manufacturing base. An empire that must borrow $2 billion a day from its competitors in order to function. Yet the delusion is ineradicable. We're No. 1. Well ... this is the country you really live in:

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
• The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
  

...

The USA is "No. 1" in nothing but weaponry, consumer spending, debt, and delusion

Well, actually, I believe the United States does manufacture more than any other country. And it is definitely the largest economy. Still I accept the point that the USA has many things it should improve.

Small World Photos

Very cool photos from the Nikon Small World photo contest - showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. See photos from past years.

Photo shown by, Dr. Marie-Hélène Bré

Laboratory of Cellular Biology
University of Paris, South
Orsay, France

Tetrahymena thermophila (protozoa) cells (1500x)

Apple Tribute to Rosa Parks

Apple has a great tribute to Rosa parks on their home page. In case the home page imagine is gone you can read about her here.

License Agreements - a Pain?

License agreements - a pain? This is exactly the type of service I believe we will see more of: services that use the internet to provide true information to consumers:
EULAlyzer:

End user license agreements (EULAs) are the bane of most computer users.
No one wants to read through pages and pages of boring text before installing a program. And many programs put their license agreements in small windows that require lots of scrolling. So many people either skim them or skip reading them altogether.

But it can be dangerous not to read license agreements.
License agreements can provide information about the intentions of software, and other bundled components. Have you ever installed a program, only to have your desktop taken over by advertising? It may have been noted in the license agreement that you simply clicked past. If you aren't reading the license agreements, you have no idea what you could be agreeing to.

You should always read license agreements before agreeing to them.
But now there's a way of making that much easier.

EULAlyzer can analyze license agreements in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you're about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or much much more.

The current customer hostile behavior of many technology companies works for them. I hope tools like this will benefit those companies that treat customers fairly and harm those that are hostile to customers.

Woz and Scoble

Fun post from Scoble on meeting Wozniak:

He showed Patrick his two iPods (a black Nano and a black 60gb video iPod). Showed me his Sony camera (same one that Steve Gillmor has). Showed me how to break a pencil with a $2 bill. Told me that his son, Jesse, had graduated from college and was working on software for NASA (on the project to repair the Hubble telescope).

Tomacco

And now for something completely different - Tomacco:

A tomacco is originally a fictional hybrid fruit that is half tomato and half tobacco, from the 1999 episode "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)" of The Simpsons; the method used to create the tomacco in the episode is fictional. The tomacco became real when it was allegedly produced in 2003. The tomacco is one of the few made-up words in The Simpsons that resulted in real life application.

A selection of made up words: Yoink!, Scientician, Redorkulated, Malk and Embiggen.

How to Work Effectively

Meet the Life Hackers, Clive Thompson, New York Times.

Great article exploring the challenges of modern office workplaces:

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Bill Gates Visits Top IT And Engineering Colleges

Bill Gates Visits Top IT And Engineering Colleges

Webcast: Bill Gates at Columbia University

Transcript: Bill Gates at Princeton University:

One of the best investments Microsoft ever chose to make was as soon as we could afford to do it we started going after this long-term research. It's out of that research activity that a lot of our great innovations have come. As we did that, we had the concern that many companies who have done advanced research haven't been able to flow it into their products. In our industry Xerox is very famous for having contributed to research and then the various products they tried to build out of that were not a success. So they, in a business sense, really didn't get any return at all from the work that they'd done.

In our case, by having the right kind of researchers, having the product people love to spend time with them, really getting it out and showing what they're doing, our experience has been quite the opposite.

Sergey Brin Lecture Webcast

A series of lectures are available as webcasts on Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business, University of California - Berkeley. And if fact see all sorts of courses at Berkeley that make available webcasts.

This is great. I just love when the internet is actually provides great content to people all over the world, that had no reasonable way to get the material previously.

The webcast of Sergey's Views on Search, Google, and Life (Sergey Brin Co-Founded, Google).

Another great place for podcasts is IT Conversations.

Fun Video

A fun video commercial for Guinness. Creating commercials people actually enjoy (and even share with other like we are here) is going to be one of the keys to being a successful mass marketer in the internet age.

Tim O'Reilly Profile in Wired

The Trend Spotter by Steven Levy, Wired:

In O'Reilly's world, sharing increases value - so much so that it becomes unthinkable to close off information or to adopt nonstandard proprietary systems. The result is a virtuous cycle where openness becomes the norm, encouraging even more participation.

A great example of a reinforcing loop in systems thinking parlance.

About Us page on O'Reilly web site:

O'Reilly Media is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies...
O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries.

Grammer Resource

Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style

This is not an area of real interest to me, but even I find this guide useful.

What I Did at Google's Summer of Code

What I Did at Google's Summer of Code by Sean Michael Kerner:

About 9,000 people applied to Google for the paid opportunity to participate in Google's Summer of Code program, an open source development project aimed at producing new and established open source programs.

The program was originally set up to accept 200 participants but that number doubled to 410 projects that were spread across 41 different sponsoring organizations, including Google.

One of the reasons Google's honeymoon is lasting so long is they keep doing so many things right.

Nestled among the 410 projects that Google funded this past summer are 13 that were directly sponsored by Google for Google.
...
Working for "free" is one thing; getting paid to work on Free and Open Source software is quite another. Google's funding of the various projects didn't raise notable problems, though it may have raised expectations for the future.

"One minor issue for us it that the reward offer is quite sizable, and was, in most cases, larger than what the bounty would have fetched in the usual Bounty system employed within Ubuntu," Ubuntu's Weideman said.

Google Summer of Code

Cell Phone Ban Urged for Teen Drivers

Cell phone ban urged for teen drivers:

The National Transportation Safety Board put the proposed restriction on its "most wanted" list of safety improvements for the upcoming year, which also includes older appeals for more states to impose limits on teens' night driving and carrying of passengers.

Good idea, previous posts on Driving While Impaired and Record Low Highway Fatality Rate.

Free Opera Browser

The Opera browser is now free.

The Opera browser is excellent. I still prefer firefox but Opera is a good second browser. Freeware provides some great software options. See more on Curious Cat Cool Direcorty - Freeware.

Google and Comment Spam

I restrict my blogs to just allow posts from registered blogger accounts. Still every post on our Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog gets spam posts within minutes of being posted (for some reason that blog gets more than 75% of all the spam comments - the others only occasionally get spam). I can't believe Google can't block most of these bozos. I also can't believe they don't give us the option to only have comments posted once we approve the comment.

Google really needs to upgrade blogger in several obvious ways. I can't believe how slow upgrades to blogger have been. When I decided to go with blogger for my blogs I figured, ok there are some really lame things (like not being able to categorize posts) but Google just bought blogger so I am sure within a few months these obvious shortfalls will be fixed. I am still waiting. Overall Google is doing great things but I really think they should be doing a better job of improving blogger and of providing less spamy search results.

They don't even make it obvious that they pay attention to the comments I delete (maybe they are doing some analysis of what all us bloggers are deleting but I don't know...). They should have a button that says deleted because this is a spam comment. Then they could use the collection of such decisions by bloggers to deal better with spam.

Google: Gates, Blog Search, Stock

Gates on Google: What, me worry? by Mike Ricciuti and Martin LaMonica

Gates: Yeah. You do me-too Google Talk, and it's a big deal. But we had our honeymoon phase, and it was fun from maybe 1985 to 1995. And we've had lots of competitors in their honeymoon phase. But I'd say, in some ways, this is the biggest honeymoon I've ever seen.

I would agree it is the biggest honeymoon phase I have seen (which points out his estimate of Microsoft's is exaggerated).


Google launches Blog Search:

But more importantly, the advanced search offers powerful functionality such as searching by date ranges and limiting to individual blog authors, in addition to features like searching for words in a blog post title or by language, which have been deployed in the past on other services.

So far I think the Google Blog Search is fine but nothing incredible. I agree the advanced page seems to be where the value is. I figure Google will improve this quite a bit, right now the quality of the results in not great in my opinion.

My comment on Battelle' Searchblog, Is this normal?: "That is normal. The secondary offering is always priced below the market price. Oversimplified market way of thinking about it: the market is balanced with buyers and sellers at the current price. You are then adding $4 billion to the sell side of the market. It would make sense the price would have to decline to bring in buyers. Oversimplified cynical way of thinking about it, those inside wall street folks don't have to pay what us regular folks have to pay. Well I missed out on the original offering, but did pick some up earlier this year way below the $295 price: I am happy with that purchase."

Google continues to get the positive press. It is really amazing how well they are doing.

Cerf Going to Google

Vint Cerf, a Founding Father of the Internet, Joins Google as Chief Internet Evangelist

"Vint Cerf is clearly one of the great technology leaders of our time," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt of Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocols that were used to develop the Internet's underlying architecture. "His vision for technology helped create entire industries that have transformed many parts of our lives. We are honored to welcome him to Google."

Google keeps the positive news stories flowing.

The Pending Problem With Patents

The Pending Problem With Patents

It's just way too easy to get a patent these days (by one estimate, more than 85 percent of all applications are ultimately approved) and way too difficult to challenge a frivolous one.

The whole point of the patent system is to encourage invention. That's why the government grants a temporary monopoly on original ideas. The problem is that many of the ideas that are awarded patents these days are not original at all. And more often than not, companies apply for patents as a legal defense against litigation rather than to unleash some amazing new product on the world.

The Public Domain

The Public Domain by Lawrence Lessig

This public domain has always lived alongside a private domain...

Traditionally, the law has kept these two domains in balance. The term of copyright was relatively short, and its reach was essentially commercial. But a fundamental change in the scope and nature of copyright law, inspired by a radical change in technology, now threatens this balance.