In BC's "Humble" Opinion

Non-intuitive Government Policy #39213

2011-12-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

Article at The Atlantic

Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?

In 2010, the United States more often chose Door #2, setting aside about 40,000 visas for people of extraordinary ability and 55,000 for people randomly chosen by lottery.

It's just one small example of our bizarre U.S. policy toward high-skill immigrants.

The Overjustification Effect

2011-12-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

Blog post at You Are Not So Smart
Related to intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation

According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day-to-day, to experience “emotional well being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.”

In 1980, David Rosenfield, Robert Folger and Harold Adelman at Southern Methodist University revealed a way you can defeat the overjustification effect. Seek employers who dole out reward – paychecks, bonuses, promotions, etc. – based not on quotas or task completions but instead based on competence.

The results of the study suggested when you get rewarded based on how well you perform a task, as long as those reasons are made perfectly clear, rewards will generate that electric exuberance of intrinsic validation, and the higher the reward, the better the feeling and the more likely you will try harder in the future. On the other hand, if you are getting rewarded just for being a warm body, no matter how well you do your job, no matter what you achieve, the electric feeling is absent. In those conditions greater rewards don’t lead to more output, don’t encourage you to strive for greatness. Overall, the study suggested rewards don’t have motivational power unless they make you feel competent. Money alone doesn’t do that.

Teach practical math

2011-09-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Article at the New York Times

A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching “pure” math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations.

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

W.L. Gore Case Study

2011-07-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

Article at Management Exchange

It’s hard to talk about management innovation without tipping your hat to W.L. Gore, the venerable maker of Gore-Tex and a host of other pioneering materials and products as diverse as synthetic vascular grafts, Elixir guitar strings, and Glide dental floss. Lauded as "the world's most innovative company" time and time again, Gore's wholly original (and endlessly inspirational) model for creating a true democracy of innovation is firmly rooted in the story of founder Bill Gore.

Bill Gore conceived of W.L. Gore as a kind of experiment in management innovation—one that is still ongoing. The questions that drove him at founding are crucial questions managers everywhere must grapple with today: Was it possible to build a company with no hierarchy—where everyone was free to talk with everyone else? How about a company where there were no bosses, no supervisors, no managers and no vice presidents? Could W. L. Gore preserve a sense of family and collegiality even as it scaled? Could you create a company with no “core” business, one that was as focused on creating the future as on preserving the past? The answers to each of these questions was an emphatic "Yes!"

Edward Tufte

2011-05-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

Interview at The Washington Monthly

Edward Tufte occupies a revered and solitary place in the world of graphic design. Over the last three decades, he has become a kind of oracle in the growing field of data visualization—the practice of taking the sprawling, messy universe of information that makes up the quantitative backbone of everyday life and turning it into an understandable story.

In the public realm, data has never been more ubiquitous—or more valuable to those who know how to use it. “If you display information the right way, anybody can be an analyst,” Tufte once told me. “Anybody can be an investigator.”

“Tufte treats data like good writing,” he said. “You have a certain thought—how clearly and beautifully are you conveying it?”

Good design, then, is not about making dull numbers somehow become magically exhilarating, it is about picking the right numbers in the first place.

Google's Project Oxygen

2011-03-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

New York Times article

retyped from the NYT article's image

Google's Rules
To engineer better managers, Google pored over performance reviews, feedback surveys and award nominations, correlating words and phrases as only a data-driven company like it can do. Here is an edited list of the directives it produced - in order of importance - as well as a few management pitfalls it found.

Eight Good Behaviors

Be a good coach

Provide specific constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.
Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employees' specific strengths.

Empower your team and don't micromanage

Balance giving freedom to your employees, while still being available for advice. Make "stretch" assignments to help the team tackle big problems.

Express interest in team members' success and personal well-being

Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work.
Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition.

Don't be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented
- Focus on what employees want the team to achieve and how they can help achieve it.
- Help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks.
Be a good communicator and listen to your team

Communication is two-way: you both listen and share information.
Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of the team. Help the team connect the dots.
Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issue and concerns of your employees.

Help your employees with career development
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team

Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy.
Involve the team in setting and evolving the team's vision and making progress toward it.

Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team, when needed.
Understand the specific challenges of the work.

Three Pitfalls of Managers

Have trouble making a transition to the team

Sometimes, fantastic individual contributors are promoted to managers without the necessary skills to lead people.
People hired from outside the organization don't always understand the unique aspects of managing at Google.

Lack a consistent approach to performance management and career development

Don't help employees understand how these work at Google and doesn't coach them on their options to develop and stretch.
Not proactive, waits for the employee to come to them.

Spend too little time managing and communicating

A Linchpin Hierarchy

2011-02-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Blog post by Seth Godin

Do exactly what the boss says.
Ask the boss hard questions.
Tell the boss what your best choice among the available options is. Insist.
Have co-workers and bosses ask you hard questions.
Invent a whole new way to do things, something that wasn't on the list.
Push and encourage and lead your co-workers to do ever better work.
Insist that they push and encourage you.

I might quibble with the ranking for #6 - I think it's difficult to rank compared with #5. Perhaps Seth is thinking of #5 as only benefiting yourself, whereas #6 benefits the group? Still, pushing for incremental improvement in many people versus a revolutionary improvement that can be spread...

Observe > Predict

2011-02-15T09:37:00.000-08:00

Blog post by Scott Berkun

There’s an old concept among architects and urban planners called desire paths. If you walk around a college campus, or urban park, it’s easy to spot the well tread paths between buildings people have made for themselves. These are desire paths, or desire lines. The natural behavior among people shows you where the optimal path should be.

Rather than invent everything out of their own mind, wise creators know a little observation can be an easier way to find the right ideas.

From Flickr

Why fund science that doesn't benefit society?

2011-02-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

Blog post at Page F30
links to a Science Channel interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Do you think I'm being driven when I look at the early universe or study the rotation of galaxies or the consumption of matter by black holes, do you think I'm being driven by the lessening of the suffering of the people on Earth? Most research on the frontier of science is not driven by that goal. Period.

Now, that being said, most of the greatest applications of science that do improve the human condition comes from just that kind of research. Therein is the intellectual link that needs to be established in an elective democracy where tax-based monies pay for the research on the frontier.

So I take issue with the assumption that science is simply to make life better. Science is to understand the world. And use that -- now you've got a utility belt of understanding. Now you access your tools out of that...to use that power in the greater good of our species.

How Great Entrepreneurs Think

2011-02-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

Article at Inc.com

Sarasvathy likes to compare expert entrepreneurs to Iron Chefs: at their best when presented with an assortment of motley ingredients and challenged to whip up whatever dish expediency and imagination suggest. Corporate leaders, by contrast, decide they are going to make Swedish meatballs. They then proceed to shop, measure, mix, and cook Swedish meatballs in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible.

You’re not a profession. You’re a set of skills.

2011-01-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

Blog post at Pop Economics

I’m Pop. I’m not going to tell you my profession, and most of you who have guessed have been incorrect... But I think I’m pretty good at writing, math, and turning complex subjects into something everyday people can understand. I (just recently) have gained basic web publishing and marketing knowledge. And I think I have a decent eye for catchy design.

Ok, so what profession am I? No idea, right? That’s the point. I could be a number of things. I could write technical manuals. I could be in marketing for an engineering company. I could be a teacher.

Longevity advice

2010-12-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

from Dr. Marle Charlotte De Goliere Devenport, 109 years old as of November 27, 1933.

"Never get angry; learn self control; develop agility; be quick and lithe, not musclebound; avoid excesses in all things; don't put anything on your face that you wouldn't put in your stomach; don't let your mind die."

Google News, Courtesy of Metafilter

Proofiness (or data != information)

2010-12-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

Blog post by Seth Godin

As the number of apparently significant digits in the data available to us goes up (traffic was up .1% yesterday!) we continually seek causation, even if we're looking in the wrong places. As the amount of data we get continues to increase, we need people who can help us turn that data into information.

Proofiness is a tricky thing. Data is not information, and confusing numbers with truth can help you make some bad decisions.

~1,300 pitches in a 4D visualization

2010-12-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

New York Times visualization

First 1:40 of the video introduces some background and concepts.
Next minute is a killer 4D visualization - X, Y, Z, and time.

That's a lot of data crunched down to support some great storytelling.

How to pack for a year

2010-11-20T13:14:00.000-08:00

Blog post at LostGirlsWorld

The list of gear she relied on heavily is quite interesting:

Bag in a Bag
Zinetic Pocket Slippers
Headlamp
Pack towel
Sleep sack/sleeping bag
Ziploc Big Bags
Fleece Pillowcase
iPod
U-Pillow
Compression Sacks

The list of gear she got rid of is also quite instructive:

Synthetic long sleeve tops (start to smell after prolonged use)
Travel shirts

I'm particularly intrigued by Zinetic Pocket Slippers, as they are cheaper (and perhaps slightly more socially acceptable) than Vibram FiveFingers. Unfortunately, Zinetic appears to be a small manufacturer and it's difficult to find any stores with stock.

You can't see what you don't measure...

2010-11-12T14:16:00.000-08:00

Slate
The Big Picture
NPR

If the goal of the Dow Jones Index is to give a single-number summary of the US equity market, the articles listed above argue (convincingly, IMO) that the goal is not being met.

By weighting the prices of a small number of stocks, instead of the market capitalizations of a large number of stocks, the Dow fails to capture the true effects of money flowing in and out of the market as a whole.

Given the amount of time and energy spent following the Dow Jones Index, I would argue that there should be a strong effort to make the index as accurate as possible (or restate the goal). Or, as the Slate article suggests, use a different index.

That's why money managers prefer to use broader market-cap weighted indexes to help create their own portfolios and benchmark their own performances.

Another alternative: RAFI 1000

EDIT: My title was inspired by a quote I'd read before. Here, it is used in a article describing how airport security in the US could be vastly improved by focusing on the people, rather than the threats.

We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there.

The Paradox of Choice

2010-11-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

TED talk by Barry Schwartz

Ever since I saw the TED talk, I find more and more examples that support the idea that limitless possibilities actually cause paralysis. For instance, the rise in popularity of recommendation engines, e.g. Netflix - there are millions of available movies, help me to narrow down my choices to the ones I'm likely to enjoy.

Another example from the New York Times

“The customer walks in the door, and often sees a huge selection of stuff in a multibrand store, and can’t figure out what to buy and ends up buying nothing,” said Paco Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, a Manhattan-based company that advises stores on shoppers’ behavior.

To maximize the profit per square foot, these retailers have to focus on selling lots of a few items. If you're not limited by physical space, how can you better monetize the Long Tail? Algorithmic recommendation engines (Based on your preferences and/or history, you might like...)? Social recommendation engines (Based on your friends, you might like...)?

Non-intuitive Optimization

2010-11-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

Article at The New York Times

Dr. Todorov has studied how we use our muscles, and here, too, he finds evidence of optimization at play. He points out that our body movements are “nonrepeatable”: we may make the same motion over and over, but we do it slightly differently every time.

“You might say, well, the human body is sloppy,” he said, “but no, we’re better designed than any robot.”

In making a given motion, the brain focuses on the essential elements of the task, and ignores noise and fluctuations en route to success. If you’re trying to turn on a light switch, who cares if the elbow is down or to the side, or your wrist wobbles — so long as your finger reaches the targeted switch?

Dr. Todorov and his coworkers have modeled different motions and determined that the best approach is the wobbly, ever-varying one. If you try to correct every minor fluctuation, he explained, not only do you expend more energy unnecessarily, and not only do you end up fatiguing your muscles more quickly, you also introduce more noise into the system, amplifying the fluctuations until the entire effort is compromised.

“So we reach the counterintuitive conclusion,” he said, “that the optimal way to control movement allows a certain amount of fluctuation and noise” — a certain lack of control.

Blog article about genetic optimization of Starcraft 2 build orders

A build order refers to the exact opening steps you take early in the game that best supports the strategy you are trying to conduct.

One of the reasons build-order optimization is so important is that you can discover openings that “hard-counter” other openings. If I can get an army of N size into your base when you do opening X, you will always lose.

The most interesting part of this build (the 7-roach rush), however, is how counter-intuitive it is. It violates several well-known (and well-adhered-to) heuristics used by Starcraft players when creating builds.

My take-home lesson: Don't limit yourself by requiring things to "make sense". Allow reality to broaden your mental horizons.

Lessons for data visualization from Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map"

2010-10-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Blog post at PeteSearch

Snow wasn't the first person to draw these kinds of maps, he wasn't the first to draw them to track disease, and in fact he wasn't even the first person to map this particular outbreak! The Sewer Commision produced a very detailed map showing the death locations. The power of Snow's version came from his decision to leave out a lot of details (sewer locations, old grave sites, etc) that cluttered up the Commision's version. Their map was so muddled that it didn't tell a story, but Snow's was stripped-down to show exactly what he needed to bolster his theory that the epidemic spread from the water pump.

As Johnson puts it in his book "the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science".

Turning data into money

2010-10-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

Blog post at PeteSearch

Here's my hierarchy showing the stages from raw data to cold, hard cash:

Data
Charts
Reports
Recommendations

You're offering them direct ways to meet their business goals, which is incredibly valuable. This is the Nirvana of data startups, you've turned into an essential business tool that your customers know is helping them make money, so they're willing to pay a lot.

My rephrasing of Pete's post: Showing people information is usually not enough. You often have to recommend what to DO with that information.

Watching "the game"

2010-10-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

Something of a misnomer...

Football (article from the Wall Street Journal)
According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

The typical length of a broadcast is 185 minutes, making the actual game ~6% of your typical broadcast.

Baseball (article from the Wall Street Journal)

A similar study of two nine-inning baseball games, one from Fox and another from ESPN.

The result is that during these games, there was a nearly identical amount of action: about 14 minutes. To put that in context, that's about 10.9% of the total broadcast time (excluding commercials).

Add in commercials, and the proportion drops even lower.

Reminds me of the "human" body, where human cells are outnumbered 10 to 1 by bacteria.

Quotes by John Tukey

2010-09-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

This is my new personal motto.

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
- John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.

Hat tip to Flowing Data

And another great one to remember

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
- John Tukey

Hat tip to Flowing Data

Using capitalism, for good

2010-09-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

Blog post by Seth Godin

Part 1: The bottom is important.
Almost a third of the world's population earns $2.50 or less a day. The enormity of this disparity takes my breath away, but there's an interesting flip side to it: That's a market of more than five billion dollars a day. Add the next segment ($5 a day) and it's easy to see that every single day, the poorest people in the world spend more than ten billion dollars to live their lives.

Part 2: The bottom is an opportunity (for both buyer or seller).

Part 3: It's not as easy as it looks
So you see the paradox. A new product and approach and innovation could dramatically improve the life and income of a billion people, but those people have been conditioned to ignore the very tools that are a reflex of marketers that might sell it to them. Fear of loss is greater than fear of gain. Advertising is inefficient and ineffective. And the worldview of the shopper is that they're not a shopper. They're in search of refills.
The answer, it turns out, is in connecting and leading Tribes. It lies in engaging directly and experientially with individuals, not getting distribution in front of markets. Figure out how to use direct selling in just one village, and then do it in ten, and then in a hundred. The broad, mass market approach of a Western marketer is foolish because there is no mass market in places where villages are the market.

Part 4: The (eventual) power of the early adopter
Just because it is going to take longer than it should doesn't mean we should walk away. There are big opportunities here, for all of us. It's going to take some time, but it's worth it.

Seth Godin's blog post relates to the mission of the Acumen Fund, "Investing in businesses to end global poverty"

Simplicity is highly overrated

2010-09-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

(in mass-market consumer goods)

Blog post by Don Norman

If a company spent more money to design and build an appliance that worked so well, so automatically, that all it needed was an on-off switch, people would reject it. “This simple looking thing costs more?” They would complain. “What is that company thinking of? I’ll buy the cheaper one with all those extra features – after all, it’s better, right? And I save money.”

Logic and reason, I have to keep explaining, are wonderful virtues, but they are irrelevant in describing human behavior. Trying to prove a point through intelligent, reasonable argumentation is what I call the “engineer’s fallacy.” (Also, the economist’s fallacy.”) We have to design for the way people really behave [emphasis added], not as engineers or economists would prefer them to behave.

Stats make something else interesting (golf)

2010-08-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

Along the same lines as my previous post regarding fashion, statistics are making golf interesting.

Slate's "Moneygolf" series
Seven million shots
How golf really works
The dark art of putting

FYI - "Moneygolf" is a reference to Michael M. Lewis' book "Moneyball", which talks about the field of Sabermetrics (statistics applied to baseball).

FYI2 - After recently watching "The Blind Side" (an emotional drama), I was very surprised at first to find out that it was based on a book by Michael Lewis ("an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist"). However, after finding out that there were two story lines in the book - one about the evolution of NFL offensive strategy and one about Michael Oher - I am once again reminded of the changes that occur when a book is transformed into a movie.

But will it make you happy?

2010-08-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

Article at the New York Times

New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

New phrase of the week - "hedonic adaptation"

The website mentioned in the article is most likely:
100 Thing Challenge

Data can make ANYTHING interesting

2010-08-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

Even fashion, which every person who knows a modicum about me would say is something I show extremely little interest in.

Article at the Wall Street Journal

Online retailers, in particular, see every click we make. They know which brands we've peeked at, how long we pondered, and what we actually purchased. They know the time of day and the days of the week that we shop. They know—and record—our color choices, sizes and tastes so that they can recommend clothes that are in tune with our yearnings.

Some of the data confirm regional stereotypes. Southerners bought more white, green, and pink than other regions' residents, for instance, according to data from private-sale site Hautelook.com, which caters to young, urban professional women. Now I know, too, why I feel like such a loner wearing brown in Los Angeles, where black, white and gray are preferred.

The value of authenticity

2010-08-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Article at Wired.com

If I had access to a secret stash of iPhone knockoffs — a phone that worked identically to the real iPhone, but was a bootleg made of inauthentic parts — how much could I charge? Could I sell them for $10 less than the purchase price of a real iPhone? What about 25 percent off? How much is authenticity worth?

This is a great summary line:

There are many blankets in the world. But there is only one blankie. The best brands are blankies.

The Top Idea in Your Mind

2010-07-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

Blog post by Paul Graham

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.

I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding.... One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done.

For me, this ties into the ideal of simplicity - your life should be simple (i.e. free of distractions) so that you can focus on what is important to you. A cluttered life makes it very difficult to choose a desirable "top idea".

A/B Testing and Groundhog Day

2010-07-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Coding Horror

Phil doesn't just go on one date with Rita, he goes on thousands of dates. During each date, he makes note of what she likes and responds to, and drops everything she doesn't. At the end he arrives at -- quite literally -- the perfect date. Everything that happens is the most ideal, most desirable version of all possible outcomes on that date on that particular day. Such are the luxuries afforded to a man repeating the same day forever.

But at the end of this perfect date, something impossible happens: Rita rejects Phil.

Phil wasn't making these choices because he honestly believed in them. He was making these choices because he wanted a specific outcome -- winning over Rita -- and the experimental data told him which path he should take. Although the date was technically perfect, it didn't ring true to Rita, and that made all the difference.

While I think the analogy between Groundhog Day and A/B testing is perfect, I disagree with the conclusion that "A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it."

I would argue that A/B testing is useful because it reveals what people actually prefer, rather than what they say they prefer. Often there is quite a gap between the two. Also, as many of the commenters pointed out, A/B testing is just a tool - you don't have to limit yourself to testing tiny, incremental tweaks. You can creatively explore the world of possibilities, while basing your final choice on hard data.

As one commenter pointed out, the analogy to Groundhog Day breaks down because at the end of the day, "It's a movie. She rejects him, not because of some inherent failure in the method he uses, but because it was written that way in the script."

Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure

2010-06-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Article at Wired magazine

Brin’s tolerance for “noisy data” is especially telling, since medical science tends to consider it poisonous. Biomedical researchers often limit their experiments to narrow questions that can be rigorously measured. But the emphasis on purity can mean fewer patients to study, which results in small data sets. That limits the research’s “power”—a statistical term that generally means the probability that a finding is actually true. And by design it means the data almost never turn up insights beyond what the study set out to examine.

Increasingly, though, scientists—especially those with a background in computing and information theory—are starting to wonder if that model could be inverted. Why not start with tons of data, a deluge of information, and then wade in, searching for patterns and correlations?

This is what Jim Gray, the late Microsoft researcher and computer scientist, called the fourth paradigm of science, the inevitable evolution away from hypothesis and toward patterns. Gray predicted that an “exaflood” of data would overwhelm scientists in all disciplines, unless they reconceived their notion of the scientific process and applied massive computing tools to engage with the data. “The world of science has changed,” Gray said in a 2007 speech—from now on, the data would come first.

What is data science?

2010-06-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

Article at O'Reilly Radar

An well-written, dense article covering the rise of data science.

I'm not even going to try to summarize the article with excerpts, but I have picked out a portion that best summarizes what I do.

A picture may or may not be worth a thousand words, but a picture is certainly worth a thousand numbers. The problem with most data analysis algorithms is that they generate a set of numbers. To understand what the numbers mean, the stories they are really telling, you need to generate a graph.

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Compendium

2010-06-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

Slide deck at Scribd

Content mostly from Wikipedia's page on cognitive biases

Why bother looking at these?
Two words: Know thyself

Rest assured that competent marketers know these biases and utilize them, and I'm not just referring to people trying to sell you stuff.

The Shop I Want

2010-05-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Rands in Repose

We’re in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there’s a lot of everything. Google was created and thrives attempting to solve the everything problem for us. Google has made it wonderfully simple to find a thing, but just because you find a thing doesn’t mean you care about it. As you stare at a PageRanked list of stuff, you have a choice:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others.

Or…

You can have an opinion.

It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.

The days are long, but the years are short

2010-05-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

A great way to describe parenthood, coined by Gretchen Craft Rubin.

She has also made a short Flash video, which is well worth watching for parents who find themselves to be a bit frustrated with the daily grind and need to "reboot" their perspective.

Quote was found as part of this article, on being a more light-hearted parent.

Bonus quote: "happiness equals reality divided by expectations", by Alden Cass

Why is the world a mess?

2010-05-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

Blog post by Scott Berkun

1. People don't listen
2. People don't read

There’s this assumption in our culture that with all the TV shows, and books, and websites, we’re all reading more and listening more, but I doubt that. It's become increasingly acceptable not to be listening (e.g. staring at your laptop or phone in meetings) and not be reading (skimming how many emails, or blog posts, in an hour). And I bet any culture, a team, a family, a country, where there is more real listening and real reading, people are happier and more successful at achieving things that matter.

But I’ve yet to see someone monetize listening, or reading. So the whirlwind of commerce naturally encourages less listening and less reading, but more of everything else.

Passive investing, with a dash of market timing

2010-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Pop Economics

But as tough it is to see if the market is slightly over or underpriced, it’s actually pretty easy to see if it’s way over or underpriced.

Looking back at market prices and earnings for a little more than 100 years, Shiller found that the market’s average P/E10 (the shorthand when you use 10-year earnings) was about 15. What’s more, if you invested when the market was at a high P/E10, your returns for the next 10 years were almost certain to be much less than if you invested when the P/E10 was below 15.

Based on the CAFE10 metric, you slightly tilt your portfolio towards stocks or bonds.

Robert Shiller's CAFE10 Data
updated monthly

Rise of the Data Scientist

2010-04-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

This post at FlowingData, which is a response to the "R is an Epic Fail" post at another blog, led me to an older post at FlowingData (which cites Hal Varian's comment regarding the forthcoming sexiness of statisticians).

As someone who finds the label "Data Scientist" appealing, I firmly believe in the following:

Similarly, those who can build visualization and analysis tools are the ones who will provide the next big thing.

So don't get too upset, R programmers, or all data scientists for that matter. While the software was bashed, you're getting a thumbs up. R is not the next big thing. You are. Besides, we all know that data is the new sexy, and in the end it's not about the tools that you use, but what you do with the tools.

My take-home message: Tools don't matter. Results do.

Doing the unprecedented is overrated

2010-04-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

Blog post by Stephen Few

...doing the unprecedented is highly overrated.

Most of what we can do to make the world a better place involves, not doing the unprecedented, but doing what matters and what works [emphasis mine], whether unprecedented or not. This might not be as exciting as the unprecedented, but it’s desperately needed. I believe that too many opportunities are wasted because we glorify the unprecedented for its own sake.

In the field of data visualization, failures are more common today than successes, not due to complexity, but to the fact that few people have been trained in the simple principles and practices of graph design. As a result, they rely on software tools to do the work for them and most of those tools lead them astray, encouraging them to produce silly, useless displays...

Here’s an example of one of the earliest quantitative graphs, hand drawn by William Playfair in 1786. In his time, Playfair did the unprecedented by inventing or greatly improving many of the quantitative graphs that we use today.

1786! I think it's pretty clear that software isn't the issue. It's taking the time to learn what the right things are, and being disciplined enough to use them every time you're presenting information. Proper dataviz shouldn't be saved for "when you have time" - it should be an inherent part of the data analysis process.

Arthur Benjamin at TED 2009

2010-04-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

"...I think that that [calculus] is the wrong summit of the pyramid. That the correct summit, that all of our students, every high school student should know, should be - statistics. Probability and statistics"

Retirement Marathon

2010-04-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

Guest blog post at Get Rich Slowly

This is a great analysis of the power of compound interest. Key points - start early, don't be afraid of risk, and you'll reap the rewards.

Early Bird Bob contributed $5,000/yr. for 20 years ($100,000 total contribution). His nest egg at age 67 is $5,938,625.
Conservative Carrie contributed $5,000/yr. for 48 years ($240,000 total contribution). Her nest egg at age 67 is $940,127.
Live it up Larry contributed $10,000/yr. for 38 years ($380,000 total contribution). His nest egg at age 67 is $4,644,805.
Late bloomer Bill contributed $20,000/yr. for 28 years ($560,000 total contribution). His nest egg at age 67 is $3,168,398.
Mid-life crisis Melissa contributed $40,000/yr. for 18 years ($720,000 total contribution). Her nest egg at age 67 is $2,005,735.

For my age, this statement from a related post at Get Rich Slowly is key:

It’s human nature to procrastinate. “I can start saving next year,” you tell yourself. “I don’t have time to open a Roth IRA — I’ll do it later.” But the costs of delaying are enormous. Even one year makes a difference.

Should managers know how to code?

2010-04-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

Blog post by Scott Berkun

A great analysis of the question, with two answers depending on your heritage - technical or business. My favorite line:

Once you are the boss, your primary job is to do all the things that individual programmers can not do.

Gratitude is a key ingredient to happiness

2010-04-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Post at Get Rich Slowly

A story commonly told by Warren Buffet - "The Lottery of Birth":

Before you enter the world, you will pick one ball from a barrel of 6.8 billion (the number of people on the planet). That ball will determine your gender, race, nationality, natural abilities, and health — whether you are born rich or poor, sick or able-bodied, brilliant or below average, American or Zimbabwean.

If you could put your ball back, and they took out, at random, a hundred other balls, and you had to pick one of those, would you put your ball back in? Now, of those hundred balls … roughly five of them will be American. … Half of them are going to be below-average intelligence, half will be above. Do you want to put your ball back? Most of you, I think, will not. … What you’re saying is, “I’m in the luckiest 1% of the world right now.”

The moral of the story:
We should be designing a society that, as Buffett says, “doesn’t leave behind someone who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well-wired for this particular system.”

IBM's Smarter Planet Commercials

2010-03-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

My favorite:

I like nothing better than a great analogy:
If you were to stand at a road, and the cars are whipping by, and all you can do is take a snapshot of the way the road looked five minutes ago...
How would you know when to cross the road?

More commercials from a post at FlowingData

Trust, epiphany, and say vs do

2010-03-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Rough transcript of a speech by Scott Berkun

Trust
Think of most of your peers – how many do you trust? How many would you trust with a special, dangerous, or brilliant idea? I’d say, based on my experiences at many organizations, only one of every three teams, in all of the universe, has a culture of trust. Without trust, there is no collaboration. Without trust, ideas do not go anywhere even if someone finds the courage to mention them at all.

Epiphany
Next, we need to get past our obsession with epiphany. You won’t find any flash of insight in history that wasn’t followed, or proceeded, by years of hard work. Ideas are easy. They are cheap. Any creativity book or course will help you find more ideas. What’s rare is the willingness to bet you reputation, career, or finances on your ideas. To commit fully to pursuing them.

Say vs Do
Words like radical, game-changing, breakthrough, and disruptive are similarly used to suggest something in lieu of actually being it. You can say innovative as many times as you want, but it won’t make you an innovator, nor make inventions, patents or profits magically appear in your hands.

Building Trust

2010-03-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Rands in Repose

My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

And I've never heard this definition of trash-talking, but it makes so much sense:

Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking — it’s the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided.

Key thing I took from this post isn't the rules for B.A.B. - substitute the tool that best fits your own situation. For us (this week), that might be Lego Star Wars on the GameCube. It explicitly requires teamwork and the sense of shared accomplishment is a great way to build/maintain trust.

How Genetics Works

2010-03-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

Obtained on 05-March-2010

Copying Creates Trends

2010-03-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

Post at the Freakonomics blog about Oscar fashions

“Ten minutes after any big awards telecast, the Faviana design team is already working on our newest ‘celebrity look-alike gowns,’” says Faviana CEO Omid Moradi.

The existence of firms like Faviana (or ABS, Promgirl, or any of a number of similar houses) raises fascinating questions about intellectual property. First, how can Faviana get away with blatantly copying a dress that someone else has designed? And second, why doesn’t this rampant and very rapid copying destroy the fashion industry?

The ability of a firm like Faviana to copy a dress means that hot designs spread rapidly, and trends rise and fall. Copying helps to create trends. It then helps to destroy them: as more and more designers hop on to a trend, the look becomes overdone, and the most fashion-forward consumers hop off. Copying, in other words, accelerates the fashion cycle.

Data-Driven, rather than Hypothesis-Driven

2010-02-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

Article about Google's reliance on data at Wired.com

Instead of using a semantic framework to build up a theory of language, Google mines its massive trove of data to find contextual word associations.

As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other... "Today, if you type 'Gandhi bio,' we know that bio means biography," Singhal says. "And if you type 'bio warfare,' it means biological."

Want to introduce a new feature? Forget focus groups or relying on management to make decisions, run experiments on actual users!

But Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group.

Blog post about data-driven versus hypothesis-driven science

The new data-driven approach suggests that we collect data first, then see what it tells us.

More info can be seen at a previous blog post.

Compressed Sensing

2010-02-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

Article at Wired.com

Compressed sensing works something like this: You’ve got a picture — of a kidney, of the president, doesn’t matter. The picture is made of 1 million pixels. In traditional imaging, that’s a million measurements you have to make. In compressed sensing, you measure only a small fraction — say, 100,000 pixels randomly selected from various parts of the image. From that starting point there is a gigantic, effectively infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could be filled in.

The key to finding the single correct representation is a notion called sparsity, a mathematical way of describing an image’s complexity, or lack thereof. A picture made up of a few simple, understandable elements — like solid blocks of color or wiggly lines — is sparse; a screenful of random, chaotic dots is not. It turns out that out of all the bazillion possible reconstructions, the simplest, or sparsest, image is almost always the right one or very close to it.

This question really highlighted the utility of compressed sensing:

Digital cameras, he explains, gather huge amounts of information and then compress the images. But compression, at least if CS is available, is a gigantic waste. If your camera is going to record a vast amount of data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in the first place?

"Good" Beats "Innovative" Nearly Every Time

2010-02-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

Article at BusinessWeek by Scott Berkun

But it's clear most companies fail not because of their lack of inventiveness; it's their lack of basic competence. Most leaders fail to prevent bureaucracy, hubris, and too many cooks from killing good ideas before they ever get a chance to make it out the door, resulting in the mediocrity we know too well.

Most projects aimed at innovation fail because creators become distracted by their egos from the true goal: to solve real problems for real people. (emphasis added)

The Way [Paul English] Works

2010-02-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Article at Inc.com

It's like hot potato. Except I take it seriously. When the phone rings, I literally jump over the desks just so I can get to the phone before anyone else. I love talking to customers, even angry ones. I learn a lot from them about how to make the site easier to use. When the call's over, I'll say, "If you have any follow-up questions, my name is Paul English; I'm the co-founder of the company." I'll give out my personal cell-phone number. Only one out of 20 people might actually call, but they're blown away when I do that.

I'm not attempting to excerpt-summarize this article - I think the above excerpt gives a flavor of the Paul English's approach. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.

Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

2010-02-10T11:41:00.000-08:00

Joel Spolsky article at Inc.com

If real life is anything like the Civilization series by Sid Meier, I would argue - "Yes!" This one quote from a Civ4 strategy guide sums it up best:
And in this, you’ll see a hint of what’s necessary to win on higher difficulties: more aggression.

Back to Joel Spolsky:
I have always believed that there is a natural, organic rate at which a business should grow, and that if we expanded too fast, the wheels would come flying off.

Uh-oh. Are we actually losing our market leadership position because we're careful?

It's entirely possible. Think of it this way: If you're growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. And when it's 10 times bigger than you, it can buy 10 times as much advertising and do 10 times as many projects and have meetings with 10 times as many customers. And you begin to disappear.

Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas

2010-02-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

Blog post at CodingHorror

I wouldn't call ideas worthless, per se, but it's clear that ideas alone are a hollow sort of currency. Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution. So instead of worrying about whether the Next Big Idea you're all working on is sufficiently brilliant, worry about how well you're executing.

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.
- Wil Shipley

If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.
- Edwin Catmull (Pixar)

Slime Mold vs Traffic Planners

2010-02-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

Freakonomics article
MSNBC article

A very elegant experimental setup:

The scientists placed food deposits (oat flakes) in a pattern that mimicked the distribution of population in the greater Tokyo area. They also discouraged mold growth in areas corresponding to obstacles like ocean and mountains by placing light sources (mold’s sworn enemy) in these spots. The researchers then introduced a single deposit of the mold on their mock central Tokyo and let the slime do its thing.

The result? The mold formed a network that closely mimicked the actual Tokyo railway map. In terms of efficiency and fault tolerance, the mold performed about the same as the real Tokyo system, and it did so at a slightly lower cost.

Conclusion?

Organic development can complement the planning efforts of a central intelligence. Planners see the big picture, but may have limited information about the small details. Organic planning accumulates the collective wisdom of myriad individuals who each know only a very small part of the picture, but know their part very well.

An interesting thought experiment: think about how this describes how a company functions. Are there any lessons that companies (or any other group effort) can learn from slime molds?

Great Lessons from Great Men

2010-01-25T11:53:00.000-08:00

From the Get Rich Slowly blog

This article is awesome - like Cliff notes for biographies. Or an executive summary of wisdom.

If I had to pick one to single out:
"No matter how great the talent or the effort, some things just take time: you can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant." - Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report (1985)

In his new book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that the difference between those who succeed and those who don't is 10,000 hours. That is, those who achieve mastery have patiently practiced their craft for at least 10,000 hours — the equivalent of five years of full-time work.

Think Different

2010-01-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

Boston.com article

The problem isn't usually - or at least isn't only - too little information, but too much, most of it ambiguous, contradictory, or misleading.

If there are flaws in the way that we think, then gathering more and more information isn't a solution. What our intelligence system really needs is ways to avoid becoming trapped by the natural tendency to leap to conclusions and stick with them.

Suggestions:

They [Organizations] can systematically solicit the views of people with different perspectives, for example, or use devil's advocates who will challenge established views.
To compensate for the tendency to rely on implicit understandings, intelligence analysts can be pushed to fully explain their reasoning, allowing others if not themselves to probe the assumptions that often play a large and unacknowledged role in their conclusions.
To better recognize the significance of absences, analysts can learn to think explicitly about what evidence should be appearing if their beliefs are correct.
Analysts can also be trained to consider, explicitly, what evidence could lead them to change their minds - not only alerting themselves to the possibility that the necessary information might be missing, but also providing an avenue for others to find evidence that might overturn established views.

Striking a balance between communication and inefficiency

2010-01-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

A Little Less Conversation

I think this is a fascinating article because while I firmly believe in Brook's Law, I also have a strong desire to "keep everybody on the same page". I think this article is an excellent reminder to myself - go easy on the CC's.

When you started your company, you probably did a great job of communicating. Everybody told one another everything. And your customers loved it, because when they called in to ask about their purchase order, everybody knew where it was. But as you get bigger, you can't keep telling everybody about every purchase order, so you have to invent specific communications systems so that exactly the right people find out and nobody else. Not because it's confidential. Because it's a waste of time.

I firmly believe in this as well, as a general rule. Every action item should be assigned to a single person. Emailed questions should be directed at a single person. Once you email two people asking for information, they each think the other is going to respond and no one responds. This is not to say that people can't work as teams, but every team should have a specific person who is ultimately responsible - this is the only way to ensure accountability.

And on every project, assign one person to make sure that communication happens -- but only the right communication. Otherwise the team will just start having long meetings with everyone there and, frankly, people will socialize, and bloviate, and speechify, and argue about things they don't really care about just to hear their own voices.

Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic

2010-01-25T11:43:00.000-08:00

Article at Gizmodo.com

Yet when Jobs reveals the company's next product, there's a critical difference: It exists. When possible, it is available for retail purchase the same day. There are few maybes or eventuallys tempering the presentation: "Here is the tiny miracle we've created. We want to sell it to you today."

I'm not a huge fan of Apple products - prefer an open ecosystem rather than one that is locked down - but you can't deny that they've had a huge impact on consumers (or that others could use a bit of Apple's fanatical approach to design).

9 ways to live better, longer, happier

2010-01-25T11:38:00.000-08:00

Blog post at Presentation Zen

Move Naturally
(1) You don't need a formal, rigorous exercise plan. We're talking here a change in lifestyle that is fundamentally active. We're designed to move. We've not meant to drive 100 meters in a car to pick up chips at the local store. Walk, do yard work, whatever. Do exercises/activities that you enjoy.

Have Right Outlook
(2) Slow down. When you're constantly in a hurry and stressed out, this has a negative impact on your health. Limiting negative stress is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself.
(3) Have a clear purpose. The Japanese call it "ikigai" ???? (lit: life + value, be worth while). You must have a passion, a calling, a purpose. There's got to be a reason to get out of bed every day.

Eat Wisely
(4) Drink a little (wine) everyday.
(5) Eat mainly plant-based foods. Small amounts of meat and fish are OK.
(6) Hara Hachi Bu: Eat until 80% full. Do not eat eat until you're stuffed. (I've talked about this many time before in the context of presentation.)

Be Connected with others
(7) Put family, loved ones first.
(8) Belong to a community. Many in his study belonged to faith-based communities.
(9) Belong to the right tribe. That is, hang out with people with healthy habits, physical and emotional ones.

The "Michelangelo Effect"

2010-01-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Partners Sculpt Each Other to Achieve Their Ideal Selves: If Successful, Relationship Goes Well

The Michelangelo studies show that close partners sculpt one another's traits and skills and promote, versus inhibit, one another's goal achievement. "It's not just that you treat me positively," Finkel said. "You treat me in particular ways that dovetail with my ideal self."

Just as the sculptor chisels, carves and polishes away flaws in the stone to reveal the ideal form, so do skillful partners support their loved ones' dreams, aspirations and the traits they hope to develop, such as completing medical school or becoming more fluent in a second language or more sociable.

Supporting a partner's image of his ideal self, whether it is a vague yearning or a clearly articulated mental representation, helps the loved one reduce the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self.

This totally makes sense to me, since I am more of the school that people adjust and grow towards each other versus one person is perfect for another.

Management lessons from pirates

2010-01-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

From this Freakonomic blog article,

Found this New Yorker article

Pirates also needed to limit the risk that their leaders would put individual interests ahead of the interests of the ship. Most economists today would call this problem "self-dealing"; Leeson uses the term "captain predation."

...most corporations since the mid-nineteenth century have behaved more like the Royal Navy, with C.E.O.s who have close to unlimited power and employees who have no say in who runs the organization or how it's administered. C.E.O.s have never been kings—they're chosen by a company's board of directors and can be fired at any time—but in practice they have often functioned more like monarchs than like democratic rulers.

Sociology of cooperative video games

2010-01-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

Et tu, Mario?

I thought the Contra example was hilarious - I totally remember that feeling as well.

Most cooperative games lie in a vast middle ground, however, a no man's land between altruism and gaming Darwinism that offers up a host of ways to misbehave.

Part of the problem (and the joy) of playing games is that such behavior isn't explicitly condoned or condemned. Looting and friendly fire aren't forbidden by most games, which leaves us to figure out our own rules. This is the right decision: Good game designers allow players to be whoever they want and trust they'll come to their own consensus about what constitutes "fair play." That's why the New Super Mario Bros. Wii was more enjoyable when I played it as God intended—with a good friend and copious amounts of beer. There was no back-stabbing, and no one's feelings were hurt.

The Future of Manufacturing

2010-01-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

"The ability to make stuff has been leached out of our society," he says. "It's sad. No, it's worse than sad -- it's almost a criminal act. Because when you think about what has happened -- the rendering down of a population to be consumers -- what you're really doing is rendering people unable to think critically." He decided his next company would address this deficit: It would make it easier to make stuff.

The Future of Manufacturing, from Inc.com

A good lesson for entrepreneurs:
He saw one problem: Ponoko was not focused on profitability. "A lot of people come to Silicon Valley and they get confused about who they're selling to," says Durham, who invested about $50,000 in the company and now sits on the board. "Is it the press, the VCs, or the customers? And for Ponoko, the customer was third on the list." Durham told ten Have to cut costs and focus on making existing customers happy.

This is much like the waterfall method of software development versus the Agile method - the waterfall method is to create a big plan, then break it up into small manageable steps, and implement the little steps, perform testing, and ship the final product. The Agile method focuses on rapid iteration of code, never getting very far away from code that will actually run and perform some sort of function - no matter how small.

I see the "position the company towards VCs" as equivalent to the waterfall method - you start with your "requirements" based on market research, create a big "design" (business plan), and then try to get VCs to give you the resources you need to implement your plan. Durham's suggestion is to do more of an Agile approach - start trying to make money immediately by satisfying customers. Build up from there - organically growing your business.

Accumulation and Attachment: Finding Balance

2010-01-25T11:25:00.000-08:00

From the Get Rich Slowly blog

Non-attachment is letting go of the belief that your happiness depends on holding onto things you think you own.

That's a lot of energy that goes into worrying, protecting, and spending. Your Stuff starts to own you. Attachment and possessiveness can extend beyond material possessions, too. Most of us know someone who tried to hold on so tightly to their partner that the relationship crumbled. We've all seen celebrities who cling to their youth through plastic surgery, the result being anything but youthful.

The idea is not to give up all of your possessions; rather, it is about letting go of the clinging and fear of loss. Because nothing in life is permanent, clinging and fear of loss only cause us to suffer. Focusing on Stuff that can be easily damaged or lost will ensure continual stress and worry until we let go of the attachment.

Good Graphs

2010-01-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

Post at the Win-Vector blog

The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all.

Summary of advice:

Make important differences large enough to perceive
Make important shape changes large enough to perceive: Banking to 45 degrees.
Make sure all the data is equally well resolved.
If you want to analyze the difference between two processes, then graph the difference, not the processes (or graph both).
If you are interested in rate of change, then graph rate of change.

Mirror Neurons: Why Watching Others Succeed Won’t Help You Succeed

2010-01-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

Blog post at The Simple Dollar

To put it simply, we often get the same feeling from watching someone else do something that we would get from doing things ourselves.

And, quite often, those emotional rushes are enough to fulfill us, reducing our drive to actually accomplish things.

Let me put it as simply as I can. If you want to succeed, do. If you want to follow, watch.

A TED talk by Vilayanur Ramachandran briefly explains the biology behind mirror neurons:

This one sentence almost completely sums up my approach to working

2010-01-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

From The Leaper, on Rands in Repose

Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information.

Chart Wars

2010-01-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.targetpointconsulting.com/ToThePoint/2010/01/05/chart-wars

R Choropleth Challenge (color-shaded maps)

2009-11-13T11:13:00.000-08:00

Link to the original FlowingData post

There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. You know, the maps that color regions by some metric. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve...or both. What if you just want a simple map without all the GIS stuff?

Link to the R Revolutions blog

Oh my, that was fast! Less than 24 hours after the Choropleth Map Challenge was laid down, no fewer than 5 hackers responded with complete solutions for plotting the US unemployment data on a color-coded map, each in less than 20 lines of R code.

The Future of Netflix

2009-09-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

Netflix Everywhere: Sorry, Cable, You're History

The article starts with a story about Reed Hastings canceling a product just before launch (it was spun off and became the Roku player) and rapidly reinventing Netflix's strategy:

Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smartphones. Netflix wouldn't be a hardware company; it would be a services firm.

The dream of routing around cable companies just may be in sight.

You'll never hear Hastings point that out, however. Unlike many in the tech world, he's a quiet disrupter, sabotaging business models silently and irretrievably.

So far, Hastings has avoided the wrath of the giants by building his Netflix service surreptitiously, slowly amassing his library of streaming content and giving viewers new ways to access it. And now, even if the cable and content companies do take him on, it may be too late. Hastings' Trojan horse—Netflix's software, embedded on myriad consumer devices—is already in place.

Data mining to the rescue! I love stories of how companies use existing data to generate new revenue or information for the company.

Sarandos asked his team to use their data-mining skills to help him find deals. While other video providers might ask studios for a sack full of sure things—new releases by big-name stars—Netflix's engineers could dig through their queue and review databases to find sleeper hits that its users actually wanted to watch but that studios might be willing to license for a pittance.

Still, the deal kicked off what Hastings hopes will be an unstoppable virtuous cycle. If Netflix can use the Starz offerings to sign up more subscribers, those subscription fees will generate more revenue. And with more revenue, Netflix can afford to pay more studios for rights to more films—which will draw in still more subscribers. And so on.

And this is a great mission statement from Reed Hastings:

"Today you love one out of three movies that you watch. If we can raise that to two out of three, we can completely transform the market and increase human happiness."

How to keep your mouth shut

2009-09-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

From Scott Berkun's blog

As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself in an environment where everyone hates you. Most people can not handle the truth. And the more you shove it in their face, the easier it is for them to ignore you. You simply become the person who always complains, rendering any good ideas you have entirely impotent. Your ideas will be shot down simply because of the reputation of the mouth they come from.

The trick to keeping your mouth shut is to hold the desire to effect change above your desire to tell people how wrong and bad they are. The later almost never leads to the former.

No matter how right you are, if you care about effecting change, you should never open your mouth without some sense of who will agree with you and who won’t.

Leadership Video

2009-09-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

From XPLANE and Harvard Business School, via Presentation Zen

"We are the glue holding ourselves together."

2009-09-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

Wired.com article

I wouldn't say that the article itself is particularly well-written, but certainly the insights revealed by the study of the Framingham papers are quite interesting.

By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.)

It has long been recognized, for instance, that the human capacity for close friendship is remarkably consistent. People from cultures throughout the world report between four and seven bosom buddies. "The properties of our social networks are byproducts of evolution," Christakis says. "The assumption has been that our mind can handle only so many other people."

After analyzing thousands of photos, the scientists found that, on average, each student had 6.6 close friends in their online network. In other words, nothing has really changed; even the most fervent Facebook users still maintain only a limited circle of intimates.

Because networks transmit the stuff of life—from happiness to HIV—evolution has generated a diversity of personality traits, which take advantage of different positions within the group. There are wallflowers and Wilt Chamberlains, shy geeks and "super-connectors." According to Christakis and Fowler, there is no single solution to the problem of other people. Individual variation is a crucial element of every stable community, from the Aborigines of Australia to the avatars of Second Life.

Extrinsic Motivation - Destroys Creativity

2009-08-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

A blog post at Presentation Zen points to a TED talk by Daniel Pink

He argues, based on decades of psychology research, that reward-based motivation only works for relatively simple, non-creative tasks. For complex tasks that require creativity, rewards reduce performance.

The solution:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters.
Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Patient Needs versus Profit

2009-08-27T04:23:00.000-07:00

Article by Atul Gawande at The New Yorker

When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue [emphasis added].

I found the Atul Gawande article from this article, which talks about the 3 key parts of the news that you usually don't get (historical context/big picture, sources of the information, what we don't know).

What Gawande did was to structure his search for truth as a quest narrative. Instead of hiding the details about how he comes by his information, he makes that the very focus. Along the way, he makes us apprentices in his quest for truth. We finish the article with a highly refined sense of how Gawande has acquired and verified the information he presents, as well as a framework for further inquiry of our own.

Back to Gawande's article, this is a great analogy and really hits home for me (pun was NOT deliberate):

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

A great analysis of recission

2009-08-04T21:53:00.000-07:00

Article at Taunter Media

Half of the insured population uses virtually no health care at all. The 80th percentile uses only $3,000 (2002 dollars, adjust a bit up for today). You have to hit the 95th percentile to get anywhere interesting, and even there you have only $11,487 in costs. It's the 99th percentile, the people with over $35,000 of medical costs, who represent fully 22% of the entire nation's medical costs. These people have chronic, expensive conditions. They are, to use a technical term, sick.

An individual adult insurance plan is roughly $7,000 (varies dramatically by age and somewhat by sex and location).

It should be fairly clear that the people who do not file insurance claims do not face rescission. The insurance companies will happily deposit their checks. Indeed, even for someone in the 95th percentile, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the insurance company to take the nuclear option of blowing up the policy. $11,487 in claims is less than two years' premium; less than one if the individual has family coverage in the $12,000 price range. But that top one percent, the folks responsible for more than $35,000 of costs – sometimes far, far more – well there, ladies and gentlemen, is where the money comes in. Once an insurance company knows that Sally has breast cancer, it has already seen the goat; it knows it wants nothing to do with Sally.

If the top 5% is the absolute largest population for whom rescission would make sense, the probability of having your policy cancelled given that you have filed a claim is fully 10% (0.5% rescission/5.0% of the population). If you take the LA Times estimate that $300mm was saved by abrogating 20,000 policies in California ($15,000/policy), you are somewhere in the 15% zone, depending on the convexity of the top section of population. If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top 1%, the folks with over $35,000 of annual claims who could never be profitable for the carrier – then the probability of having your policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two. You have three times better odds playing Russian Roulette.

Happiness

2009-07-22T09:12:00.001-07:00

Eric Wiener, on Rick Steve's show, as blogged by GetRichSlowly

There have been studies that show that people are materialistic — irrespective of how much money they actually have — people who are materialistic tend to be less happy than people who are not.

Close relationships are a better predictor of happiness than monetary wealth. “Happiness is other people,” Weiner says. “Our happiness is determined in large part by our quality and quantity of relationships with others.”

Let’s talk about Denmark, for instance, because Denmark ranks consistently in the top three for happiest countries in the world. The Danes have low expectations. In survey after survey, they’re asked about expectations, and they have relatively low expectations. We Americans have very very high expectations. And I think that partly explains the discrepancy.

I think if you have low or moderate expectations, you’re less likely to be disappointed. You’re more likely to be satisfied or content. You’re more likely to be happy.

Craftsmanship, not engineering

2009-07-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Post at Coding Horror, "Software Engineering: Dead?"

What DeMarco seems to be saying -- and, at least, what I am definitely saying -- is that control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.

The guys and gals who show up every day eager to hone their craft, who are passionate about building stuff that matters to them, and perhaps in some small way, to the rest of the world -- those are the people and projects that will ultimately succeed.

Everything else is just noise.

Statistics Resources

2009-07-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

Cancer Genomics Tools from Washington University (WUSTL) includes a list of R functions that can be used for various statistical tests.

UCLA's Academic Technology Services department has a page with R links and information. In particular, they have a list of analyses and sample code.

Dunbar's Number and Security

2009-07-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Post by Bruce Schneier on his blog, "Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain"

In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Several layers of natural human group size
3-5: Clique - people you would turn to in times of severe emotional distress
12-20: Sympathy group - people with whom you have special ties
30-50: Typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps
150: Approximate maximum number of co-workers
500: Megaband
1500: Tribe

Note: All of these numbers have very large confidence intervals.

These numbers (and particularly the ~150 number) are important because of their effects on organizational behavior.

Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. So as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure -- and more formalized security systems.

Small companies can get by without the internal forms, memos, and procedures that large companies require; when does what tend to appear?

Machine Learning Resources

2009-07-14T16:43:00.001-07:00

Stanford University CS229 (Machine Learning) Materials

Andrew Ng's presentation - ML Advice
Problem: Overfitting (high variance)

Diagnostic: Training error is much lower than test error
Solution: Larger dataset, fewer features

Problem: Too few features (high bias)

Diagnostic: Training error is high
Solution: Larger set of features, different features

Great analogies for wireless security

2009-07-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

From a Lifehacker.com article

WEP is like a home bathroom lock, the one you can open just using a bent paperclip. Everyone knows how to unlock it, but when it's locked everyone who walks by understands they should stay out.
WPA is like a standard door lock; it's a lot more secure, but it is still possible to get by for someone with the right tools, knowledge, and circumstances.
WPA2 is like a bank safe. It may be possible to defeat, depending on how it's been set up, but it's not realistically possible for anybody to actually do so... yet.
Not broadcasting your SSID is like taking the numbers off of your house - The house is still there and everyone can see it, it's just a bit harder to find for people that don't know what they are looking for already.
Filtering by MAC address is like having a guard at the door that checks everyone's name against a list to see if they can enter. The only problem is, he doesn't ask for ID or remember what people look like, so anybody can and can listen in to see what names are allowed and then claim to be anybody else.

Facebook vs Google - Social vs Objective

2009-06-29T11:42:00.001-07:00

Wired.com article titled Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

How would you rather get information? An objectively defined "best"? Or a recommendation from a trusted friend? Are they truly mutually exclusive?

"Up until now all the advancements in technology have said information and data are the most important thing," says Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager. "The most important thing to us is that there is a person sitting behind that keyboard. We think the Internet is about people."

Just Don't Look

2009-06-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Do I want to hear about the latest sob story on the nightly news?

Do I want to know what J. Lo or Brad Pitt or [insert celebrity of choice] is up to?

Do I care about the latest weight-loss approach? (Seriously, just burn more calories than you eat, or eat less calories than you burn - how hard is that?)

This post at Coding Horror, which references this post at kottke.org, describes an approach to dealing with things/people that run on attention - Just Don't Look.

That's how you change the world. Not by arguing with people. Certainly not by screaming at them. You do it by ignoring them.

How to defuse a "Screw-Me" moment? (Hint - "Spin" is the wrong answer)

2009-06-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Rands in Repose

Manage the room. Questions aren’t Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don’t let her take over the conversation. Say, “I’ve got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?” Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?

Tim’s got the Screw-Me and you didn’t see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don’t have a clue how to answer. Shit.

You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That’s the realization everyone is having that you’re Screwed. First, let’s not make it worse…

Tim: “Rands, what about THIS?”

I’m a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.

There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I’ve got This handled.

That’s not what they’re seeing or hearing.

This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.

It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:

Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
Admit “I don’t know.”
Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.

You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.

3 Skills of Sexy Data Geeks

2009-05-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

Blog post at Dataspora

Skill #1: Statistics (Studying). Statistics is perhaps the most important skill and the hardest to learn. It’s a deep and rigorous discipline, and one that is actively progressing (the widely used method of Least Angle Regression was only recently developed in 2004).

Skill #2: Data Munging (Suffering). The second critical skill mentioned above is “data munging.” Among data geek circles, this refers to the painful process of cleaning, parsing, and proofing one’s data before it’s suitable for analysis. Real world data is messy. At best it’s inconsistently delimited or packed into an unnecessarily complex XML schema. At worst, it’s a series of scraped HTML pages or a thoroughly undocumented fixed-width format.

Related to munging but certainly far less painful is the ability to retrieve, slice, and dice well-structured data from persistent data stores, using a combination of SQL, scripting languages (especially Python and its SciPy and NumPy libraries), and even several oldie-but-goodie Unix utilities (cut, join).

And when data sets grow too large to manage on a single desktop, the samurai of data geeks are capable of parallelizing storage and computation with tools like 96-nodes of Postgres, snow and RMPI, Hadoop and Mapreduce, and on Amazon EC2 to boot.

Skill #3: Visualization (Storytelling). This third and last skill that Professor Varian refers to is the easiest to believe one has. Most of us have had exposure to basic chart-making widgets of Excel. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: these software tools are often insufficient when faced with the visualization of large, multivariate data sets.

Here it’s worth making a distinction between two breeds of data visualizations, which differ in their audience and their goals. The first are exploratory data visualizations (as named by John Tukey), intended to faciliate a data analyst’s understanding of the data. These may consist of scatter plot matrices and histograms, where labels and colors are minimally set by default. Their goal is to help develop a hypothesis about the data, and their audience typically numbers one.

A second kind of data visualization are those intended to communicate to a wider audience, whose goal is to visually advocate for a hypothesis. While most data geeks are facile with exploratory graphics, the ability to create this second kind of visualization, these visual narratives, is again a separate skill — with separate tools.

The ability to visualize and communicate data is critical, because even with good data and rigorous statistical techniques, if the results of an analysis are poorly visualized, they will not convince: whether it’s an academic discovery or a business proposal.

Rise of the Startups

2009-05-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

My gut feeling has been that history is cyclical, generally speaking, and that true revolutionary change is highly unlikely in the long term. Little did I know that there is an incredible amount of information on this topic just a Google search away.

Wikipedia article on "Social cycle theory"

Anyways, the following excerpt from this Wired.com article about the "new new economy" caught my attention:

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

The article points out the recent decline of large corporations and points out their disadvantages in our current economy, while highlighting the strengths of small, nimble startups. The article also links to an article by Paul Graham, expanding on the whole "old versus new" debate.

But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size.

Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they're no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. If they're really ambitious, they want to start it.

Reading that article led to another one, which talks about the declining importance of credentials and how startups are much more meritocratic - nobody cares where you went to school or who your parents are, all that matters is your performance.

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities.

Large organizations can't do this. But a bunch of small organizations in a market can come close. A market takes every organization and keeps just the good ones. As organizations get smaller, this approaches taking every person and keeping just the good ones. So all other things being equal, a society consisting of more, smaller organizations will care less about credentials.

Googlenomics and Auctions

2009-05-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

Wired.com article about Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist

Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it's all about harnessing supply and demand. "What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices—decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math.

This is an example of a disruptive innovation - a gutsy move for Google, but one that ultimately paid off.

The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker's trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn't have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids.

By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the world of advertising, removing human guesswork from the equation.

The move was risky. Going ahead with the phaseout—nicknamed Premium Sunset—meant giving up campaigns that were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the unproven possibility that the auction process would generate even bigger sums. "We were going to erase a huge part of the company's revenue," says Tim Armstrong, then head of direct sales in the US. (This March, Armstrong left Google to become AOL's new chair and CEO.) "Ninety-nine percent of companies would have said, 'Hold on, don't make that change.' But we had Larry, Sergey, and Eric saying, 'Let's go for it.'"

The article asks if we can imagine using auctions in our everyday lives? Does this make our free market economy much more agile, responsive, and transparent? Take game consoles, for example. An auction-based system would very quickly determine the value of consoles, creating a true free market economy, rather than our current system of retail price management (RPM) agreements (sometimes called vertical price-fixing).

Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."

Let the Little Guys Drive (Disruptive Innovation)

2009-05-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

Article at Wired.com

If a domestic auto industry is to survive, it will have to incorporate and encourage breakthroughs from outsiders like Transonic. Automakers will need to transition from a vertical, proprietary, hierarchical model to an open, modular, collaborative one, becoming central nodes in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. In other words, the industry will need to undergo much the same wrenching transformation that the US computer business did some three decades ago, when the minicomputer gave way to the personal computer. Whereas minicomputers were restricted to using mainly software and hardware from their makers, PCs used interchangeable elements that could be designed, manufactured, and installed by third parties. Opening the gates to outsiders unleashed a flood of innovation that gave rise to firms like Microsoft, Dell, and Oracle. It destroyed many of the old computer giants—but guaranteed a generation of American leadership in a critical sector of the world economy. It is late in the day, but the same could still happen in the car industry; it just has to harness our national entrepreneurial spirit to develop the next wave of auto breakthroughs.

By seeking to match the likes of Toyota, Detroit has been trying to come from behind in a game where its adversaries set the rules. To Klepper, the Carnegie Mellon economist, the Big Three today resemble the American television-receiver industry in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by US corporations that, after decades of domination, were suddenly confronted by foreign innovation. Companies like RCA and Zenith were slow to incorporate new technologies until it was too late; all exited or sold out to foreign firms. "Every time American companies catch up to the competition," Klepper says, "the competition already has moved on and instituted new things. In that situation, it's extremely difficult to get ahead."

The only escape from this conundrum is to pursue what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has called disruptive innovation—the kind of change that alters the trajectory of an industry. As Christensen argued in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma, successful companies in mature industries rarely embrace disruptive innovation because, by definition, it threatens their business models. Loath to revamp factories at high cost to make products that will compete with their own goods, companies drag their feet; perversely, financial markets often reward them for their shortsightedness. Good as they are, the European and Japanese automakers are established companies. At this point, they are as unlikely to pursue disruptive innovation as Detroit has been. That gives the US auto industry an opening. To take that opportunity, it will have to behave differently—it will have to step far outside the walls of the Rouge.

I very strongly believe in the idea of disruptive innovation. Other innovations that I consider disruptive are "netbooks" and casual gaming (i.e. PopCap Games). Getting sucked into a never-ending cycle of competition between established companies encourages incremental improvements, is reactionary, and ultimately drags down all players involved. Much better to break free and create a new paradigm/product.

An interview with Tina Seelig

2009-05-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

Posted by Guy Kawasaki at the OPEN Forum

Some excerpts I liked:

Question: What is the secret to successful negotiation?
Answer: Make sure that you understand the other person’s point of view. If you make assumptions, you will very likely be wrong. When I bought a car for my son. I assumed that the salesperson wanted us to pay the highest price. That wasn’t the case! After asking a bunch of questions, I learned that his commission wasn’t based on the price of the car—it was based on the scores he got on the customer evaluation form we filled out afterward. Of course, I was happy to give him a great score in return for a great price. This is how win-win negotiations come about.

Question: How does one balance work and “life”?
Answer: You copied a quote from my book into one of your recent blogs. That quote, attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, is very powerful.

“The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.”

DinTaiFung

2009-05-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

via Seth Godin's solicitation for updates to Purple Cow

Two things are guaranteed at the remarkable DinTaiFung restaurant in Taipei: the extremely long line outside and the size/weight of their world famous steamed juicy pork dumplings. Each dumpling uses only the freshest ingredients, weighs a precise 0.74 oz, and has exactly 18 folds. In 1993, NY Times named DinTaiFung as one of the top 10 restaurants in the world. Even with many outlets worldwide today, thousands of tourists still visit Taipei every year just to eat at its original location. One of the stories told about the restaurant owner is that he takes the tour buses to hear what people say about his restaurant. One day, he found that bus stopped before reaching its destination and tourists were encouraged to use the restrooms so that they can avoid using the ones at his restaurant. He went back and installed the most advanced toilets available in the restrooms and made sure that they were cleaned every 15 minutes. Since then, the restrooms at DinTaiFung also became one of the most talked about topics for tourists.

Traits of successful CEOs

2009-05-19T10:33:00.001-07:00

Op-ed column at the New York Times

They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 C.E.O.’s and measured their companies’ performances. They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.

What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours.

These results are consistent with a lot of work that’s been done over the past few decades. In 2001, Jim Collins published a best-selling study called “Good to Great.” He found that the best C.E.O.’s were not the flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again.

That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness and openness to new experience did not correlate well with C.E.O. success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and, most of all, conscientiousness — which means being dependable, making plans and following through on them.

The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.

Two Buck Chuck

2009-05-18T12:48:00.001-07:00

CNN article about Fred Franzia, CEO of Bronco Wine

...the CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation's fourth-largest wine company, tells me repeatedly that only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine - including his own $35 Domaine Napa. And that Napa's and Bordeaux's claims about their special soils are bogus: "We can grow on asphalt. Terroir don't mean sh*t."

In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe's to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range - and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July's California State Fair over far pricier competition. The label is one of America's fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores.

"There's not a doubt in my mind that the two biggest things that have happened to the wine industry in the last 10 years are the movie Sideways and Two Buck Chuck," says Gary Vaynerchuk, who reviews wines on his popular video blog, Winelibrarytv.com.

While he expects a lot, Franzia is known for listening to his employees, even if he has to berate them into talking. "The thing we do better than anyone is we listen," Franzia says. And despite Bronco's size, he's still willing to take big risks.

As we speak, enormous swaths of his fields are being ripped up to switch from cabernet sauvignon and merlot vines to pinot noir and pinot grigio, which Franzia expects to be big sellers because they're easy to drink.

"Success is easy if you think of it like rust: It's inevitable if you keep at it. You look for magic moments, but they're not there," Franzia says. "Guys can claim they are, but that's bullshit."

Elegance

2009-05-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

Interview with Matthew Mays by Guy Kawasaki

Question: How do you define elegance?
Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful... At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

Question: Which companies are your favorite examples or elegance?
Answer: Toyota is one. With Scion, they refused to advertise, and they drastically reduced the number of standard features to allow Generation-Y buyers to make a personal statement by customizing their cars. The Scion xB flew off the lot when it came out.Another example is the British bank, First Direct. It is branchless and became the most highly recommended bank in the United Kingdom. Then there’s the French manufacturing company FAVI that realized better employee relations when they eliminated their human resources department. W. L. Gore and Associates completely eliminated job titles and typical corporate hierarchy in order to release the creativity of its staff employees. And finally there’s always the usual suspects like the Google interface and Apple’s clean design. But my all-time favorite is In ‘N Out Burger. a freakishly popular hamburger chain that started in Los Angeles a half century ago, that has built its brand on the "less is more" approach with an interesting twist. The menu offers only five items: a hamburger, cheeseburger, double burger, French fries, and a short list of beverages. By keeping things simple, founder Harry Snyder says he is able to provide the highest quality food in a sparkling clean environment.

Question: What’s the first step a CEO should take to get her company on the right track?
Answer: ...Steve Jobs revealed that a "stop-doing" strategy figured centrally into Apple’s approach. What he said was: "We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done." That’s the mindset. And step one? Create a solid stop-doing list. Sounds simple, but few do it. Guru Jim Collins says you absolutely must have a "stop-doing" list to accompany your to-do list. As a practical matter, he advises developing a strong discipline around first giving careful thought to prioritizing goals and objectives, and then eliminating the bottom 20 percent of the list. If as CEO you do that, and demand that everyone do that, including designers and engineers with respect to the stuff they’re building, your ugly crap quotient goes way down.

Question: Why do you think the Japanese have such a way with elegance?
Answer: [First is Zen, and one of the fundamental Zen aesthetic themes is emptiness, and second] ...kaizen — continuous improvement. It means "no best, only better."... To stop improving was to stagnate—which was to die. It was a war on all the things that make for crap: overproduction, overprocessing, defects, conveyance, unneccessary motion, inconsistency, and inventory. In short, Japan HAD to get elegant. They’ve never forgotten how they did it, and they’ve institutionalized it.

No utility, high price due to artificial scarcity

2009-05-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

Article in the New York Times

Russia quietly passed a milestone this year: surpassing De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer.

Quote from Aleksandr A. Malinin, an adviser to the president of Alrosa (Russia's largest diamond producer [97% of domestic rough diamond production]).

But what we are doing is selling an illusion,” meaning a product with no utility and a price that depends on the continued sense of scarcity where there is none.

“If you don’t support the price,” Andrei V. Polyakov, a spokesman for Alrosa, said, “a diamond becomes a mere piece of carbon.”

Escaping the Cubicle Nation

2009-05-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

An interview with Pamela Slim

Question: How do you decide which business to start?

Answer: Business ideas are a dime a dozen. From my perspective, which is firmly rooted in the idea that the purpose of a business is to allow you to live the kind of life that makes you happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy—or at least well-fed, a good business idea has four components. First, it is rooted in something you are passionate about and which energizes you. Entrepreneurship is too darn hard to manufacture enthusiasm. Second, you have the skill and competence to make it happen—or at least a really great contact list of smart and enthusiastic friends to help you figure it out. Third, you need to do enough business planning to know whom you are trying to serve, and how you are going to make money. Finally, you want a business model that you have the resources to support and that delivers the life you want to live.

Question: What is the most common mistake the “escapees” make?

Answer: The most common mistake is thinking that they have to get all their plans absolutely perfect before launching. I have listened to people explain why they spent two months crafting an introductory email to a potential client. Perfectionism will cripple your business and thwart your plans faster than anything. Get used to pushing things out that feel not quite ready and then be completely responsive to fix them as you go. There will never be a perfect product, service, market or economy, so the most passionate, enthusiastic and responsive entrepreneur will win.

The greatest mathematical discovery - compound interest

2009-05-01T11:31:00.001-07:00

Applied, in this case, to start-ups.

Article at ReadWriteWeb

While I thought the discussion of compound interest was interesting, I think the following excerpt is useful for entrepreneurs

Typical Thinking
"I've got an idea that no one has ever thought of. I'd better not tell anyone because as soon as I launch it, everyone will copy me. I'll develop it in secret, and then when my vision is ready, I'll launch it with great gusto and have a big sales and marketing campaign ready to go to snap up customers, who are all going to flock to me."

Typical Reality
You've got an idea that 100 people have had, 10 have already started working on, and probably a few have failed at. If you don't tell anyone or are so excited that you don't do your research, you won't find out about the 10 who have started working on it. You also don't invite 100 experienced people to help you refine your product, all of whom are far too busy to steal your idea anyway. You develop it in secret, and then 30 seconds after you finally launch, 50 people tell you about little things that are broken or need tweeking (a "tweek" being any change that you think will take two hours but ends up taking two weeks: tw(o) (w)eeks, get it?). You spend the next 6 months scrambling to get the product up to scratch. Customers don't come flocking. They come dribbling in like glue-covered sloths, whinging about every little thing you've missed.

Interior Design Websites

2009-04-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

I'm removing these from my Google Reader, but wanted to keep the links for when we move to our next place:

Design Sponge
Apartment Therapy LA

Most Dangerous People in Your World

2009-04-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

Post by John Goekler on Counterpunch
All statistics are in deaths per year in the US, based on statistics available in 2009

Yourself - between half a million and a million deaths due to "lifestyle disease" (smoking, lousy diets, lack of exercise, etc.)
A doctor - ~200,000 deaths due to medical errors
A coworker with an infection - ~75,000 deaths from diseases like flu or pneumonia
"Toxic agents" - ~55,000 deaths due to asbestos, lead, pesticides, household chemicals
Other drivers - ~42,000 deaths

The list continues, but notice that terrorists, lightning strikes, sharks, spiders, and other common fears are not on this list.

Found via Bruce Schneir's Crypto-Gram