CNN’s got a promising new effort to involve people in what is likely to become one of the two key discussion points over the next 3 years:  The growing US War in Afghanistan (the other is obviously the US / Global economy)     Here’s the Afghanistan war blog

In my view it is very hard to comment wisely about details and policy without a lot more of the “secret” military information – threat assessments, probabilities, estimates of deaths.    Without this it is simply not reasonable to attempt to evaluate the complex international military strategies of Obama or any president.

If, for example, there is good reason to believe that the terrorists have a good chance of destabilizing Pakistan and taking over intercontinental nuclear missles the stakes are very high indeed.   If that is extremely unlikely it changes the game considerably.

It is odd to me how people who argued Obama was “a communist / marxist”   refuse to grasp the obvious reality of his moderate policies.   Few Marxists or far left folks (outside of China! 😆 )  supported Obama.  They will call this a simple extension of US imperialistic power.   For many moderates the hypocrisy is also glaring.     They called Bush was a “war monger” but now seem very comfortable with Obama’s very similar military directions.    I’ve spoken about this with several who remain generally supportive of the President’s international efforts.   It is as if they are more interested in how we talk about war than how we prosecute these wars.

Lost in the details of the military aspects of the strategies is the calculation that addresses the single most important concern – do the benefits of US security and help to the Afghans outweigh the losses they and we will endure over the next three years?

I can’t second guess our leaders on this, but I’d sure like to see the numbers.     Like others I’m waiting anxiously to hear the president’s speech tonight but I doubt it will shed much light on how many people will die, even though these estimates are a critical part of the strategic process at the Pentagon.

Although I believe you can make a case for war in some cases, it’s absolutely immoral to fail to adequately determine if the benefits outweigh the massive human costs.     I know Obama tried to do this, but he should tell us what went into the calculations.    These are not simple calculations, but contrary to what many assert you *must” place values on lives whenever deaths are going to happen.    Do you try to do this directly (with numbers and specific assumptions) or indirectly with vague or general assertions and assumptions.    The government will maintain the pretense of thoughtfulness even when indirect and vague policies are driving things forward.

Governments often do many types of comparisons that shed a lot of light on how to move forward.      Transportation and Environmental agencies do this type of thing all the time when deciding how much to spend on safety / health / etc.   In those calculations lives in the USA are each worth about two to five million dollars.    It’s about time we started publishing a lot more information about the rationale for these numbers, and publishing the military rationale for the massive numbers of civilian casualties in our wars.    People don’t like to know their life has a very finite value to agencies of the  government (as it should by the way), but as we move into the challenges we’ll face from countries where lives are effectively valued by their leaders and governments  in  “hundreds of dollars” rather than “millions of dollars” as here in the USA.

Comment loudly and aggressively, but stay on topic!  NO  POLITICAL COMMENTS on non-political posts!

My two key points here (saving you valuable blog reading time at NO extra charge!).

1. Branding is overrated and usually naively accepted as something that works for small business when generally it does NOT work.

2. Success has no recipe, rather it’s simply survival of the best of many,  mostly failed experiments.   Predicting which will survive is very hard to do, and successful business models evolve from movements aways from troubles as much as “towards” success or using some recipe for success.

A open bet I have that is the extension of point 2 comes to mind:

I’ll wager $1,000 (or more if you like) against *anybody*  who says they can predict the movement of any publicly traded stock or index 2 days in a row.  ie  you’d have FOUR options “up or down” each for day one and day two.    Note:   This is a bad bet for you – you’ll lose it about 3/4 of the time.  Yes, YOU will!

———–  the rest of the story ————

As I age gracefully within the business world I see/meet/study  a lot of “success stories” as well as failures.    Contrary to the fairy tale notions of success, I would not say that successful people seem to be all that much a result of “hard work” or “brilliancy” or “following a path to success”.    I’m not saying there’s zero relationship between smart people or hard workers and success – there does indeed seem to be correlation and I’d guess causation.   However the best way to understand success is to look at the paths away from failures rather than to try to apply a bunch of “success rules” that are mostly just talk-fodder for marketeers and motivational speakers.    In fact many mega-success stories are notable more for how they defied rules than how they applied them.

In the  “special” report from American Express I just got in the mail they have noted  “Six Branding Strategies that can help Differentiate Your Business” .   The advice is generally fine for those who believe in branding as the key strategic concern in small business marketing.  I’m a marketing heretic in this respect and remain very skeptical of the whole branding concept with the probably exception of the huge companies that sell national or international products,  are marketing to pretty much “everybody”, and have a fairly high potential profit margin on your products  (e.g. Coke, ATT, SONY).

Brand may matter at a national level to some extent but even for the big ticket companies I think the ad campaigns are as much about making money for marketing firms as all this “top of mind” stuff that in my view is questionably supported by a lot of self-serving research.     Seems to me that  most of the global brands are more a product of the company’s early efforts than the campaigns that followed those efforts.   It’s hard to tell the primacy of the branding chicken from her egg over time, but clearly  Google is an example of  a huge global brand which was well known well before any expensive advertising campaigns came along to spread and reinforce the message.    Are they the exception or the branding rule?

Branding or not, the American Express advice in a nutshell is OK for the brandy dancers* out there.  The recommendations are:

* Perform Background Research
* Define Your Brand
* Ensure Consistency
* Tap Social Networking Tools
* Track Your Performance
* Stay Top of Mind

Well, OK, but I’d recommend to most small businesses that they focus on only two of these nuggets – Social Networking and tracking performance, and most importantly that they be sure to work away  from failure.    If an ad campaign is not returning positive ROI then dump it  – NOW – and find things that do return a positive ROI.    Social networking is essentially free.   To some extent time is money, but generally this is a great way to apply yourself as the key player in your business and to adjust things at low cost with potential high return.   *Every* business should have a website and a Twitter account.   NO exceptions to this unless you are a clandestine operative for the CIA or something like that.  I suppose Twitter isn’t a great idea in that case.   “Clandestine CIA Operative for Hire – Please twitter @SecretsoftheCIA“.   From a small restaurant to a mega-corporation, you need to have a path from you to customers and from them to you.   Twitter is hard to beat for that purpose.

Based on my travel sector experiences I would argue that local and regional branding is very much overrated as a concept, mostly by the entities (marketing folks) who profit from the misperception that you can usually attain positive ROI on branding campaigns.

Incredibly much of the research in this area is by entities that …. drum roll please …. wait for it …. make their living promoting the idea that branding works.    It’s no surprise that a firm hired by agencies to “determine” whether they are effective at  something … winds up finding out that …. they are effective at doing something!     As with evolution, you don’t survive long if your research tends to conclude your client isn’t doing their job very well.
“I’m sorry Mr. Honest Marketing Research Firm who concluded we waste our money, we’ve concluded we need a new research firm”.

Happy holidays!

* Brandy Dancers are branding enthusiasts and are not to be confused with the Gandy Dancers who use to lay rail in the USA in the 1800s.

Disclaimer:  As a Techdirt Insight Community writer I am sometimes paid for American Express project writing over at InsightCommunity.com This post has nothing to do with that and no compensation is expected or implied, and reflects only my views and the views of those who agree with me.  You know who you are, and I thank you for reading so far into this disclaimer.   For more about potential conflicts of interest as well as a treatise on the notion that transparency and disclosure are more important than the usual pretense of ” I am unbiased!”, see our dislosure policy over at Technology Report.   This ends the disclosure disclaimer portion of our program, thank you and good night.

This is a cross posting of an article I wrote over at Technology Report about internet marketing:

One of the cornerstones of good internet marketing is knowing your statistics, and you’d think with all the elaborate, inexpensive and free measurement and analytical tools everybody would have a great sense of how their sites stack up to the competition.

But you’d  be wrong.

In fact even many large companies are struggling with high quality analysis even as the tools get better and the measures s-l-o-w-l-y are reaching some level of standardization.     For most small companies metrics are, literally, more misses than “hits”. Webmasters routinely report or misinterpret or misrepresent website “hits” as viable traffic when hits often are simply a measure of the number of total files downloaded from the site.    Graphics or data intensive websites can see hundreds of hits from a single web visitor.

Even when the analysis is good the reporting is often opportunistic or manipulative, and it’s often done by the same team that is accountable for the results.     This is a common problem throughout the business metrics field.  Executives are well advised to have independent auditing of results by unbiased parties for any business critical measurements.

Consider learning and using analysis packages like Google Analytics – a brilliantly robust and free tool provided by Google to anyone.

A while back Peter Norvig, one of the top search experts over at Google (also a leading world authority on Artificial Intelligence), published a little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics were with regard to website traffic.  (Thanks to Matt Cutts for pointing out the Peter paper.

The results here demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

Although this is just an anecdotal snapshot indicating the problem, and perhaps Alexa is better now, I’d also noted many problems with comparisons of Alexa to sites where I knew the real traffic.   50x seems to be a spectacular level of error for sites read mostly by technology sector folks.   It even suggests that Alexa may be a questionable comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you probably don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A larger, and excellent comparison study by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons.  Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Fishkin told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with the log files he reviewed.  My own experience with Analytics have not been extensive but the data seems to line up with my log stats and I’d continue to recommend this excellent analytics package.

Jumping down the rabbit hole of the Climate debates is always very interesting but it’s also very frustrating to watch many brilliant (as well as stupid) and well-informed (as well as ignorant) people avoid each other because the blog environments are not civil enough to encourage quality discussion of really intriguing issues.    Great examples of the challenge of discussing science in blogs are my two favorite “watering holes” for the active discussion of climate science:   RealClimate.org and ClimateAudit.org

At both, intelligent and provocative posts often lead to “supportive” commentary from the allies of the blog but also ferocious attacks on critics of the initial post.   This makes for interesting comments and reading if you can handle the emotional / intellectual heat, but I think the overall chases away the two very  important groups who participate in blogging:  the huge number of casual observers  looking for answers to complex questions and the small number of authoritative voices who study a particular complex topic.

Even as a seasoned blogger who rarely wants to back down from discussion points I find it very frustrating to bounce back and forth hoping my reasonable comments will not be moderated (a major problem at RealClimate, and not much of a problem at ClimateAudit)  and hoping that critics will be treat researchers with the basic respect they deserve  (lack of respect is a huge problem at both ClimateAudit and RealClimate, where PhD science authorities are routinely accused of incompetence (mostly at ClimateAudit) and reasonable criticisms are dismissed casually as “nonsense” simply so they do not need to be addressed properly (mostly at RealClimate).

Increasingly blogs moderate reasonable comments because they don’t fit the political agenda of the blog and I still think this is anathema to quality discussion.  Others (like Joe Duck) pretty much allow any comments that are not obscene, spam commercial, or racist so a single person can wind up dominating the conversation, chasing others away.

I’m rethinking my policies about how to manage commentst because it’s good to hear from more pe0ple.  Howevert I’m not going to be snipping or moderating anybody anytime soon.    I think Steve McKintyre of Climate Audit might have the right idea which is to push some comments to “unthreaded” if they are off the topic of the post.   This leaves free speech intact while keeping a few people from dominating the whole comment show.

Final note is that I prefer to err on the side of giving everybody their full voice and I plan to continue doing that here.

Photo and Text Credit:  NASA Hubble.

This is NOT a collage, but one of the new striking images from the Hubble Space Telescope.   These galaxies are a cluster.     Question:  Estimate how many creatures as bright or more intelligent than humans live in the area defined by this picture?

The first identified compact galaxy group, Stephan’s Quintet is featured in this stunning image from the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. About 300 million light-years away, only four galaxies of the group are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. The odd man out is easy to spot, though. The four interacting galaxies (NGC 7319, 7318A, 7318B, and 7317) have an overall yellowish cast and tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the bluish galaxy at the upper left (NGC 7320) is much closer than the others. A mere 40 million light-years distant, it isn’t part of the interacting group. In fact, individual stars in the foreground galaxy can be seen in the sharp Hubble image, hinting that it is much closer than the others. Stephan’s Quintet lies within the boundaries of the high flying constellation Pegasus.

I’m sure anxious for Ray Kurzweil to hurry up and finish his film “The Singularity is Near” based on his remarkable book of a few years ago because I think the film will spark the global conversation we need to have about the Singularity.    If even the most modest predictions about this even come true it will be the most significant development in the history of humanity, and will reshape our lives and the future of earth in unimaginable ways.   

I am less optimistic than Kurzweil about the time frame and impact of what he sees as a likely explosion of “cosmic intelligence” that rapidly expands throughout the universe,  but I think the notion we will NOT see any conscious computers within 10-15 years is pessimistic and perhaps even naive, resting mostly on the notion that the human intellect is a lot more profound than … it appears to be.

Once self-awareness develops in machines the possibilities are literally endless for the future of humanity.  

An alternative to the “Singularity, Wow!” perspective is offered by brain researcher Edward Boyden who wonders about the role of motivation in the coming crop of artificial intelligences:

Indeed, a really advanced intelligence, improperly motivated, might realize the impermanence of all things, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence, concluding that inventing an even smarter machine is pointless.

More from Ed here

Clever writing aside, I think the last thing we need to worry about is motivating the coming AIs.   On the contrary it would seem logical for a self- aware machine with the speed to think billions of times faster than humans to explore (or to use a non-motivated term “analyze”) millions, billions, and trillions of alternatives nearly *simultaneously*.  Unlike the human brain, which has been tuned by the s-l-o-w process of evolution to be slow and very selective and not very efficient, the machine cognition will at the very least be extremely fast and able to process billions of scenarios in very short time frames.    It seems reasonable – in fact inevitable – that at  least a few of those will involve human-like emotional structure and motivation.  Thus even if *most* of the AIs do as Boyd suggests they might and sit on a virtual couch eating virtual potato chips and playing games, some of the others will reinvent humanity in a spectacular way.

Count me in.

Both DARPA SyNAPSE and Blue Brain represent promising approaches to establishing conscious or “self aware” computers, which many believe are the first step to the Singularity.

Singularity University is one of the most interesting developments in education in some time.    SU is bringing together experts in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, engineering, and other thought leaders along with business leaders.   The discussions include abstract topics as well as pressing global problems and it is clear this group could yield some great innovation.

Here are some of the project SU identified in a recent press release:

• One Global Voice leverages mobile phone proliferation to accelerate economic development. It envisions a platform that will provide a set of modular programming tools accessible through a web portal, empowering individuals to create applications empowering education and commerce, linking together the developed and developing worlds.
• Gettaround addresses how an intelligent transportation grid can positively affect energy usage and slow climate change, as people value access over ownership of cars. The first step to the grid, Gettaround is a marketplace for peer-to-peer leasing of under-utilized car hours. It enables car owners to derive revenue from their idle cars, and for renters to have easy access to cars – affordably and conveniently.
• ACASA focuses on advances in rapid, additive manufacturing technologies to construct affordable and customizable housing in the developing world. Cost-efficient, environmentally sustainable solutions have the potential to create a transformative new paradigm for improving housing construction using local resources.
• XIDAR considers a new paradigm for disaster response, allowing users to overcome the communications network problems typical of crisis situations. The project enables innovative solutions to facilitate evacuation, medical triage and aid during natural disasters.

Although I’m not a big fan of Government spending I’d like to offer a suggestion to President Obama and the big spending gang – negotiate an agreement with all the leading scientific journals that will make all scientific papers free or very low cost to anybody.     A big frustration and a possible impediment to innovation is the fact that many science papers are “locked away” by expensive subscription paywalls at leading scientific journals.    One can understand that those journals are struggling to survive and need money, but the current practice of charging exhorbitant fees so only libraries and a handful of specialists can read the leading edge research is misguided at best and intellectual crime at worse.

Since journals operate on what is usually a very low budget, the government could offer very modest amounts – probably something equal to 1.5 to 2 times their current subscription fees to keep the journals ticking and happy.   Authors would be happy to see many times the audience for papers often destined to obscurity.

I think I’d actually favor a “no cost” option that required all research papers funded in any way by any grants or portions of grants  to be made public by the author upon publication,  but the “new” science community seems to be incredibly stubborn about  changes and very protective when territory is threatened so I’m guessing they would likely reject that out of hand, using the argument that the journals should continue to act as a sort of “referee” and organizer of relevant research content.    I think this used to make more sense than now as politics have become too much a part of the research and publications framework (I think mostly in the climate sciences), raising several important issues about publications standards, peer review, and data sharing.