Category Archives: personal

Web 2.0 – it’s more than just snooty elitism.

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Dang.  I was going to write about how damn snooty and elitist O’Reilly and Battelle are with their “invitation only” Web 2.0 events.  But whenever I read O’Reilly’s blog, and the few times I’ve met him in person, I always come away thinking he’s quite simply the clearest and most innovative fellow who thinks and writes about changes in the internet landscape.    John is pretty dang sharp as well.

So, instead of criticizing those guys I’ll note the upcoming non-snooty version of their Web 2.0 events, called the Web 2.0 Expo , to be held in April 2007 at Moscone in San Francisco.    Be there or be …. Web 1.0.

Blog, Humbug!

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Over at Adam’s he forced me to think a bit more about my concern that blogs, forums, and wikis all fall short of the ideal environment for information exchange / communication / enlightenment. He basically asked what was needed to create a better environment and I answered:

I don’t have a good solution in mind but it seems to me the analog offline is something like a party or informal conference space (e.g. the Meet the Engineers session at Google Dance though it ended too early for me to introduce myself to … you!).

In that environment there are “conversation leaders” who are the center of attention and gather people interested in a specific topic, but you can also break off to talk with somebody you just met there. Blogs seem to suffer from too much focus on the blog author and forums from too much focus on worthless or off topic comments. Wikis …. just don’t usually work well due to lack of participation.

I have a feeling the “solution” may come from virtual spaces like SL or game environments which can leverage available technology (e.g. web search, messaging, threaded conversations) with the social component we all seek as primates.

…..hmmmm … I’m also thinking that the dialogs at Myspace, though often painfully superficial or bizarre, are more “real” and interactive than many in the tech or political blog space. There, the comments have a higher profile than in conventional blogs and incline users to bounce from one member to another based on the comment streams.

Todd Davidson of Oregon is the State Tourism Director of the Year

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Congratulations to my pal Todd Davidson who was just named State Tourism Director of the Year by the Travel Industry Association of America.    This is one of the top awards in travel and it’s great to see him win it.   I worked with Todd back in the day when I was doing a lot of regional and state tourism work for Oregon and I’m so glad to see him honored in this way.   Congratulations Todd!

Talent, Oregon Real Estate

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Here in lovely Talent, Oregon the real estate prices have been going up in spectacular fashion. Until now. As a favor to my pal Jack Latvala I’m helping him set up a PPC campaign over at Star Properties, the closest thing to an official real estate office for Talent we have here. They also cover Ashland Oregon and have a lot of Ashland Oregon Real Estate listings as well as Talent Oregon Real Estate. Jack and Lynn are great to work with and are one of those rare brokerages that are more interested in helping people and the community than in landing the sales commission.

We’ll start with the $50 in free clicks from Google from SES and see if they can get any action from that bidding on terms like Talent Oregon, Talent Real Estate, Ashland Real Estate, etc. I’m very interested in this from a Search optimization perspective as well. Star would very reasonably be considered the most relevant site for Talent Real Estate, but probably not for Ashland Real Estate. However, the listing at the top for Ashland has a PR of only 2 and is not one of the big players there. I’m thinking he may be the cleverest one though as that’s a choice spot. In these “longer tail” areas we see that Google often fails to deliver the type of result you’d get if you asked a very knowlegeable local from Ashland about Real Estate, and I think this bodes well for Yahoo’s more humanized social search approaches.

Head on – apply directly to your gullibility and wax your forehead.

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Another homeopathic remedy rears it’s silly head with the product I’ve seen advertised so much on TV without any description of what it’s supposed to do.   Apparently that’s because it does .. nothing.

Wikipedia:
HeadOn is a homeopathic topical headache relief product produced by Miralus Healthcare.[1] Although intended uses are not listed on the website or in the commercial spot, the purported purpose of the product is to assuage head pains after being applied directly to the forehead.[1] Chemical analysis has shown that the product consists of almost entirely wax.

Poverty? Cool!

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I really like the ONE campaign because I think it’s doing something other development efforts have failed to do – harness celebrity power and “coolness” into the mix which encourages those who otherwise do not think about these issues to …. think about them a lot and jump on the bandwagon. One is making it “cool” to care about poverty, and I can think of few more powerful forces of change than the coolness factor. http://www.one.org

Kids, cars, costs, and risks

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Time to buy a car that’ll be used by my son, a new driver. Here we have the intriguing but rarely discussed intersection of safety, cost, and coolness factors. As for most parents, the safety of my kids is my top priority. However like most parents I won’t be seeking the single safest vehicle available for my new driver. Rather I’ll balance various concerns according to behavior formulas I do not understand and hope for the best. At times like these I wish there were simple programs for a family decision maker to allocate risk rationally, but I doubt you could make money on them. I don’t think evolution prepared humans much for allocating long term risks and rewards. It would be nice, for example, to see if the substantial risks associated with bicycling swamp out the differences in risks between a car with and without airbags. ie can I get the same “safety boost” I get with airbags by just having my son foresake a few hours of bike riding or other “riskier than driving” behavior.
Here’s a summary of some old Natl Transportation Safety Data from OK Police (I couldn’t find more recent data or the direct source at NHTSA.

Air bags save lives. Air bags in passenger cars and light trucks prevented an estimated 1,136 fatalities from 1986 to 1995, with another 600 saved in 1996. Once these life saving devices are equipped in all cars, it is estimated that 3,000 lives will be saved each year.

Driver-Side Air Bags
Driver-side air bags reduce the overall fatality risk of car drivers by a statistically significant 11 percent.

In other words, a fleet of cars equipped with driver-side air bags will have 11 percent fewer driver fatalities than the same cars would have had if they did not have air bags. Still, air bags can be dangerous to short stature adults sitting too close to the air bag module, especially when unbuckled.

Passenger-Side Air Bags
Passenger-side air bags reduce the overall fatality risk of car passengers age 13 and older by a statistically significant 13.5 percent.

It is estimated that an additional 88 right front passengers ages 13 and older would have died from 1986 to 1995 if passenger cars or light trucks had not been equipped with passenger-side air bags.

To date only one passenger, a 98-year-old female, has died as the result of an adult passenger-side air bag-related injury.

MORE: Here’s more data including a study (see left side of page) that suggests over 12,000 deaths from US state’s failures in more aggressively implementing seat belt laws.   If we assume these folks are worth 2.7 million each as the transportation department likes to do,  then in simple terms it would have been worth 12000 x 2.7 million = 32.4 billion dollars to prevent these deaths.     Assuming EPA’s higher value of life number we get even more life bang from our bucks by getting people to buckle up, which is one of the cheapest ways to save lives.    The cheapest of all for USA life saving, if I recall correctly from a study printed in the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, is increasing the use/quality of smoke detectors in buildings and homes.    For life saving on a global scale I think it’s oral rehydration therapy or mosquito nets, which at .15 per dose / 2.50 per net are quite the deal if you see *human life* as the thing we should be optimizing for as we allocate limited resources to big problems.

Blogging is great even if you don’t get indexed…

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It’s hard for many people to understand why bloggers who only have a few readers enjoy blogging so much, but I suspect that most writers would understand that it’s fun to just jot things down regardless of the audience.   In fact I think I’m a better writer when I’m NOT writing for others, rather to clarify my own thinking or ideas or muddling confusions.

However, I’m noticing my usual readership of 75-150 appears WAY down, probably because Google is not indexing snippets of my posts as of a few days ago.  My first guess was some temporary confusion over WordPress blog indexing.  However, (and this is a cool thing about blogging) I’ve already got word from Robert Scoble over at his blog – the top wordpress blog – that he’s not seen this before.

Which Universe are you from again?

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To me the most appealing and mind-bending aspect of string theory – now considered a fairly mainstream approach to a mechanistic understanding of the world – is Brane Cosmology, which suggests we may be “surrounded” by inhabitants of other parallel universes.   More fanciful than any new age guru speak, Brane Cosmology opens an almost unbelievable world of possibilities that fit squarely within the theoretical constraints of this notion of how our mechanistic universe works.

We’d be unable to interact directly with these other systems due to complications that arise from living on a “brane”, or large extension of a string.  However we might be able to communicate using gravitational forces which may be the product of closed strings and can therefore move between Branes, visualized in Brian Green’s excellent book and PBS series “The Elegant Universe” as slices of bread within a multidimensional loaf.

Please pass the butter?

Reason Rules! Not.

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Over at the House of J there’s some discussion about the irrationality of some security measures and about the AOL search results privacy scandal (which I also think is a questionably rational concern).

I’ll put up my comments from over there:

IMHO people are missing the key point about privacy — that cat is out of the bag. We need rules about how to penalize for abuses of information, not the pretense that AOL/Yahoo/Google/MSN will do a great job of keeping information away from Govt or commercialization. People worry about abstract Government abuses even as their search stream is processed to invoke better manipulation of their behavior.

RE screening pilots … sounds logical, but the FAA’s record of identifying flight school terrorists is not … impressive. I think the “answer” is for us all to realize that we can’t lower the risk threshold to zero so we should optimize the costs and benefits, allocating resources to the “low hanging fruit” problems in all sectors that are cheap to solve. Solving terror problems in the current fashion is so expensive it’s breaking the bank which will lead to more vulnerability.