People, including my wife, often ask what I do for a living. Somehow "Internet Entrepreneur", "web guy" fall short and today I realized that my job is to "Get it". If I succeed, and I "get it" I can position myself in the path of internet money and do swell. If I don't get it I can be lucky and still pocket some internet bucks OR maybe I'll have to go back to regular work.
Ouch, that's an incentive to get going and get it.
I praised Kayak's flight selection service a few posts back, but I'm finding they are listing flights that are not available even after what appear to be many hours of non-availability. However, this does appear to be an American Airlines data problem more than a Kayak one so I'm still bullish on Kayak, but it sure is frustrating to see this note which appears at AA.com:
Check below for errors:
The flight you selected is no longer available. Please select another flight or modify your request
Arrgghhhhh!
A detailed study of the many services really is needed. Maybe I'll put that on the list.
UPDATE: Using Kayak.com which sent me into AA.com booking system I did get an excellent rate MFR to BWI of $384 which appeared cheaper thanat AA.com's rate when I searched there independently of Kayak. The 384 was over $100 cheaper than Orbitz, Farechase, or TravelNOW.
Later …. Wait, I think I'm being too hard on Schneider who later qualified the quote below to apply only to soundbite decisions when getting interviewed… ]
He apparently did not mean it to be as broad and sweeping as it sounds below]. However, I do think the quote reflects the current behavior of many scientists who are choosing to accept alarmism because it suits their needs.
My initial post:
A great intellectual frustration for me is trying to understand why super bright, well informed people who all subscribe to the idea of rational, scientific inquiry often disagree – sometimes violently – about the interpretation of well studied phenomena. I now think the answer can be found by noting how our pesky human intellectual inadequacies combine with our "tribal" tendency to agree with our friends and challenge our enemies, especially when we are under personal attack. This in turn focuses attention on a "too narrow" spectrum of information and people, which in turn leads to faulty analysis or suspect statements – even by very competent intellects.
Stephen Schnieder is an internationally respected Stanford climatologist and biologist and a key author of the IPCC report which is the key Global Warming reference work. He's also one of the harshest critics of Bjorn Lomborg and his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Back in 1996 Schnieder got to the heart of the challenge of mixing science and politics in the statement below and his answer to critics who often accuse him of alarmism based on the following statement he made in an interview:
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. [bolding added]
Yikes Dr. Schneider – please JUST SAY NO to effectiveness if it is going to compromise your honesty – that should not be an ethical bind for a scientists who should be held to a higher standard of honesty.
I sure don't like his idea that "offering up scary scenarios" somehow serves the long term best interests of the public. It sure looks like Schneider would support Al Gore's alarmism as an important part of getting the public to act on an issue many hold very dear (reduction of greenhouse gases in the hopes of stopping global warming), but I think a more functional view is that the role of science should be to offer the unvarnished truth, and to *challenge* alarmists and political or economic vested interests when they report facts selectively or inaccurately. Only with accurate analyses can we allocated resources most effectively to the myriad problems of earth.
The irony of it all is that global warming alarmists cite potential human death catastrophes from global warming, yet simply ignore the *fact* that there are many human catastrophes going on *right now* in many parts of the globe. Before you ask me to focus my attention and hundreds of billions of dollars of tax money on the (slight) possibility that global warming will rise sea levels 20 feet, I ask you to focus your precious attention, and a few dozen billion, on the easy to solve problems of the world like clean water, intestinal disease, and malaria. Deal?
After reading "The Skeptical Environmentalist" I was astonished at how effectively Lomborg challenged many of the ideas about the environment I'd been holding dear for so long. I was especially impressed by the case he makes for allocating resources based on analysis of the lives saved and a cost benefit approach rather than the often irrational, politically motivated spending that saves only a few but costs a lot.
This led me to a fascinating email exchange with the editor of Scientific American, which had blasted Lomborg in a very long critique of the book. The SA critique was written by four internationally recognized experts, but in my view they'd done little more than attack Lomborg personally and suggest – speciously – that his objective was to disparage a scientific approach to problem solving.
What consistently impresses me the most about Lomborg is his willingness to take on his critics point by point, addressing their concerns with citations and what only appear to be legitimate personal criticisms. (Such as noting that climatologist Schneider used to warn about potentially catastrophic global cooling but now warns of potentially catastrophic global warming).
I suggest that Lomborg is thinking very clearly and applying science appropriately, but has challenged his critics effectively and aggresssively enough that they've responded in an emotional fashion rather than a scientific one.
The enthusiasm many scientists seem to show for Al Gore's excellent but misguided propaganda film "An Inconvenient Truth" reflects poorly on the state of scientific thinking. I think it reveals the limitations we primates, even those primates high on the scientific food chain, have with mathematical constructs and allocation of risks, costs, and benefits.
Later: Wadard does NOT agree with me or Lomborg – the debate continues over at Global Warming Watch:
Here's a clear thinking piece by Lomborg
After gushing over Kayak's great flight search I realized I had not used Sidestep in some time and should give it a try. In my opinion Sidestep used to really suck, requiring download of software to your browser and in my limited experience did not deliver good rates.
Now, like Orbitz and Kayak, Sidestep allows easy browser based searching. However for the 2-3 legged cross country flight I'm currently researching (MFR to BWI), Kayak blows away Sidestep and Orbitz with an American Airlines flight that is a whopping $200 less.
This could be a quirk due to my rural Oregon location but I'm impressed nonetheless. I also REALLY like Kayak's intuitive interface and the ease of selecting your previous searches very quickly. Rates from the big systems are updated three times per day and availability can change even more frequently, so it's a good idea to search using the same criteria several times before you "give up" on a good rate. Persistence pays in the bookings game and Kayak makes it easier to stay on task.
Eventually I'll try to do a better more balanced comparison where I'll pick a bunch of routes and run them on the different consolidation systems to see who wins, but first I'll do a few more of these quickie comparisons such as Kayak vs Yahoo's fairly new offering "FareChase".
My initial experiments with Kayak over a year ago left me unimpressed, but Kayak.com has evolved into one of the best tools for finding cheap flights. There are several notable features that make it a great way to search for flights when you have some flexibility and want a good price:
* You can select a date range of up to 3 days before and after your departure and return. Without this feature Orbitz was probably better than Kayak for discount flight seekers, but now that Kayak's got it you are able to get a good fare picture for a range of dates.
You must sign up for this but all that requires is a 10 second email signup. A huge hat tip to Kayak's team for recognizing that even requiring a name and address is a barrier to sign ups. Get all that mundane detail from people later or not at all.
* Also great is Kayak's ability to select different arrival airports with immediate fare updates allows you to fine tune your driving to flying ratios. Especially helpful when traveling to areas where several major airports may be in close proximity to many final destinations. BWI, IAD, and PHL for example or SFO, SMF, and OAK in California.
Apparently IKEA, more as tax avoidance than altruism, is technically the world's largest charitable foundation, though clearly Gates foundation, at 29 billion, is the world'd largest "real" charitable endeavor. Gates reported yesterday that he's leaving Microsoft over the next 2 years to devote full time to Gates Foundation activities.
One of my greatest disappointments is to hear far too many technology people absurdly suggest that Gates' motivations are other than the obvious – spearheading one of the greatest philanthropic efforts of all time that primarily serve the two most significant challenges of humanity – health and education.
This cost allocation study Notes that the EPA is willing to spend almost twice what the Dept of Transportation is willing to spend to keep YOU alive. The numbers seem old so there may be some adjustments, but interesting is this:
In policy and regulatory analyses, EPA uses a value of $4.8 million to represent the cost of a premature death. This value is the mean of estimates from 26 studies dating back to the mid 1970s that have attempted to place a value on the cost of premature deaths. Estimates from those studies range from $0.6 million to $13.5 million, reflecting the large uncertainties in trying to estimate the public's willingness to pay to avoid premature death.
The Department of Transportation has adopted a value of $2.7 million per premature death, based on a comprehensive 1991 study by the Urban Institute
People are reluctant to accept this type of "dollar valuation" analysis even though it's commonplace in legal settlements and is a VERY APPROPRIATE way to allocate public funds. Note that the 4.8 million dollars the EPA spends to save a life would save thousands of lives if spent in alternative ways. One can argue that the complexity of this type of analysis undermines the rationale behind using this "lives for dollars" game, but it's a weak argument. Yet even with this appropriate method of trying to allocate dollars to lives and then allocate them most effectively, we tend to apply funding in odd ways and squander billions due to political budgeting.
Robert Scoble, one of the world's most influential and well-known bloggers, is leaving Microsoft for startup podtech.net
It's not official until he announces it tomorrow at Vloggercon.com, but in typical blogOsphere fashion the news is out before it is news. Looks like Robert notified a few folks who called a few others who posted about it and it'll be old news by the time he announces tomorrow.
I had a chance to talk briefly with Robert at the MIX06 conference and he's a great guy. I'm very surprised that Microsoft allowed this to happen though I'm guessing it's because the corporate structure made it hard to reward him appropriately for his enormous contributions to Microsoft as one of their most prominent online spokespeople. Also I'm guessing he was frustrated by the slow pace of change at MS. As such a well-connected guy I bet he wanted to jump into the excitement of Web 2.0. Microsoft is missing much of the point of Web 2.0 as many have noted – in fact it they aren't careful Web 2.0 could kill Microsoft, and Scoble's departure is notable in that respect. He was Mr 2.0 at Microsoft and now he's gone.
Microsoft's loss is Podtech's gain and I'll look forward to seeing Robert more often now that he's heading to Silicon Valley.
I'm still big on "web surfing" and prefer bouncing around from site to site to RSS feed readers and customized home pages like MyYahoo.
However, as information online continues to explode and as blog content replaces website content as the freshest and most interesting stuff online, I think we'll all be moving to a more structured environment for pulling in information. This won't stop our surfing but it will tend to reduce the time surfing and increase the focus on topics of interest to us. Interestingly, this may mean we'll be less inclined to bump into "new" ideas. On the upside it may allow more in depth analysis as we refine the niche sources to the best of class in our areas of expertise/interest and learn to organize the information and data associations in more effective ways.
I think these RSS vs Surfing developments may be more profound than most realize. At MIX06 it was clear that Microsoft was going to focus heavily on RSS feeds as a key online distribution tool. Yet it was striking to me how Bil Gates (who I respect) and MS in general seemed out of touch with the big news of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee both are good at seeing the future and they seem to suggest there are profound changes in emphasis for the online world – a shift to community/collective intelligence/complex webs of interconnected dynamic data/ etc. This is not directly related to the future of surfing but will influence it greatly, and I think Web 2.0 may not be as compatible with "navigation via surfing" as the old web.
Joe Duck 