Category Archives: Science & Technology

We should fear diarrhea more than we fear Osama, but we don’t.

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The Agriculture Department is investigating a possible case of mad cow disease, the agency’s chief veterinarian said Saturday….

Worried?   You shouldn’t be.   Not at ALL.   Very close to ZERO.  Why?   Only ONE American has died from Mad Cow and he got it in Britain.  Only about 150 died in Britain years ago from a major outbreak.   DO THE MATH and fire up the BBQ.
I’m now convinced to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that humans are extremely crappy at mathematics, and even worse at digesting the *implications* of mathematics.    These are not skills evolution selected for aggressively and therefore it’s a daily dose of “Houston, we have a problem!”
We routinely allocate risk improperly, especially as it related to dangerous activities.   For most people the big dangers – and they are fairly substantial – are things like getting into a car (about a hundred people die each day from car accidents), Handling guns (if you include suicide gun deaths this is also close to 100 deaths per day in the USA.

Are You a smoker?   DANGER!  Obese or just Overweight with a BMI over 24.9?  Your DANGER of heart disease and earlier-than-otherwise death is very real.

YET…. I know of few people who worry much, if any, about these real dangers, preferring nonsensical concerns about things like getting struck by lightning, earthquakes, or terrorism.

Terror stats have a tricky caveat in that baselines are very hard to establish. HOWEVER, even if we assumed that the awful toll of 9/11 was to happen globally on a DAILY BASIS, our current terror related expenditures would be better spent on global healthcare if return on our investment was the key metric.  Why?   Because many more people die daily from preventable disease than died on 9/11 from terror.    Diarrhea and Malaria alone kill over 10,000 humans per day – mostly children.  PER DAY!

Mad Cow worries?   Silly – you are more likely to be killed by a perfectly normal cheeseburger’s tendency to raise your chances of heart disease.

Godin at Google is Good

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Seth Godin, one of the great online marketeers, recently spoke at Google and here is the Video.

His main point is that success is about marketing more than technology, even for companies like Google.

I’m really struck the more I “dive in” to the Web 2.0 people, experience, and companies how poorly this simple message is understood.   Everybody seems to “get” that they’ll need to monetize traffic at some point, but I think many *wrongly* have taken away from the Google experience that great money comes when you build great technology.   It happens, but not often.

Myspace perspectives from Danah Boyd

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Danah Boyd is a social networking researcher who also works at Yahoo. Easily one of the brightest observers in this space though I’m not yet convinced that she is a *wise* observer of these things. I’d read her blog and realized she’d have valuable perspectives on Myspace. Here is a great summary of her perspective, though I’m concerned that there may be a generational issue of “parents have the RIGHT and OBLIGATION to know about those tracking and marketing to their kids (e.g. Myspace.com)” that she can’t see cuz….she’s young and has not yet had the shot ‘o wisdom and insight that comes from having children running around in potentially dangerous environments.

Is Myspace.com a safespace?

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On CNN a child psychologist warned that NO child should have a “web page”, and that Myspace.com, a social networking site popular mostly among teens, was a dangerous environment that could be used by predators to “profile” potential victims.

It sure seemed to be an exaggeration, and since I actively encourage my own 16 year old to develop websites I thought I better find out a bit more. The buzz in the industry is that Myspace and friendster are getting replaced by facebook, which I understand is more popular for college students looking for dates. Partly for this reason I hadn’t been paying … enough … attention to myspace.

But indeed my son had a page and so did many of his friends. Nothing too provocative from that group, but the psychologists concerns were justified in other respects as I learned browsing the listings and content and by signing up for my own Myspace account. Here are the interesting features that I guarantee few parents are aware of and would concern many greatly:

* Extensive personal information, often including pictures and names of friends, crushes, school and city specifics.
* Discription of sexual orientation. This includes the term “swinger”.
* Easy picture upload.
* Crappy age verification. Easy to make up things to “get in”, so many of the age listings are almost certainly false. This fact or ALONE raises many serious legal issues as minors are posting volumes of suggestive material with no oversight.
* Advertising for adult sites. I didn’t see any ads (yet) for x rated material, but prominent were ads for “intimate dating” which is euphemistic for sex match services. I don’t object to these ads in the adult space, but actively advertising sex dating to teens and preteens should be of concern to any clear thinking parent.

There’s more but I’d urge any parent to browse the site. An upside to the detail is that you can learn about your own kid’s friends and other aspects of their life they might not share at the dinner table. I’d argue that the most important factor is whether this environment is getting abused rather than whether it *could* be abused. For that I’ll need to research a bit.

Too hard on TED?

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Have I been *a bit* too hard on the TED Conference? I’ve been reading more. It’s certainly great to see discussion of the project to document human rights abuses with digital cameras (Peter Gabriel), see the history of TED includes awards to luminaries in smart, scalable development like Bono, and much much more. TED conference blog

But there’s still a HUGE problem with such events which provide economic barriers to entry that are so great they insulate the TED community from….the real community. Sure these guys have mechanisms to hear from and about AIDS children in the Congo, poor Chinese factory workers and Indian farmers, but the voices of these folks are absent as conferences like TED set the agenda for what some would call progressive change. (yes they have some free spots but they appear to be tightly controlled and very limited. This is a choir who likes to hear themselves preach).

I’m always amazed how well intentioned wealthly people often create microclimates of compassion that miss the big picture. TED is better than that, but certainly we need to find ways to have the most influential discussions about critical global issues take place on the global stage, not the 1000- at-$4400-per-person-half-caf-cappucino crowd.
(no offense to the full caf cappucino folks)

Gates hasn’t gone soft, he’s gone heroic!

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What a disappointment to read New York Magazine’s John Heilemann on Bill Gates and what he sees as a softening of Gates that has led to a weakening of Microsoft.

Like most tech oriented folks I’ve never been a big MS fan, but ever since hearing Gates on Charlie Rose discuss development with a passion he used to reserve for monopolizing the PC industry I’ve been a huge fan of his and was thrilled to see the media attention, albeit very BRIEF media attention, following the Time award.

Rather than laud him for shifting his generally brilliant focus from software to world health, Heilemann focuses very narrowly on what he sees as the demise of Microsoft.

It’s a dubious premise at best (watch their unique Neural Network search triumph in about 1- 2 years as a fantastic tool), but even if it’s true that Microsoft is dying the challenges are not related to Gates philanthropy or even Gates himself as much as they are the result of the tidal waves of online innovation and change sweeping away old business structures and new and old companies alike.

I expect more from elite magazines, but like most in our sad and superficial corporate media New York Magazine fiddles while the developed world burns, and like mainstream TV media focuses more on a notable’s celebrity while the celebrity, in this case Gates, heroically tackles real and pressing global problems with unprecedented success.

Shame on Heilemann, shame on New York Magazine, and Bravo to Bill Gates.
—————-

UPDATE: John Heilemann very courteously replied to my rant at length in the following email in which he also had to correct my mistake calling NEW YORK MAGAZINE the “NEW YORKER”.

> On 1/10/06, John Heilemann wrote:

joe —

sorry you were disappointed, but at least you can let the New Yorker off the hook — i’m a columnist for New York Magazine, an entirely different publication.

i wrote a book about the microsoft antitrust trial, so i have some views about the company, its past behavior, and future prospects.
maybe we can just agree to disagree on some points there.

but while it’s true that i didn’t devote the bulk of my column to
praising gates for his philanthropic work — a point of view i
considered pretty fully covered by Time’s Person of the Year cover
story — it’s not like i didn’t acknowledge the point:

“By all accounts, Gates has emerged as the most influential philanthropist on the planet; with a $29 billion endowment this foundation is setting new standards for both generosity and rigor in tackling an assortment of the world’s most dire maladies, from malaria to HIV.”

“Gates’s consolation is that his opportunity to be a transformational figure isn’t lost with Microsoft’s abeyance. This is not a trivial thing. Gates has already changed the world once; now, through his foundation—which is not only disgorging a gusher of funds but inventing a new model for philanthropy, driven by statistics, leverage, and an insistence on accountability—he has a chance to do it again. And as Bono told Time, “The second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more.”

sorry if this is insufficient — but please don’t accuse me of
ignoring the good that gates is doing with his charitable endeavors.

jh