Icicles at Sunset – Winter in Minnesota
Originally uploaded by DaffodilBlue
It has been my good fortune to visit my wife’s lovely family here in Minnesota for some 31 years – often around Thanksgiving. We’re here in Northfield, MN this year. Carleton College and St Olaf College are both here with pretty and historic campuses. Northfield is also home to the world headquarters of Malt-O-Meal and I am informed this is a great Minnesota retirement area.
I’ll be reporting live again in January from CES 2009, the world’s biggest (and that means HUGE) and most influential Consumer Electronics Show. The reports will mostly be over at Technology Report, my new technology blog project with a good friend of mine from California.
Pictured below is Noel Lee of Monster Cable, one of the music industry’s key players and host of one of CES hottest party tickets – the Monster Party. Last year Mary J Blige gave an awesome concert after the Monster Retailer awards.
Jeopardy will be filming at CES as well, with 11 shows scheduled to be taped during the week of CES. One of the challenges of an event this large is that you simply cannot see everything – there are thousands of exhibitors and events and sessions and the venue is so large it takes up all of the Las Vegas Convention Center and most of the Sands Convention Center.
Today’s tech blogOsphere buzz is about Google’s new wiki search feature that allows users to rank their own results. This appears to me to be a splendid idea although I agree with some who say it won’t get used much.
However, for those who use this it may eventually allow a kind of search ranking we have never seen, where user defined preferences trump the mysterious algorithmic magic mistakes, gradually giving the user a great set of results well optimized to their needs.
I’d suggest that “perfect individualized search” may only require two basic steps – the first is a *discovery* part where you surface content relevant to your particular query and then plow through that manually to determine which sites best fit your needs. Google does a pretty good job of facilitating that right now. However a second piece would allow you to build on those “personally filtered” results in various ways – some as simple as just listing them in rough order of relevance to you as Google is now doing.
Is this a good Google idea? Yes! Will anybody much use this? Nope, because our habits as humans don’t incline us to be this organized. I had a great conversation a few days ago with the developer of Reuters Calais semantic search – a brilliant tool designed to surface relevancy and meaning from massive document archives. We were noting how difficult is is to simply break the habit of using Google search, even when it’s not the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.
Funny primates we !
This post falls squarely in the “SEO Experiments” category. We’ve had an informative but “plain jane” Oregon Coast website up for some time based on Oregon Coast magazine which is published by Northwest Travel Magazines.
The site has historically ranked poorly for “Oregon Coast” and related terms, probably in part because we had never done much to optimize it for search engines, and (I think) partly because quite ironically Google now struggles to properly optimize websites that have extensive internal cross linking. Ironic because extensive linking was a cornerstone of early web quality but fell out of ranking fashion as Google sought to kill off auto-generated websites that used that technique to boost their pagerank and thereby their Google rank for optimized query terms. This became a spam signal because it is so easy to create large database driven websites, but in the case of many sites it is also a good *quality signal* because the site may be very info rich, covering basically every mile of the Oregon Coast Highway 101 in good, objective detail. Google recognizes they’ve created a lot of collateral damage in this way but frankly they have not done much to fix the problem, basically feeling that there is enough “good content” that ranks well. This is wrong and unfortunate, and in travel it has led to a lot of mediocre results when better search would give detailed blog and website references to pages spawned, for example, by people who live in the place getting described and have extensive insider detail.
One part of the optimization has been to rename the site OregonCoastTravel.net and 301 redirect the old pages at 101MilebyMile.com to the new name, hoping to rank better for “Oregon Coast” and “Oregon Coast Travel” as we should.
I’m linking here to the Oregon Coast birding page because it is a straggler that has been 301 redirected to OregonCoastTravel.net but remains listed by Google at the old site. Also, it is an excellent resource page for that topic of Oregon Coast Birding. I want to see how fast this page will now be correctly reindexed.
Answer: Very low, though I wildly speculate (putting me in the same expert category as any expert you can name) that DOW at 7000 and S&P at 700 will be the bottom of this megabear market, after which we’ll continue to see major trouble with the economy continue for at least 2 years during which many businesses will die, successful ones will consolidate and just keep in the game, and a handful of nimble and clever new businesses will thrive and lead the new “post recession” economy forward, probably based on impressive technological innovations now testing in a handful of big company R&D departments and literally *millions* of small business efforts around the globe.
Thanks to the internet, the rise of highly social media, and the plummeting cost of powerful computing I remain optimistic that technological innovation will pull us out of this crisis and remain for yet another century the key force behind most socioeconomic progress.
What’s pushing things down in stocks? I think the main factor is simply that the market, which is predictive rather than reactive, overvalued how fast technology would trump other considerations and continue to lift mediocre companies ever higher. It’s not as if many companies were doing profoundly brilliant stuff out there – on the contrary the auto companies were up to the same old stupid nonsene they’ve been doing for decades. Financial companies were gambling with Credit Default Swaps and fueling the mortgage crisis with fundamentally irresponsible and misguided profiteering. Even high tech companies, home to many of the globe’s best and brightest working for Yahoo, Intel, [Google?], and MSN found themselves in huge battles to protect market share and profitability while containing the onslaught of online spam. Google may be something of an exception here as their profitability and advertising brilliance has – until recently – kept them squarely above much of the fray and on the path to more innovation.
About eight years ago this foolishness led to the bubble of 1990 where the internet company valuations were out of line with their potential for innovation. The commercial internet revolution was an amazing thing in the 1990s and remains the most profound new development in history, but the companies were not all that inspired and most companies were destroyed by the very markets they had convinced to fund them in the first place.
So a far better question than “why are my stocks dropping?” is “Why were all these companies valued so highly in the first place?” We needed a contraction to square the values with the prices, and now we are watching that happen.
Why 7000 DOW and 700 S&P? At that point the markets will have dropped just over 50% from the highs of a few years ago. I see that as a significant practical and psychological milestone. “half off” is a very accessible notion as we know from retail, and we already know there’s a lot of money waiting on the sidelines to buy into a “market bottom”. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some, and probably many of the companies hammered by this have been penalized irrationally by the broader market downturn. As prices drop to 5 and 10 year lows some of these bargains will be irresistable to those with cash on hand, and this buying should stabilize the market.
Will it rise quickly from 7000? I say no – I think the globalized chickens have largely flown the coop and many of the unfair advantages we have enjoyed as Americans … will be no more. I see no major depression looming and I see the USA as the economic “safe harbor” and leader for at least the next decade, but the days of easy prosperity are probably gone for some time so … buddy …. can you spare …. a dime?
Convergence08 was a great conference with many interesting people and ideas. Thankfully the number of crackpots was very low, and even the “new age” mysticism stuff was at a minimum. Instead I found hundreds of authors, doctors, biologists, programmers, engineers, physicists, and more clear thinking folks all interested in how the new technologies will shape our world in ways more profound than we have ever experienced before.
My favorite insights came from Monica Anderson’s presentation on her approach to AI programming, which she called “Artificial Intuition“. Unlike all other approaches to AI I’m familiar with Anderson uses biological evolution as her main analogs for conceptualizing human intelligence. I see this approach as almost a *given* if you have a good understanding of human thought, but it’s actually not a popular conceptual framework at all.
It has always surprised me how poorly many computer programmers understand even rudimentary biological concepts such as the underlying simplicity of the human neocortex and the basic principles of evolution which I’d argue emphatically have defined *every single aspect* of our human intelligence over a slow and clumsy, hit and miss process operating over millions of years. I think programmers tend to focus on mathematics and rule systems which are great modelling systems but probably a very poor analog for intelligence. This focus has in many ways poisoned the well of understanding about what humans and other animals do when they … think… which I continue to maintain is “not all that special”.
….. more on this later over at Technology Report …..
OK, so I’m lost in a blogOspheric mania but not posting enough here at Joe Duck.
The new project is with my gadget expert pal John and it’s called Technology Report. We’ll report extensively from CES Las Vegas this year and I’ll have liveblogging from the Convergence08 and Mashup Camp conferenced in Mountain View in a few days.
I’ve imported lots of my technology posts from here so I hope this does not mess up any search issues because I certainly don’t want to delete indexed blog posts from here.
Despite a fair amount of college physics and math, and the insights that come from being a living conscious being on planet earth which you’d think would give some insight into the nature of the reality we experience on a daily basis all around us, I remain confused.
How can the *physical universe* have no center? Almost all theories of cosmology and all of the extensive and available data is said to support this idea, but it still completely baffles me. Earth has a center, the Galaxy has a center, and our Galactic Cluster has a center. But at cosmic universe scales you cannot talk about “centers” anymore – ie the point where the big bang happened. My understanding is there is no point of origin – almost all cosmologies that are consistent with the (huge amount) of physical data say the universe sprung into being but did NOT spring from any particular spot.
Now, one way this *does* make sense to me is to assume that the basis of reality is tiny bits of information rather than tiny bits of matter and energy. ie matter and energy are a great way to model things down to a certain level, but at the very heart of everything we’ve just got some sort of binary information thing – zero or one, yes or no, on or off, “something or nothing”, etc.
This is appealing at one level because it seems to simplify some of the ultimate questions to about the simplest dynamic concept you can imagine which allows only two conditions – ie something or nothing. A concept that allows only ONE condition would be totally static – I don’t see how you could have change or thought in a system that is defined with only a single contruct, but clearly if you add only one more condition, giving you the “on or off” 1 or 0, etc, you can get an infinite number of variations.
Eric Schmidt said on CNBC’s Jim Cramer show today that even if asked he will not accept a position in the Obama administration that is expected to be something of a chief technology officer for the USA.
Reuters reports on the statement
Technology remains a vital US concern in terms of economy, national security, and offers the potential to extricate us from at least some of the pressing problems of the day.
Who would be a great choice for this position?
Mr President Elect Obama, I’d like to nominate Craig Newmark. Craig’s technology credentials are superb, he’s got global vision, and … his website is so successful he’ll never be bothering you for a raise in pay.
Here’s a good discussion of the CTO issue and potential qualifications. I hope Obama realizes how important it is that this person comes from Silicon Valley, deeply understands the internet from both a technical and business perspective, and has the ear and respect of many other major players. Schmidt and Newmark meet this test.
Other good choices might be Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina. Both which would help cross the party line and the conspiculous tech gender line as well.
Reprinted with permission, copyright Bjorn Lomborg
A New Dawn
The benefits of climate-change policies are limited and costly. Instead, the president-elect needs to coolly evaluate competing priorities, says Bjørn Lomborg.
By BJøRN LOMBORG
Most generations face large and daunting challenges. But few generations have the promise of leadership that could address them rationally. Fortunately, President-elect Obama is uniquely positioned to achieve such a feat and help the world solve some of its most entrenched issues.
He will be swamped with suggestions as to what to do first — perhaps none more impassioned than those who advocate dealing with man-made climate change. He will be told that it is the biggest threat facing humanity and that its solution is the mission of our generation. In many quarters, global warming is now positioned as a kind of uber-issue: a challenge of such enormity that it trumps all others.
Science and economics say otherwise. The United Nations science consensus expects temperature increases of 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, leading to (for example) sea-level increases of between one-half and two feet. Yet such a rise is entirely manageable and not dissimilar to the sea-level rise of about one foot we dealt with over the past 150 years. And while warming will mean about 400,000 more heat-related deaths globally, it will also have positive effects, such as 1.8 million fewer cold-related deaths, according to the only peer-reviewed global estimate, published in Ecological Economics — something that is rarely reported.
Most economic models show that the total damage by the end of the century will be about 3% of global GDP — not trivial but certainly not the end of the world. Remember that the U.N. expects that by the end of the century the average person in the world will be some 1,400% richer.
And yet, macro policy-making such as the Kyoto Protocol has been supported by an ill-founded perception of impending doom. The framers of Kyoto will ask that the global economy spend $180 billion per year for each year of the coming century mitigating CO2 emissions, with an eventual reduction of global temperature of an almost immeasurable 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit. It is perhaps time to ask if this can really be our first priority and generational mission.
This would not matter if we had infinite resources, and if we’d already solved all or most other problems.
But we don’t, and we haven’t. Especially in the current economic climate, we have to prioritize what we do — we have to coolly look at the costs and benefits of policies.
If we don’t do this, we in the developed world will preside over a moral tragedy: We will waste an extraordinary sum of money doing relatively little good, while millions of people suffer and die from problems which we could easily have consigned to history.
Take hunger. Impassioned pleas for climate action are based on the fact that agricultural production might decrease because of global warming, especially in the developing world. But again, we need context. Integrated models show that even with the most pessimistic assumptions, global warming would see a reduction in global agricultural production by the end of the century of 1.4%. Since agricultural output is expected to more than double over the same period, this means that climate change will cause the world’s food production to double not in 2080 but in 2081.
Global warming will probably in isolation cause the number of malnourished to increase by 28 million by the end of the century. Yet the much more important point is that the world hosts more than 900 million malnourished right now; though we will add at least three billion more people to humanity before the end of the century, the total number of malnourished in 2100 will probably drop to about 100 million. And in a much richer world, such remaining hunger is entirely a consequence of a lack of political will.
Crucially, focusing on tackling hunger through climate change policy is amazingly inefficient. Implementing Kyoto at $180 billion annually, we would avoid two million hungry by the end of the century. Yet spending just $10 billion annually, the U.N. estimates we could save 229 million people from hunger today.
Whatever is spent on climate policies saving one person from hunger in 100 years could instead save 5,000 people today.
This same point is true, whether we look at flooding, heat waves, hurricanes, diseases or water shortages. Carbon cuts are an ineffective response. Direct policies — such as addressing hunger directly — do a lot more.
Some say we just need to go much farther in cutting carbon. But more of a poor solution doesn’t make it better. Even if we could completely stop climate change through carbon cuts (an utterly unrealistic proposal), 97% of the hunger problem would remain, because only 3% of it will be caused by global warming.
More generally, since climate change mainly exacerbates many of the world’s existing problems, reducing emissions will only do marginal good. If global warming is the proverbial straw that will break the camel’s back, spending huge sums on removing the straw is a poor strategy compared to reducing the camel’s excess base load at much lower cost.
Mr. Obama has promised both an ambitious climate strategy investing $150 billion in new technologies and a doubling of foreign assistance to $50 billion. With a teetering U.S. economy, he has indicated that he may have to scale back the $150 billion investment. The Vice President-elect has clearly said that the doubling of aid might have to be postponed.
Now more than ever, there needs to be trade-offs between competing priorities. His foreign aid should focus on areas like direct malnutrition policies, immunization and agricultural research and development.
These would be some of the best investments possible. Why? This year a team of the world’s top economists, including five Nobel Laureates, identified the very best investments in improving the world in a process called the Copenhagen Consensus. They found that if Mr. Obama’s increased foreign development spending was focused on these areas, it could achieve 15 to 25 times more good than the cost.
We should also deal with climate change, but in a smarter way.
Kyoto shows what not to do. In 1997, politicians made lofty promises, which were to be fulfilled in the future. Well, the future has arrived and most countries did not want to pay enough — not just the United States, but the European Union, Japan and Canada.
Making even grander pledges at the next negotiation in Copenhagen in 2009 will likely just waste another decade. Mr. Obama’s undertaking to spend $150 billion over the next decade on clean technology could make a huge difference.
In climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus experts found that research and development of low-carbon energy technologies could do 11 times more good than the cost, whereas simple CO2 cuts produce a disappointing 90-cent return on the dollar.
Amazing good could come from using Mr. Obama’s $150 billion primarily to invest in creating new technologies, rather than simply subsidizing existing ones.
Investing in existing inefficient technology (like current-day solar panels) costs a lot for little benefit. Germany, the leading consumer of solar panels, will end up spending $156 billion by 2035, yet only delay global warming by one hour by the end of the century.
If Mr. Obama invested instead in low-carbon research and development, the dollars would go far (researchers are relatively cheap), and the result — maybe by 2040 — will be better solar panels that are cheaper than fossil fuels. Complex Kyoto-style political negotiations would become unnecessary because everyone, including China and India, will want to switch. The change will come because in large part Mr. Obama’s $150 billion will have made the technologies cheaper. Following Mr. Obama’s lead, countries should agree to spend 0.05% of their GDP on energy R&D — increasing the global R&D ten-fold, yet costing 10 times less than Kyoto. This could realistically and cost-effectively fix global warming in the medium term.
Harnessing the immense intellectual and scientific capital of the great nation of the United States to help solve the problems of the world in a rationally and morally defensible way is our true generational mission.
It will require true leadership, and the courage to fly in the face of much popular opinion — traits Mr.Obama has already exhibited in great measure.
Change is definitely needed. Focusing on investment in malnutrition and disease could do immense good at low cost, brandishing a world where healthier and stronger humans can take charge of their own lives and deal better with the many challenges of the future.
Global warming also needs strong leadership. Avoiding the lost decades and misused resources of a Kyoto approach would be paramount, and a focus on 0.05% of GDP R&D would fix long-term global warming at much lower cost and with much higher probability of success. This, truly, would be change we could believe in.
Copenhagen Business School professor Bjørn Lomborg is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus and author of “Cool It.”
Joe Duck 