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2012

  • 1 min read

Selling course notes: a market solution

Should it be ok for students to take notes during a class and turn them into a marketable product that they make money on?

If I am teaching the same class again this year, students could buy the course notes and potentially do better, or learn more. That's a good thing, right?

However is it fair to me? After all these students are becoming multi- millionaires by reselling my work, my intellectual property. Yeah right.

One professor has an amusing solution to this dilemma, but I think it still misses the point;

Precisely. Besides which, I've figured out a much more fun solution to the problem: I'm going to buy some of these note sets and outlines being sold for my classes. I'll go through them and find all the mistakes. And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick. (from Professor Bainbridge.com)

  • 1 min read

Superbowl Social Media

Here's a really interesting article about how the Superbowl used Social Media to enhance the experience:

"An exclusive, in-depth look into the Super Bowl’s first ever social media command center, the folks who ran it, and how the convergence of technology and people created the ultimate online Super Bowl experience." (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

The article goes into each of the four missions/goals they set out:: Safety, Service, Capture the experience, Amplification. Interesting that safety is number one. What they say:

"With an anticipated 150,000 visitors to descend on Indianapolis, a main focus of the social media command center is to ensure public safety. They will monitor social media channels for traffic situations, parking recommendations, and anything that could be considered suspicious behavior or malevolent. Additionally, should a crisis situation present itself, the command center will disseminate information for Homeland Security and public safety command centers." (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

And thanks to Melissa for pointing me to that article. Melissa is VP Engineering at Awareness who gets very high praise int he article:

"Awareness, Inc.€“ After test driving many different social monitoring systems, Raidious chose Awareness Inc's Social Media Marketing Hub for publishing, monitoring and analyzing conversation streams. Raidious chose Awareness, Inc because of its capabilities and user interface…" (from Why the Super Bowl's Mission Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown)

  • 2 min read

Elections: Hand counts are NOT the gold standard

There is always a good deal of controversy surrounding elections and in particular, whether an election is 'fair' or not. As I have been working on a project with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation I've been exposed to this from time to time.

This controversy arises in many different guises. There is a group that is absolutely against using computers in any way shape or form to run elections. Given that we need to count the votes of some 200 Million people in this country alone, it seems far fetched to try to do that without a computer involved anywhere.

Others say that the act of looking at a ballot and determining the votes cast should only done by people, working in well organized teams with carefully designed procedures. They refer to this as the 'gold standard ' of counting, the only way to be really sure that we are counting votes correctly.

That is not quite as far fetched. But also not self evident. Here comes a study that tries to rigorously measure the error rates of hand counted ballots. They say:

'"It is probably impossible to completely eliminate errors in hand counting of ballots," Byrne said. "However, there are new auditing methods that capitalize on advanced statistical procedures that can help ensure that final election results better match what is actually on the ballots. It is important that we become aware of the limitations of current methods and develop alternative ways to improve the accuracy of election results."' (from Rice University)

The bottom line result that they found was that "Hand counting of votes in post election audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent." You can easily recall recent elections that were decided by less than 2 percent, right?

Bruce Schneier (a highly respected cryptography and security expert) says:

"All voting systems have nonzero error rates. This doesn't surprise technologists, but does surprise the general public. There's a myth out there that elections are perfectly accurate, down to the single vote. They're not. If the vote is within a few percentage points, they're likely a statistical tie. (The problem, of course, is that elections must produce a single winner.)" (see Bruce Schneier's Blog)

  • 2 min read

Software Developer Meat Market

An interesting article in Forbes about Software Developers and Development in general, The Rise of Developeronomics. While here and there he is promoting old chestnuts which may or may not be true there is a core argument which is quite intriguing. It goes something like this:

  1. All companies are becoming software companies, meaning they are driven by software whatever their business actually is.
  2. Hence a key resource to a successful business is an effective, efficient and scalable capability to create innovative computer driven systems. Programmers are scarce.
  3. Hence the way to invest in the future is to cultivate great and excellent developers who believe in you, are willing to follow your vision and will commit to your projects.

Sometimes I wonder whether business writers come up with a two paragraph insight or story idea and bulk it up into a 3 page article, or whether I am just not appreciating their craft. In any event, Venkatesh Rao writes:

"Investing in good developers is such a good bet at the moment, that if you have money and you happen to find a talented developer who seems to like you and wants to work with you, you should give him/her your money to build something, anything, even if you have no really good product ideas (those are cheap; I’ll sell you a dozen for a dollar)." (from The Rise of Developeronomics)

Wow. And a little further on he warns:

"In what follows, I am deliberately going to talk about the developers like they are products in a meat market. For practical purposes, they are, since the vast majority of them haven’t found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage. Which means others find a way to do so. In capitalism, every human is either a capitalist, somebody else’s capital, or economically worthless. Today, this abstract point specifically translates to: people who can invest in developers, developers, and everybody else. (from The Rise of Developeronomics)

Read the whole of The Rise of Developeronomics.

  • 1 min read

Customer vs. Consultant: Excellent advice

From an article called "Effective Customer Consultant Relationships":

"As a customer, how can you get the most out of your consultants? As a consultant, how can you deliver what your customers really want? I have been on both sides of this relationship and experienced both successful and unsuccessful results. In this post, I will go through the typical aspects of these types of relationships and identify action items that I have used to forge effective and lasting customer consultant relationships for both parties." (from "Effective Customer Consultant Relationships")

If you are a tech consultant or are thinking of hiring one, this article has some excellent advice.

  • 1 min read

Is your software developer any good?

Are you thinking about hiring a software developer to build your system? Here are "8 Things You Ought to Know If You Do Not Know Anything About Hiring a Software Developer". He says:

"I did not come to this industry with a software background. I studied math, physics, business, then finance. But over the past 12 years or so, I have learned quite a bit about how to pick a software… “friend”. So let me share with you 8 things I would want to know if I was starting afresh." (from "8 Things You Ought to Know If You Do Not Know Anything About Hiring a Software Developer")

Can I be your friend?

  • 1 min read

Is Amazon using Wish List entries to pre-position inventory?

This happened: I had a book on my Amazon wish list for several months.

Yesterday , I finally placed the order at around 3pm and today the book is in my hands , just about 24 hours later. And this is with regular Prime shipping, which is supposedly two days.

I wonder. Amazon is pretty clever. What if they used the presence of a book on wish lists as a clue to where to inventory the books, in effect pre-positioning them closer to the probable shipping destination. Wouldn't that be clever?

Of course a book on the wish list may or may not be ordered. And also, you wouldn't preposition a single book in Massachusetts because Pito might decide to order it.

But let's say you forecast that you are likely going to be selling 100 copies of this book in the next 30 days - it was a fairly geeky book, so not one that would sell in huge numbers. You might put 50 copies in a warehouse on the west coast and 50 in one on the east coast.

Or you might come up with a probability calculation of where in the US any particular book or category of book would be ordered from - City by City, State by State or something like that. And when you received inventory from the publishers you could distribute it according to this forecast.

Or it was just a fluke … Still I am pretty impressed.

  • 1 min read

What is one life worth?

A fascinating article, which is hard to disagree with, although the conclusion is a little counter-intuitive:

"Imagine that the captain of a $5 billion aircraft carrier let his ship sink rather than allow seven volunteers to attempt a repair, on the grounds that the odds favoring their survival were only 50 to 1. Such an officer would be court-martialed and regarded with universal contempt both by his brother officers and by society at large." (from How Much is an Astronaut's Life Worth?)

If you agree with this logic, it would be hard to argue with the case made in the article, that the top priority of a space mission should be Mission Success not Human Safety.

The article also very nicely puts a value on 'excess' expenditures for safety in space exploration by looking at how many lives could have been saved if those funds were spent on, for example, healthcare or immunizations.

  • 1 min read

Funny: Shit they say in Sillycon Valley

Funny insider lingo. I am sure you'd be able to do a similar video for Washington DC (politics) and L.A. (movies) and Kendal Square (Biotech). My word is computers. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR8zFANeBGQ]