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  • 1 min read

Interesting article about technology and risk

David Brooks of the New York Times writes about technology and risk, in the context of the drilling disaster in the Gulf:

"Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk." (fromDrilling for Certainty, NYT)

Good article, check it out.

  • 1 min read

We need a debt rating service rating service

Very meta. Who rates the rating services?

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal, an article today called Stocks Wind Down a Brutal May:

"Trading was especially volatile in the afternoon after Fitch Ratings lowered its rating on Spain's debt to AA+ from AAA, but said the country's outlook is stable. The downgrade came despite this week's passage of austerity measures by the Spanish government—a move that bulls had hoped would help the country avoid struggles similar to those of Greece." (from The Wall Street Journal)

And I thought, who is this Fitch Ratings Service, and can we trust them? Hmm. Who can I ask? I need a Dept Rating Service Rating Service.

  • 1 min read

MSFT and APPL

I saw this bit today: "Apple: Will Steve Balmer Show Up At The WWDC Keynote?". Interesting… It leads me to speculate in a different direction.

What if Google is distancing itself from Apple over competition between Android and iPhone? And so, what if in anticipation of this, Apple, knowing that it couldn't ALSO be in the business of creating a world class mapping service, decides to move native support of the iPhone mapping app from Google Maps to Microsoft Maps? Good theory?

  • 1 min read

Wall Street Traders == Hackers

Mark Cuban comes up with a very plausible analogy:

"The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market. (From Wall Street Insider)

The Sunday New York Times today suggests a similar conclusion but not the perfect analogy:

“The financial industry always finds ways to stay ahead of the
regulators,” says Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard.
“Whatever law they design today, if it’s not updated in 15 or so years,
it will be completely ineffective, completely irrelevant.” (From New York Times: Rule 1 - Make Money by Avoiding the Rules")

  • 1 min read

Poetry – “The Wasteland”

I'm ok with poetry - like it from time to time, but certainly not one of my main interests. Who knew that an hour lecture about a single poem, "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot could be absolutely gripping and fascinating. Maybe it's the genius of the lecturer, but even if you could care less about Poetry, this is a fascinating talk.

By the way it also is a great introduction to my current absolute favorite Podcast series, "Big Ideas", who present hour long lectures on all kinds of diverse topics, each by a great speaker who knows their topic, have prepared a well argued and compelling speech and then deliver it well. I recommend the series! (The Big Ideas web site, on the other hand, not so great…)

  • 1 min read

Sinking in a sea of documents

Lately because of one of my projects I am having to work my way through a bunch of long, semi structured documents containing things such as requests for proposals, government program reports, threat models and all kinds of things like that. They are in techno-legalese as I would call them: highly structured, with section numbering and 3, 4 and 5 levels of nesting. All in English, they look like the writers were getting paid by the word if you know what I mean.

I need a more efficient way to locate those paragraphs of nuggets that matter to me. So what I'd like is kind of a local document index/repository, that would allow me to have some standing queries and easily locate sections in documents that talk about my queries. Here's an example:

  • I'd like to load in 10 large PDF files, each of say 100 pages. Each PDF contains English text, formatted very nicely into paragraphs and sections.
  • I'd like to specify that I am interested in "blogging platforms", "weaknesses in Ruby", "localization and internationalization"
  • Ideally then look at a list that showed the section of text, the name of the document, and other information that seemed to be related to and/or include the words and phrases I specified.

I am sure something like this exists. I would call it something like document indexing, document comprehension or structured searching.

Any suggested leads or ideas?

  • 1 min read

Spy vs. Spy

Here's a great article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about espionage. Most of the content comes from a couple of books that he essentially is summarizing, but in his inimical style make more fun and fascinating:

He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?” (from: The New Yorker)

  • 1 min read

The funny thing about iPhone apps

So a friend of mine told me of his iPhone app, called Etude. He sung the praises, it sounds really cool to me. So I whipped out my iPhone and went to download the app. Wouldn't you know it costs $4.99. I turned to him and I said, hey, "it's not free!".

Yeah silly reaction, given how I've ranted myself about free and not-free. And here's the funnier part still. He said, Oh, yes, it's $3.00. I said, "No it's more like $5.00". He said, "Oh yes, we just raised the price." I gave him a blank look.

Here's the kicker. He said, "What if I give you $5.00 right now?".

I still didn't want to buy it… How does that make any sense?

  • 1 min read

The “T Word” – Trust

I am not sure exactly what this article about Trust means exactly, but it's thought provoking, don't you think?

"Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular measure is zero. When trust is non-zero (which is better, believe me) it is based on one of two methodologies — empiricism or transparency (the other T-word)." (from I, Cringely)