Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • Entitlement bargaining

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    1 min read

    James Surowiecki, explaining why it’s so difficult for legacy airlines to change, relays what social scientists Simon Gächter and Arno Riedl call entitlement bargaining… …for people in a negotiation, ideas of fairness are determined by what happened in the past. Once someone earns a particular cut, all the participants, on both sides of the bargaining…

  • Faster or Stronger

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    1 min read

    A shot from the preferences panel of Apple’s newest version of Chess… I assume the application works like Deep Blue, massively calculating moves in advance to choose a better position. So it can go faster but calculate fewer moves, or calculate more moves and become a stronger player, but at the expense of speed. It’s…

  • Passive Customer Profiling

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    1 min read

    Brett Lider on Building Sales Intelligence with Passive Customer Profiling: “There are a number of strategies for gathering maximum user profile information while effectively reducing the amount of user input. Outlined are four techniques for creating and building lasting and lucrative customer relationships.“

  • Croquet for Bush

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    1 min read

    The big NYC protests at the Republican National Convention have come and gone, but the best was away from the madding crowd, held by the satiric Billionaires for Bush: Billionaire Croquet Party 10am, Central Park, SE area of the Great Lawn 500,000 anti-Bush protesters will be barred from Central Park so that we can play…

  • What does your concept car look like?

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    1 min read

    The concept car is a phenomena of the automobile industry. At the beginning of the auto show season, manufacturers will show prototype cars of the future, vehicles that illustrate their best ideas and excite people about the future of the company. (Incidentally, there’s been an interesting trend, starting with the VW New Beetle, where manufacturers…

  • Which are safer, SUVs or cars?

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    1 min read

    “People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars,” says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “It’s largely a function of the rollover problem.“

  • Massaging social classification

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    1 min read

    There’s been some great conversation on social classification among myself, Jess, Stewart, Gene and Alex. I just realized that James already built a system that combines the best of social and constructed categories, for example by creating equivalent associations on the backend to correct for too many, similar categories. His design has the virtue of…

  • Discount for new pair.com hosting accounts

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    1 min read

    If you’re setting up a new domain name and hosting account, code PAIRNIC381 will discount the setup fees at Pairnic and Pair.com.

  • A foray into paper publishing

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    1 min read

    An essay I wrote in 1991, Music and Censorship, will be included in an upcoming Pearson textbook, Music and Culture. Even more surprising is my company, the likes of (beware shameless name dropping) Copland, Paglia, Quindlen, and Bloom. It is some of my better writing: though the argument is weak in sections my style hasn’t…

  • Photo Stamps

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    1 min read

    Down with aristocratic taxation, up with photo stamps.

  • Distributed classification through self-interest

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    3 min read

    Jess has a great comparison of faceted and social classification, go read it now. It reminds me of another solution to the metacrap problem: distributed classification. It’s an approach I’ve seen in my last two big taxonomy-driven projects: a financial services firm’s website and a retailer’s CMS. In the case of the retailer, they have…

  • Blather

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    1 min read

    Blather “is words. bunches of words, strewn about in a twisty tangly web of pontification, insight and nonsensical delight.” Exposing the intertwingularity of language. I used to love the smell of freshly-mowed grass. It smelled like barbecues at dusk. Mosquitoes, kids with chicken greased fingers butterflies, and Spring. The hot sun on my freckled face.

  • Ted Kooser

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    1 min read

    Ted Kooser was just named the new U.S. Poet Laureate. Here is A Happy Birthday: This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride…

  • Bob has been given two keys…

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    2 min read

    What is a Digital Signature? is a fun little introduction to digital signatures by David Youd. Unfortunately the system is generally hard to understand, which I think is the reason it hasn’t caught on more widely (who wouldn’t encrypt the occasional email if they could?). Since I’m on a mental model kick lately, I can’t…

  • A coffee education

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    0 min read