I was about as bitter as you were, until I heard about Behavioral Economics, which uses the results of *scientific* tests in psychology and human behavior as the basis for (or at least a counterbalance to) economic theory; this stands in contrast to traditional economic theory, which is based on the idea that rational self-interest will cause markets to function perfectly, and will, in a larger sense, reroute funds to those who would put it best to use.
Dan Ariely gives a good overview of Behavioral Economics in his book, "Predictably Irrational," in which he describes how the conventional wisdom often is completely wrong, both through anecdotes and descriptions of rigorous scientific experiments:
http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061854549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252910997&sr=8-1
So while in theory it would be *possible* to improve financial models by incorporating lessons from Behavioral Economics, you would have to trust that those with the power to influence markets would correctly apply them. And that's a big "if." If the misuse of the Gaussian Copula to price mortgage-backed securities is any indication of private industry's ability to take the ball and run with it in the wrong direction, then it'll take more than just good science to save us...
On closer inspection, it looks like the author himself submitted the story to Digg. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? On the one hand, it seems like the same brand of shameless self-promotion that accompanies the idea of submitting an article on one's own blog to Digg or Slashdot. On the other hand, it's a recognition -- almost a concession -- to the distributive power of websites like Digg and Slashdot over BBC's website.
In the future, will all news on the Internet need to go to consumers from content providers via filters? If so, then the ones who control those filters will have a lot of influence on the attitudes of the public. Let's see where this goes.
Did anyone else notice that the article references the Digg comments thread that's associated with this story? I find this extremely interesting -- almost a validation of Digg by BBC, a major media outlet; also, a major validation of the BBC, by a major user-driven web community.
Of course, I found this story via Slashdot, so there's no reason for major media organizations to NOT be aware of/reference the methods of "Web 2.0" in their online articles.
I know your intention is to show that most people would recognize a kitten, but I was speaking about the method in general. Sure, everyone knows what a kitten is, but to visually identify a kitten, or any other animal, depending on the context, may not be so cut and dried as you think. (I'm not a moron, and yet I had trouble with the foxes, as I described.)
It's not always a matter of needing to "get outside," either -- rhis method of authentication suffers from the same problems as the text-recognition methods. After all, visually speaking, how do you differentiate between a "kitten" and a "cat?" Is it any easier than differentiating between a "number one" and "lowercase letter L" in a Courier-like font? KittenAuth works if you use wildly different animals and ask the user to compare -- like, pick a kitten from among a series of pictures of reptiles.
(And no, I never had a kitten I was a kid, though I can clearly recognize them. Feel free to continue discriminating against me, though.)
There's a geographic/cultural/educational problem with KittenAuth -- what if you're not familiar with kittens? Or foxes? What if you've never seen real cattle? These situations are not as rare as you might think, and certainly not invalid. I personally would have had a little trouble identifying the foxes on the KittenAuth page, were they not highlighted with a red border.
I think it's a step in the right direction, though. It's an interesting insight into what human memes can be considered universal.
This commenter is an AC, but it's true, to a point. I don't want to dis IT as a whole, but to be completely and utterly honest, you don't have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to get your foot into the door of the IT industry. A lot of people are complaining about how they get much worse service from India, but my experience has been the exact opposite. Most of you are really complaining about the obvious poor service. Many people easily forget the excellent service they've gotten from people in India -- or weren't aware of the fact that the service was in India at all.
Some people in this discussion thread are oblivious to the fact that Indian companies (or global companies operating in India) do employ people who communicate well, and are perfectly capable. If you haven't gotten good service from India, that's just your luck.
This is a good idea for some companies, and a bad idea for some companies. Don't be so quick to assume that every company that implements such a program is instantly going to have all their systems go down in flames. Some companies will have good experiences, and some may have bad experiences. We're seeing comments in both directions in this very discussion thread.
I'm sure that companies that outsource their network administration have an emergency lifeline in case of severe problems. It would probably be most cost-effective to have your main network administration in India, but have a local company (which contracts its services to multiple companies) only for problems that require a physical presence.
However, if your company's system experiences truly earth-shattering complications on a regular basis, maybe you ought to be outsourcing your network administration to Indian professionals who offer a tenfold talent-per-dollar increase over your existing resources. If nothing else, it's a better value for the 300 days out of the year when all the servers need is some remote babysitting.
Isn't it currently illegal to perform wiretaps on American citizens without a court order? This "need for a court order" doesn't seem to be the rock-solid check against power abuse that it's expected to be.
Don't worry. I'm sure that the need for a court order would have been respected in this case too.
Your view must be very distorted if you believe that members of the IT industry are, on average, far more intelligent than the members of other professions. Too many people posting on this thread seem to think that being in IT or being a software developer makes you a god among men. You really need to take a step back and look at what you really do for a living, what impact it really makes on your industry, and then compare it to other professions. If you have an accurate view of what it takes to cut it as a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, even a nurse, you may think twice.
You make the assumption that most documentation out there is well-written and easy to understand, without making hundreds of obscure references or alienating new users with obtuse language. The reality is that most people who write documentation, unfortunately, especially for OSS, are not good writers, good speakers, or good teachers.
If you find a particular piece of documentation useful, that's great. It served its purpose. But keep in mind that you and the author might be on the same unnaturally inhuman wavelength, and that "real" people will have a bit of difficulty deciphering the author's meaning.
This may be pretty anal of me, but...
on
Google Calendar
·
· Score: 1
I think that one positive result of calling this service Google Calendar instead of Gcal (or something similar) is that maybe people will start spelling "calendar" correctly. Of course, I could be wrong...
What about portable gaming devices?
on
The Future of the PDA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Compare the installed base of PDAs (either by model, by manufacturer, or by the class of devices as a whole) to the installed base of portable gaming devices (GameBoy, et. al.), and you might see *one* possible direction for the PDA.
Previously, games were popular on a PDA, but the limitations (speed, memory, battery life, etc.) made it evident that portable gaming on a PDA wasn't enough to keep the PDA craze alive as we knew it. The Nintendo DS, though, is already starting to look more and more like a PDA every day: there's a homebrew organizer (http://www.youngmx.com/?loc=ndsdev/DSOrganize), a Linux project (http://dslinux.org/), and even a game that features puzzles aimed at/successful with older people (http://www.nintendo.com/gamemini?gameid=tYVqJgro- KG6QL_mMbXFoQTkQIzgi9nU). The fact that it has touch/stylus input and 802.11b is enough to get one's mental gears turning at the possible confluence of a gaming idiom and personal information management idiom in a single device.
Perhaps the change will come from the other direction. As millions and millions more Nintendo DS units (and Sony PSP units, for that matter) are sold, we may get a population of generally older, more sophisticated portable gamers who demand a bit more functionality from their handheld devices -- the very same functionality that a stripped-down, basic PDA would have provided. Instead of a feature-rich-but-mostly-underused PDA that can play games, we might have a gaming-device-that-also-holds-my-calendar that can read e-mails. And I guarantee you that there are more GameBoys out there than Palms.
Slashdot Mirror
I was about as bitter as you were, until I heard about Behavioral Economics, which uses the results of *scientific* tests in psychology and human behavior as the basis for (or at least a counterbalance to) economic theory; this stands in contrast to traditional economic theory, which is based on the idea that rational self-interest will cause markets to function perfectly, and will, in a larger sense, reroute funds to those who would put it best to use. Dan Ariely gives a good overview of Behavioral Economics in his book, "Predictably Irrational," in which he describes how the conventional wisdom often is completely wrong, both through anecdotes and descriptions of rigorous scientific experiments: http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061854549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252910997&sr=8-1 So while in theory it would be *possible* to improve financial models by incorporating lessons from Behavioral Economics, you would have to trust that those with the power to influence markets would correctly apply them. And that's a big "if." If the misuse of the Gaussian Copula to price mortgage-backed securities is any indication of private industry's ability to take the ball and run with it in the wrong direction, then it'll take more than just good science to save us...
I can't believe the site's down already. This means that Slaashdotters are actually reading TFA. Who knew?
On closer inspection, it looks like the author himself submitted the story to Digg. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? On the one hand, it seems like the same brand of shameless self-promotion that accompanies the idea of submitting an article on one's own blog to Digg or Slashdot. On the other hand, it's a recognition -- almost a concession -- to the distributive power of websites like Digg and Slashdot over BBC's website.
In the future, will all news on the Internet need to go to consumers from content providers via filters? If so, then the ones who control those filters will have a lot of influence on the attitudes of the public. Let's see where this goes.
Did anyone else notice that the article references the Digg comments thread that's associated with this story? I find this extremely interesting -- almost a validation of Digg by BBC, a major media outlet; also, a major validation of the BBC, by a major user-driven web community.
Of course, I found this story via Slashdot, so there's no reason for major media organizations to NOT be aware of/reference the methods of "Web 2.0" in their online articles.
I know your intention is to show that most people would recognize a kitten, but I was speaking about the method in general. Sure, everyone knows what a kitten is, but to visually identify a kitten, or any other animal, depending on the context, may not be so cut and dried as you think. (I'm not a moron, and yet I had trouble with the foxes, as I described.)
It's not always a matter of needing to "get outside," either -- rhis method of authentication suffers from the same problems as the text-recognition methods. After all, visually speaking, how do you differentiate between a "kitten" and a "cat?" Is it any easier than differentiating between a "number one" and "lowercase letter L" in a Courier-like font? KittenAuth works if you use wildly different animals and ask the user to compare -- like, pick a kitten from among a series of pictures of reptiles.
(And no, I never had a kitten I was a kid, though I can clearly recognize them. Feel free to continue discriminating against me, though.)
There's a geographic/cultural/educational problem with KittenAuth -- what if you're not familiar with kittens? Or foxes? What if you've never seen real cattle? These situations are not as rare as you might think, and certainly not invalid. I personally would have had a little trouble identifying the foxes on the KittenAuth page, were they not highlighted with a red border.
I think it's a step in the right direction, though. It's an interesting insight into what human memes can be considered universal.
This commenter is an AC, but it's true, to a point. I don't want to dis IT as a whole, but to be completely and utterly honest, you don't have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to get your foot into the door of the IT industry. A lot of people are complaining about how they get much worse service from India, but my experience has been the exact opposite. Most of you are really complaining about the obvious poor service. Many people easily forget the excellent service they've gotten from people in India -- or weren't aware of the fact that the service was in India at all.
Some people in this discussion thread are oblivious to the fact that Indian companies (or global companies operating in India) do employ people who communicate well, and are perfectly capable. If you haven't gotten good service from India, that's just your luck.
This is a good idea for some companies, and a bad idea for some companies. Don't be so quick to assume that every company that implements such a program is instantly going to have all their systems go down in flames. Some companies will have good experiences, and some may have bad experiences. We're seeing comments in both directions in this very discussion thread.
I'm sure that companies that outsource their network administration have an emergency lifeline in case of severe problems. It would probably be most cost-effective to have your main network administration in India, but have a local company (which contracts its services to multiple companies) only for problems that require a physical presence.
However, if your company's system experiences truly earth-shattering complications on a regular basis, maybe you ought to be outsourcing your network administration to Indian professionals who offer a tenfold talent-per-dollar increase over your existing resources. If nothing else, it's a better value for the 300 days out of the year when all the servers need is some remote babysitting.
Isn't it currently illegal to perform wiretaps on American citizens without a court order? This "need for a court order" doesn't seem to be the rock-solid check against power abuse that it's expected to be.
Don't worry. I'm sure that the need for a court order would have been respected in this case too.
Your view must be very distorted if you believe that members of the IT industry are, on average, far more intelligent than the members of other professions. Too many people posting on this thread seem to think that being in IT or being a software developer makes you a god among men. You really need to take a step back and look at what you really do for a living, what impact it really makes on your industry, and then compare it to other professions. If you have an accurate view of what it takes to cut it as a lawyer, an engineer, a doctor, even a nurse, you may think twice.
You make the assumption that most documentation out there is well-written and easy to understand, without making hundreds of obscure references or alienating new users with obtuse language. The reality is that most people who write documentation, unfortunately, especially for OSS, are not good writers, good speakers, or good teachers.
If you find a particular piece of documentation useful, that's great. It served its purpose. But keep in mind that you and the author might be on the same unnaturally inhuman wavelength, and that "real" people will have a bit of difficulty deciphering the author's meaning.
I think that one positive result of calling this service Google Calendar instead of Gcal (or something similar) is that maybe people will start spelling "calendar" correctly. Of course, I could be wrong...
Compare the installed base of PDAs (either by model, by manufacturer, or by the class of devices as a whole) to the installed base of portable gaming devices (GameBoy, et. al.), and you might see *one* possible direction for the PDA. Previously, games were popular on a PDA, but the limitations (speed, memory, battery life, etc.) made it evident that portable gaming on a PDA wasn't enough to keep the PDA craze alive as we knew it. The Nintendo DS, though, is already starting to look more and more like a PDA every day: there's a homebrew organizer (http://www.youngmx.com/?loc=ndsdev/DSOrganize), a Linux project (http://dslinux.org/), and even a game that features puzzles aimed at/successful with older people (http://www.nintendo.com/gamemini?gameid=tYVqJgro- KG6QL_mMbXFoQTkQIzgi9nU). The fact that it has touch/stylus input and 802.11b is enough to get one's mental gears turning at the possible confluence of a gaming idiom and personal information management idiom in a single device.
Perhaps the change will come from the other direction. As millions and millions more Nintendo DS units (and Sony PSP units, for that matter) are sold, we may get a population of generally older, more sophisticated portable gamers who demand a bit more functionality from their handheld devices -- the very same functionality that a stripped-down, basic PDA would have provided. Instead of a feature-rich-but-mostly-underused PDA that can play games, we might have a gaming-device-that-also-holds-my-calendar that can read e-mails. And I guarantee you that there are more GameBoys out there than Palms.