Never seen anything this scale before.
Mushroom
5 Replies
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Gas Shortage
Sometimes there is too much news. The southeastern US is suffering from serious shortages of petrol. I wonder what it would take to get them to lower the speed limit; organize some ride sharing; provide some discounts on public transportation. I’m reminded of how in the depths of the recent and horiffic drought in that same region they were unable to organize a collective response to lower thier consumption. Small government at work.
Talk is Cheap
Clay Shirky spends a few pages (p286..290) in his book digging into how as it becomes easier to communicate with others value of each message declines. After a while everything looks like spam. He mentions some examples of ways to work around that. If a few thousand people show up for a political rally, if fans send a few tons of peanuts to the TV network, if activists send flowers the signal value is restored.
As far as I know there is not a good name for this. “Hard to forge signal” might be good name, but clearly somebody needs to come up with a good tag line for this.
All of which suggests to me that there is money to be made in a service that creates hard to forge signals for a cost. Such services exist. There are plenty. You can go to AbeBooks for example, order a book and send it to your recipient. You can go to postful.com and send them a color postcard or a letter. You can send tiny amounts of money thru paypal. There are quite a number of Facebook applications which allow you to spend a bit of money and tie it to your communications. It’s interesting that there is money to be made in this. Campaigns managers could use more services like the ones that helped the campaign to save the TV show Jericho, services to do the fufillment. Online petition sites could hold money in escrow until the issue is resolved.
Of course this is what those racks of gift cards are about in stores; and why some junk mail includes a gift or even a dollar bill.
I’d love more examples or exsiting services you can use to address this example and ideas for new services.
Hair Trigger and the Messy Desk
“… Compared with liberals and moderates, conservatives score significantly higher on psychological instruments designed to measure epistemic needs for order, structure, simplicity, certainty, and closure, and they score significantly higher on instruments designed to measure the intensity of existential concerns such as fear of death and perceptions of a dangerous world (…). In terms of basic personality dimensions, liberals (and leftists) score significantly higher on Openness to New Experiences, and their greater open-mindedness manifests itself in terms of creativity, curiosity, novelty, diversity, and interest in travel. By contrast, conservatives (and rightists) score higher on Conscientiousness, and they are generally more orderly, organized, duty-bound, conventional, and more likely to follow rules …” — <http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/jost2.pdf>
“… In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, where as individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats. …” — <http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/oxley.pdf>
My critique of the first guy’s work is that he is unsympathetic to one side of the dialect. That said his data appears pretty robust. For the second quote: given what we know about how plastic the brain is it seems difficult to reach any useful conclusion about causality. It is an actionable assortment of symptoms.
Token Ring & Local Talk?
I need a more modern version of this: bluetooth, USB, GPRS, G3, etc. etc., real log-log graph paper, and a pony.
Baleen
What was wrong with Agile?
That graphic was decorating a blog posting on another topic so I don’t know it’s original source. But it’s great, isn’t it? See also: Management Enthusiasms.
Don’t shoot or …
Just saying, I think I agree.
meanwhile
“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.” — John MaCain
