One of the seeming puzzles about identity is how tags placed upon people don’t work as one might hope. For example if I tag somebody as “short,” the act can be many things: accurate, insulting, invasive, diagnostic, etc. You can’t treat the act of tagging independent from the context. You need to know a lot [...]
This is rolling on the floor funny: ” … Theorists love the model of job market signaling . In this model agents perform a costly effort which produces nothing useful. The only point is that it is less costly to the able. Thus an equilibrium exists in which the able signal their ability by performing [...]
Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport. $157 per adult. I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean. A place people go for the weekend; well they used to. The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have [...]
The HR department is administering the loyalty oath. This is annual event. We are requested to testify, via a form, to all our professional affiliations. To a degree I am, of course, joking. This invasion of our personal privacy is motivated by three concerns: concerns about possible conflict of interest (i.e. that the best interests [...]
Solving coordination problems, in this case the internet identity problem, always involves leveraging some existing coordination framework. For example the PGP signing scheme leverages the acquaintance network and the signers are encouraged to leverage the government issued identity cards. For example my local library asks to see a utility bill, and thus leverages the account [...]
One of life’s puzzles is how to elicit desired behaviors. Managers, parents, leaders, what have you try out various schemes to address this puzzle. I sometimes characterise this as thrashing about looking for the right lever to pull. It’s not uncommon to see people deeply committed to a particular lever; metric management for example. The [...]
Saturday, January 27, 2007
I once did a consulting gig for a huge bank and learned that thier international funds transfer network would grind to a crawl each May Day. All over the world workers would take a day off and capitalism would grind to a halt. If you work in middle management in any large firm you learn [...]
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
DAIC, which sounds like Daisy, is one of those BSchool/Psychology-Today frameworks I picked up at some point in my work life. It’s mnemonic for four roles that employee’s might play in the process of reaching a decision: Driver Approver Informed Consultant Since entrepreneurs ran the organization inside of which I learned this particular framework they [...]
Friday, December 15, 2006
Martian speaks wisely about why open voice networks aren’t a technology problem but a social entrepenural one. At the same time he is also talking about a minor aspect of why internet identity isn’t a technology problem. These days I find myself thinking that internet identity is hard because the gap between people’s intuitions [...]
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Thought provoking: my morning mail reports that the ID card servers at the university are down and that this effects “card readers” across campus. Reminds one that hubs are a target for assorted criminal activity. I wonder what boundry crossings people are discovering they can’t make right now? Meanwhile I’m told we citizens get our [...]
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