Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Match making is at the heart of most middleman functions. The buyer and seller work thru the middleman to improve the chance of closing a transactions. Both sides reveal information to the match maker who then puzzles out if a deal can be closed. The negotiation literature is full of examples where the negotiations fail, [...]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
We know how skewed the distribution of wealth and income are. But I suspect that if you had data about the flux of advertising dollars you would discover that those dollars are targeted disproportionately at tail of the distribution. I gather that it is well known that if you look at the ads in a [...]
This is very good: How Complex Systems Fail (pdf) – hat tip to John Allspaw via his blog. I particularly like the swipe at root cause analysis. This is a nice complement to the wonderful book Normal Accidents, which I mention here. Update: via @gully this cartoon is great too, I’ve added one frame [...]
Sunday, November 15, 2009
This is a post about why gerrymandering might not be as unethical as it appears; or maybe it’s about the hidden agenda of those who argue against it. Each time you encounter a highly skewed (power-law) distribution the population spread out on the long tail can be assumed to suffer from a severe coordination problem. [...]
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Having spent far too much time thinking, writing, and attempting to bootstrap some two sided network businesses I’m impressed by this slogan from Google’s efforts to become the hub of bookville: “buy anywhere, read anywhere”, very clever.
RNA viruses may well be the ultimate r-selected species. The life cycle of an RNA virus includes a few steps. Infecting the cell, coopting the machinery of the cell, making copies of its self, assemble those copies into viral particles. Then the offspring need to escaping the cell, avoid the immune system, and find a [...]
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I’m glad to see that somebody is taking my advice.
I’ve been trying to think about the financial structures around processes that exhibit highly skewed distributions. The insurance industry is a great place to find the examples. We buy insurance to hedge against the small but awful. Most of our houses don’t burn down, but it does happen. The chance of a fire is scale [...]
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Michael Heller’s new book looks interesting. Heller was, for the last decade, been working to introduce a bit of balance into the discussion down stream from the idea that goes by the name “Tragedy of the Commons.” He originally called his idea “The Tragedy of the Anticommons.” Those who public goods coming to tragic ends [...]
This talk by Clay Shirky is a basicly the first bit of his book performed live. He cut from the book the suggestion that the phase transition we are going thru is going to lead to chaos. I don’t recall hearing before the delightful idea that Institution rely of carrots and sticks, but that if [...]
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