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 [...]
Sitting in the small Vietnamese restaurant in Western Massachusetts an ominous dark cloud slowly delivered one of those marvelous downpours that sometimes end hot summer days. For the woman at the next table the sky was bright one moment; the next the windows were sheeted with water. A young man walked across the square, hood [...]
I have sighted a new urban myth: Electric heating is cheaper than oil heat! Here in Boston people heat with both gas and oil, and the cost per unit of heat between the two has diverged rapidly over the last few years. Those who heat with oil are looking for ways out of their plight. [...]
This is a long, interesting, carefully written article by Alex Kotlowitz about a program to change community behaviors in service of decreasing violence. It is nice to see a discussion of how to reduce polarization. There is so much entertainment value in polarization that the media revel in it. It is further to the article’s [...]
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