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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Facinating article about a mast year in bamboo. Rat’s thrive and the following year people starve.
… Mizoram and Manipur … rats … army … teach … eradicate … flowering … bamboo … increase fertility rates … population explosion … crops … severe famines … the mautam in 1958-59 … triggered an insurgency … [...]
Search in a space requires poking around. In fact random search is the canonical strong method. Presuming you have time, can cover the search space, and recognize a solution it can solve any problem. Of course, drunken random walks are well known to result in repeatedly bumping into the same parking meter. [...]
Another good posting on inequality.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Oh, yummy. Some data on the distribution of torrent traffic. Not what I expected. Curious!
That’s at Guillaume Besset’s blog, he’s also a collector of highly skewed distributions: More…
He’s also working on a p2p jabber based wiki, Bouillon. I found this provocative: “… Everything you see in Bouillon is recommended by your friends [...]
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
As requests go “How long will it take?” is one of the tough ones. Taleb’s book Black Swan makes an thought provoking point about it. Like most of that book the underlying question is what statistical distribution the data is drawn. Naturally, that should color our expectations.
Some project durations are reasonable, Gaussian. [...]
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Income inequality effects firms and individuals. Rising inequality moves hand and hand with increasing skew in the distribution of firm size. For firms this goes by various cliched names, consolidation for example. When it becomes extreme then we talk of anti-trust. In this framing talk of what’s good for small business [...]
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Brad DeLong picks up some postings arguing that Google destroy’d the garden wall revenue model that the New York Times was using for Times Select and that others (e.g. the Financial Times and the Wall St. Journal) aren’t long for this world.
My first nit to pick here is that it wasn’t Google, but the tsunami [...]
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