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 … redrawing [...]
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. So it is [...]
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. How long [...]
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 is analogous to talk [...]
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 [...]
The papers have recently been full of stories about yet another interesting pattern that researchers have gleaned from the data collected in the Framingham heart study. You can get a taste for the result by watching this annimation. What is shows is a social network (genetic and friends) changing over time. The primary focus of [...]
I’ve thought and read about cities for decades so it is extremely cool to encounter a new idea. I’m currently on vacation in Ithaca NY, and before hand I wandered into the Architecture library at work to pick up a book about the Finger Lakes region. That book was a disappointment, but nearby was a [...]
This is a very elegantly written posting. Most people are not aware of the depths of the argument that between the fine craft establishment and the dominate fine art elite. I used to think about that debate more; but I’m pleased to note something about it. Fine art is at it’s core about scarcity; fine [...]
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