Just an FYI, since apparently the Internet doesn’t know this yet.

You currently can not use Migration Assistant to export your setup from Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard) to OS X Lion (10.8),  as soon as the assistant on Lion makes contact with the one on Leopard it announces that “You need to update Migration Assistant on you other Mac.”    Meanwhile, back on Leopard, software update confidently reports that no updates are available.

Apple phone support finally reported that the Leopard update to Migration Assistant is TBD, and they are snail mailing me a Snow Leopard upgrade.

Look at that!

Isn’t that amazing!  Before a half a million+ cases every year!

More here – including: “In the late 19th century, Stockholm was the site of a massive smallpox outbreak. A combination of religious and personal rights-based objections resulted in a drop in vaccination rates to less than half of that of the rest of Sweden.”

One of the ways to make your name in the social sciences is to publish a simple experiment that illustrates how your experimental subjects appear to be incompetent. The pinnacle of this tradition, of course, is Milgram’s experiment showing that people will torture other people entirely because an guy in a white coat asks them to. (see also this example).

One reason these experiments have such traction is the way they confirm our deep seated presumption that other people don’t have it together as much as we do.  I, of course, do not suffer from this confirmation bias; and so each of these experiments is a body blow to my own self esteem.  Other people, less self aware than I, find these stories entertaining.  For example they would probably enjoy the book I’m reading: Kathryn  Schulz’s Being Wrong; but I find it frightening and a little depressing.

Last night’s scary bit reports on a lovely experiment done by Emily Pronin and reported in “You Don’t Know Me,  But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.”  Since we are not members of the right club, so you and I can’t actually read the paper (my readers, see comments, found it (pdf) – go readers!)  But I trust the summary given in Schulz’s book.

Pronin’s experiment is very simple.  She gave people a sheet of paper with some words listed, but the words had missing characters, for example “b__k”, and asked them to fill in the blanks quickly with what ever work came to mind.  And then she collected the sheets from N people.

The she asked people to look at the sheets and say something about the person who filled it out.  That task implicitly presumes that if somebody filled in “book” it tells you something about them, compared to say “bank.”  And sure enough people say stuff: “He’s a scholar.”  “She’s concerned about money.”

So what happens when they get to their own sheet?  “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all … random completions.”  Schulz’s book reproduces a table from the original study showing the conclusions that X and Y reached from one or another sheet where X had filled out the sheet.  Here are two examples:

X1 writes “I’m almost convinced that these are not at all revealing.” while Y1 had no trouble seeing deeply into X’s soul “He doesn’t seem to read too much since the natural (to me) conpletion of B__K would be ‘book’  BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of the mind.”

X2 write “I think word completions are limited in this ability [to reveal anything about the subject].”  And Y2 finds them quite revealing: “He seems to focus on competition and winning.  This person could be an athlete or someone who is very competitive.”

All I can say it that I find it deeply sad to realize that everybody else is a Y.  And,  I’d like to thank all the little people for helping to make me the not-Y that I am today.

Bad graphic, interesting info…

We all have our preferred way of framing up problems and their solutions.  If your a math guy you build a mathy model.  If your an Engineer you throw some tech at it.  If your a political actor your try to shift the Overton Window.  If your a capitalist manager your likely to lean toward financial incentives.

And we all have our preferred frameworks.  Capitalism, religion, community, science, what ever.  Recently I overheard a somebody opining that private enterprise has been far more innovative than government.  A statement to which I had which I had multiple strong negative reactions.  Such as “you would think that!” or “Of course, that by design.”  But no matter.

Here is an interesting list from the CDC of what they consider the 10 greatest successes of public health in the 20th century.

• Vaccination
• Motor-vehicle safety
• Safer workplaces
• Control of infectious diseases
• Decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke
• Safer and healthier foods
• Healthier mothers and babies
• Family planning
• Fluoridation of drinking water
• Recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard

It seems to me, that when we talk of major acts of innovation those deserve to be at the table, as benchmarks.

Mike Konczal has an interesting posting about what becomes of people who are unemployed.  I liked most diplomatic observation: “from what I’m seeing the whole idea of dropping out of the labor force from unemployment is completely under-theorized in the literature.”

I naive model might assign each person into one of three categories: employed, unemployed, other.  The first two are the labor pool; and other includes prisoners, children, the retired, the idle rich, etc. etc.  In this game the dice has three sides, in each round of the game people stand some probability of changing category.  So how is the dice weighted?  It’s worth pausing at this point and asking yourself; what would guess?

This charts shows that.

It shows the chance an unemployed person will move into one of the other two states. Each round of the game is 3 months, i.e. a quarter.  For example in 1967, the left most data point, an unemployed person stood a 45% chance of becoming employed, and a 34% chance of dropping out of the labor pool.  The third outcome isn’t shown; the i.e. the 100-45-34 = 21% chance that in the next round of the game he’d still be in the pool.

It’s amazing to me how close these two lines are.  You don’t do much damage to generalize: people exit unemployment out both exits with a 50/50 probability.  If you want a better generalization you have to look at the size of the gap; he has another chart.  You’ll notice those lines cross, but only once.

If your interested in Network Effects this article from the San Francisco chronicle is worth reading.  It outline a few ways you might be able to tackle an incumbent firm that owns the natural monopoly of a strong network effect.

First they might screw up – which we call “bad execution.”  This is the usual story for how Facebook managed to take the territory that other earlier social networks had already colonized.  Friendster and Orkut are both fine examples of failure of execution.  This has other names: lack of vision, lack of follow, etc. etc.    I believe that one subspecies of failed execution is the lack of necessary complements – it is damn hard to build a huge internet business without access to the resources that Silicon Valley has and nobody else does.

Secondly it is possible that the current entrant hasn’t managed to cover the ground; in which case you can grab up real estate and later displace them.  I suspect that for this theory to work out you need to seize higher ground.  Thus Facebook’s happen stance initial market – ivy league schools – turned out to be higher ground that MySpace’s Los Angeles party scene (plus bands & fans).

The third is an old one – vertical specialization.  Right from day one people have presumed eBay would face serious competitive threats from more narrowly focused auction sites: antiques say, or fashion, cars, etc.  While on balance this tactic does not make sense for eBay it might make sense for other networks biz.  And, it goes both ways.  For example is there a social gaming business that can exist outside of Facebook – taking traffic away from them – or on the other hand – are all the massive multiplayer games going to collapse into Facebook?

The fourth segment of the article is mostly about Group-on and it’s based on a bogus strawman.  Nuff said.  And again they don’t seem to understand how Gilt Groupe is a network effect business of a slightly different color.

At one point in the article tries to split hairs about scale effects.  They argue that Google’s search get’s better because they can learn by observing the behaviors of their crowd of users.  I don’t see that.  It is a common delusion – in my experience – that the folks who run these network businesses believe that their fine execution with it’s deep craft knowledge is the primary cause of their success rather than just a necessary part of avoiding the failure of bad execution.

Many wags like to argue the CraigsList is, sooner or later, going to fail due to an or all of these reasons.  Possibly, but lordy that prediction is a perennial.  Anyhow, the article contains this delightful slide enumerating various attempts to seize some of that territory using vertical specialization (click to enlarge).  Of course, the same chart could be made for eBay’s categories.

Gosh that looks like a roll up waiting to happen.  I’m happy that the LinkIn IPO is going to make that a lot harder.

though tacky, this was fun…

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This is an  amazingly thought provoking technique for collecting and presenting survey results.  It is just better.  Imagine, if you will, how the usual newspaper headline would summarize this data.

You could use this to survey employee moral.  Marketing people could use this to survey customers.  I find the comments very interesting; again, imagine the damage the usual newspaper article would do to that diversity of opinion.

There are lots of second order things you could do.  For example, thumbs up/down on the comments.  It would be fascinating to watch the ebb and flow over time.

You could also allow people to select ovals rather than points.

Please, somebody, add this to your survey taking site.

Pretty amazing chart this:

It shows the probability of a prisoner being granted parole depending on when during the day his parole hearing takes place. The dotted lines indicate when the parole board to a break for food.

Ok, now:  Schedule your next meeting.