I do love a big picture.

Taken from this posting.  Click for full size.

I’m sad that public service isn’t on the chart.

I’m surprise that wealth seeking is missing.  Also there is something about diversity in the Bay Area that’s missing, but exactly how to frame it is hard.  Where is social?  Where is Biotech?

The 60s and 70s are so outside of many people’s experience at this point; incomprehensible and misunderstood really.  At this point doesn’t burning man get a little box somewhere?

An interesting chart showing the “wage premium” of various schools vs. their cost, click thru to enjoy the search and browsing.

It’s interesting that Microsoft choose to leave the Nokia patent portfolio behind, effectively encouraging a known patent troll.  I seem to remember some other cases where they left the patents behind, taking only a license.  That provides a clever way to achieve the benefits of a patent rich market without having to look like your the problem.

This reminder feature in Google’s card scheme might be an interesting foreshadowing of the user experience that they intend for what ever finally replaces Google Alerts and Google Reader.  It starts to follow thru on the value of prospective search; i.e. allowing users to have standing queries related to their interests.  … or do I mean their buying signals.

Excellent short article about the way Google is slipping a runtime library between the (open) Android OS and all their (proprietary) Apps.  The fragmentation in the Android space is a problem.  But, this threatens the promise of an open platform.

I find PGP very lame because the community has failed to do even the most basic product management.

There are audiences that need to be drawn in.  Who: email users, email client authors, major email users (i.e. commercial entities), even the intermediaries.  Each of these audiences needs guidance, best practices, models.  And usability sucks.

For example there is no guidance for how to signal that I support PGP and or that I would like my correspondents to use PGP if possible.   There should be a norm about how to signal it in a footnote.  There should be a standard header so counter party clients can automate the song and dance.

The state of all this has only slightly improved over the many many years PGP has existed; but the name change around GPG was the worst kind fragmentation of branding.  Pure navel gazing.

It’s all a terrible shame.

An amusing  tax scheme, framed as a Claiming-race, via Underbelly.

The idea is that the owner must declare what he thinks the the property is worth.    The state then get’s to pick one of two options.  A) collect the tax on the declared value, or  B) buy the property.

The term claim-race comes from horse racing.  It’s apparently common.  Horses in a give race can be purchased for a price tied to that race.  Owners accept that as part of the risk they take when they enter the race.

In the horse race it helps to get horses of about equal quality into the race and relieves the race organizer of assessing quality.  In the tax scheme the state is relieved of assessing the value of the property being taxed (unless they want to exercise option B).  In the example underbelly found of the property in question was cargos passing a toll booth.

A recent interview on hiring in the New York Times[1] included these little snippets:

“we did a study to determine whether anyone … is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

…

G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation …”

While these are consistent with my experience, it’s a reasonably bleak conclusion.  First off just imagine you’d spent the last few years expediting a huge hiring pipeline, twisting arms to get interviewers, forcing them to fill out score sheets, etc. etc.  And now it all turns out to have been totally useless.

Or what if you want to make the decision to commit to a relationship.  It’s presumably like other shopping exercises: You collect information.  You then distill into “signals.”  Those signals help trigger the decision to commit.   Apparently all that interviewing and dating is useless.

What then?  Seek other signals presumably.  Height?, rosy complexion?, ficco score?  The article does mention: “what works well are structured behavioral interviews.”   I wonder if that has a consensus meaning.

It’s fun to realize that they probably have the data which would allow them to realize some unfortunate hiring patterns.  For example they might discover that candidates interviewed in building 3 just after afternoon tea on a Tuesday early in the month by a senior employee are much more likely to be hired.  Remember that one of the five ways to get rich is to marry well.  Candidates would pay for that information.

Of course it’s, no surprise that the match making (commitment) problem is so hard.  Evolution you know.

I guess it shows what a city mouse I am that “…one in three Americans has never used public transportation…”[pdf] surprised me.

I am delighted to see that Google’s public transit directions includes the cost of the trip, and for comparison the cost of driving.  They show the cost to you, not the externalized costs.  To get a feel for how these costs break down you can look at this. Very interesting. I’d tried to compute these numbers myself some years ago[1], so the line items I had not included are interesting.  For example I didn’t have a line for the cost of accidents.

The little report that the quote above is taken from has a point it’s making.  People have their habits and they rarely change them.  So the transit systems really ought to make an effort to get people introduced to the system.   I can think of a few, but not many, examples for free trial offers by transit systems.  There should be more.

Mimi and I will be in San Francisco tomorrow evening, leaving next Tuesday morning.  Mimi is exhibiting at the amazing Renegade crafts fair.  It’s in the Marina district at Fort Mason on one of the piers.  Last year there was also an wonderful farmer’s market on Saturday morning.  And, I gather, the America’s Cup will is taking place in the water at the end of the pier.  Last year was amazing.   It should be fun.

In the meantime slow down and be sure to chew your food:

That’s from this old article in the New York Times: Obesity and the Fastness of Food.

I just had a 3TB disk drive fail, and so was checking the warranty.  Happy news, it’s covered.  But in the meantime I can see my first Amazon order, Oct 1996.

I know I ordered that shortly after I wrote my first web server.   God that was fun.  But it was during that fun I got my frightening case of RSI.  And, while that’s much much better now I still can’t code as the speed I could back then.

So then I decided I should learn about business, i.e. MBA stuff, and that when added to what I learned work on on my web server lead to a very calculated decision to get involved with Apache.  That was fascinating.