General

Science — 1 Comment
02
Apr 08

Change blindness

From the NY Times: Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face:

Visual attentiveness is born of limited resources. â€œThe basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain,â€ Dr. Wolfe said. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view. In deciding what to focus on, the brain essentially shines a spotlight from place to place, a rapid, sweeping search that takes in maybe 30 or 40 objects per second, the survey accompanied by a multitude of body movements of which we are barely aware: the darting of the eyes, the constant tiny twists of the torso and neck. We scan and sweep and perfunctorily police, until something sticks out and brings our bouncing cones to a halt.

Literature / Software / Internet — Comments Off
13
Mar 08

Google Book Search a joy for antiquarians

Google Book Search is a project that exemplifies Google’s vision for information. For the past few years they’ve worked with various libraries and universities to digitize books, periodicals, and journals that might otherwise have remained untouched in their collections. Each resource is scanned by hand and rendered into indexable text. For older works whose copyrights have lapsed, you may read the entire thing online. Even for books under copyright, Google Book Search is a good way to search the contents of published works and is a great supplement to the usual search engine results for many research topics. Over the past few months, I’ve come across several books I might have paid for available online via Google Book Search. For any older books, this is now the first place I check. Here are a couple good books you may read online. They’re mostly aphorisms or concise wisdom, so it should be good for casual reading:

The Maxims of ChÃ¡á¹‡Ã¡kya: The Maxims of ChÃ¡á¹‡Ã¡kya are an interesting record of thought by an early Indian statesman.
The Maxims of Francis Guicciardini by Francesco Guicciardini. Practical and political philosophy by a contemporary of Machiavelli, the historian Guicciardini.
The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave: From the Latin
Maxims and Moral Reflections by FranÃ§ois La Rochefoucauld

Business / General — Comments Off
12
Mar 08

Good use for Social Security data

Every year I get a green, printed Social Security statement in the mail from the federal government. It lists my taxable income for every year I’ve paid taxes. Looking at past earnings is a trip down memory lane. The first jobs at 16, the lean college years, the post college flailing about… my life story in numbers, faithfully recorded by the Social Security Administration.

It would be useful to take this information and chart your earnings over time to see the trend. I would imagine that if you did this over your expected lifetime you would observe a bell-like curve. From no earnings in youth to a considerable increase then a slowed growth, then inevitably a decline as you approach old age. (I could be wrong here. How would you continue increases in income growth? Invest an inordinate amount when young?)
You could also calculate your year over year percentage income growth to keep your career earnings on track. For example, if you experienced 15% in annual growth for several years and then observed a decrease in growth or even negative growth you might consider retooling your skillset or looking for other income growth opportunities in order to maintain your growth trajectory. Income growth is essential in asset growth, though you will have no asset growth if you spend everything you earn.
It might also be a good idea to keep an eye on average annual income growth on a five year trend. The last five years are probably a better guide to your income growth than what you earned at 16.

General / Society — Comments Off
02
Mar 08

Fashion is an expression of cultural life

I saw this high school kid yesterday with the whole 80’s metal look: black Iron Maiden t-shirt, tight grey jeans, and long hair with Dave Mustaine bangs. I’m amused by how often teen fashion recapitulates past trends and then I remember how we were no different in my time, aping the teens of past generations who seemed cool. In a way, fashion is regressive and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It looks for inspiration from the past while adding the stamp of the present; creating culture while maintaining direct links to previous layers of culture. I would like to see people drawing fashion inspiration from far-flung periods in time or from extrapolations of the future, but we will continue to see kids drawing inspiration from more recent trends simply because, as a culture, we lack both a deep sense of history and an imagination for the future.

General — Comments Off
02
Mar 08

Formalized dynamism in government

While wandering through Google Books, I came across this compelling passage in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England:

In a democracy, where the right of making laws resides in the people at large, public virtue, or goodness of intention, is more likely to be found, than either of the other qualities of government. Popular assemblies are frequently foolish in their contrivance, and weak in their execution; but generally mean to do the thing that is right and just, and have always a degree of patriotism or public spirit. In aristocracies there is more wisdom to be found, than in the other frames of government; being composed, or intended to be composed, of the most experienced citizens: but there is less honesty than in a republic, and less strength than in a monarchy. A monarchy is indeed the most powerful of any; for by the entire conjunction of the legislative and executive powers all the sinews of government are knit together, and united in the hand of the prince: but then there is eminent danger of his employing that strength to improvident or oppressive purposes.

Thus these three species of government have, all of them, their several perfections and imperfections. Democracies are usually the best calculated to direct the end of a law; aristocracies to invent the means by which that end shall be obtained; and monarchies to carry those means into execution. And the ancients, as was observed, had in general no idea of any other permanent form of government but these three: for though Cicero[12] declares himself of opinion, “esse optime constitutam rempublicam, quae ex tribus generibus illis, regali, optimo, et populari, sit modice confusa;” yet Tacitus treats this notion of a mixed government, formed out of them all, and partaking of the advantages of each, as a visionary whim, and one that, if effected, could never be lasting or secure.

It is likely that the founders of our constitutional government had this in mind when planning our legal framework. In the United States, these three attitudes exist in a state of tension: the will of the people vs. the wisdom of the elite vs. the authority of the monarch (monarchy is literally the rule of one). The authority of the monarch is represented by the President and the Executive Branch. The will of the people is represented by the Legislative Branch with its representative bodies. The wisdom of the elites is represented by the Judicial Branch. The system of checks and balances ensures that each branch possesses some influence over each other branch and allows for a dynamic tension that can respond to change.

Maybe this tension is responsible for our success and relative stability. This dynamic tension allows each tendency to influence events when it is most needed. When the public Will grows new laws can be promoted by the legislature to change policy, when authority is required the President can exercise his particular advantage, when wisdom and judgment is necessary to arbitrate, the judiciary can make decisions independent of the public will or the authority of the executive. The genius of our political system is that it provides a stable framework for this tension and recognizes at a basic level that society is both cooperative AND competitive.

Cool Tools / Software / Internet / Technology — 2 Comments
26
Feb 08

Quick tip: Cheap unlimited cellphone plan

I’m with T-mobile, so your mileage may vary.

Step 1: Sign up for T-mobile’s MyFaves plan. This allows you unlimited calling to five telephone numbers. These numbers may be in-network or out-of-network. In other words, they can be any five phone numbers.

Step 2: Sign-up for a free Google Grand Central Account and phone number. Grand Central allows you to receive calls at any phone via one number. It’s basically a free hosted PBX system with some nice extras.

Step 3: Forward all your inbound Grand Central calls to your MyFaves phone. In the Grand Central settings have all your inbound calls routed to your cell.

Step 4: Add your Grand Central number to your MyFaves plan as a “fave”. Any calls to and from your Grand Central number will fall under your MyFaves unlimited calling plan. With Grand Central you can make outbound calls by clicking a link in Grand Central, which will initiate the call and then will ring your phone to connect you.

Step 5: Give your Grand Central number to friends and family. Any calls to your Grand Central number will forward to your cellphone and will be calculated as unlimited calls.

Step 6: Profit!! (Well, not profit, but savings.)

Religion/philosophy / Science — 3 Comments
23
Feb 08

Evolution is parallel computing

Let’s say you created a program with a simple yet specific goal: to persist. This program would iterate by replicating itself and branching off into new directions with very simple changes to the underlying code. Each version of the program is without volition, yet, if successful in persisting long enough to replicate, it will pass along key components to the next version. This would grant further success and the program would survive.

DNA is this program and we who inhabit the earth are its compiled result. If all life is the result of this process of iteration (biological evolution), it makes sense that to iterate more rapidly and efficiently it would help to have multiple branches, populations, and individuals iterating in parallel rather than attempting to iterate serially from a single line of individual organisms. In other words, maybe our rich biodiversity is the result of Life increasing its processing power by developing in parallel.

DNA Helix Life started out with a limited ability to create new versions with significant variation. In the beginning, presumably only a handful of different organisms existed (maybe even an ur-lifeform, or grandfather organism) and these tended to be unicellular with minute amounts of genetic information. As life forms evolved and grew more complex, they incorporated other single-cell organisms into them and adapted sexual reproduction, which granted enhanced variability in genetic information through the combination of two sets of different yet fundamentally compatible DNA sequences.

Other thoughts:

Life has developed from simple forms with limited genetic information and a limited impact on its environment, to complex forms with complex genetic information and a more pronounced impact on its environment. How will this trend continue? Will it?
Life has developed multiple methods of reproduction trending from simple to more complex, which has led to greater genetic diversity. Is there a logical improvement on sexual reproduction? Intelligent, self-directed mutation? A networked organism comprised of intelligent individually evolving components?
The human genome consists of 3 billion base pairs, which is equivalent to about 750 MB. Our genome contains genetic information from more primitive organisms (bloatware?) just as our physical structure has primitive antecedents.
Our biological systems have tended from simple to complex. Consider the development of the eye, or the heart (fish have a two-chambered heart, birds a three-chambered heart, and mammals a four-chambered heart), for example. Is technology the proper extension of this complexity? (This is a point made in The Singularity is Near)
Semi-related: The symbolic use of information in religious sources like the Bible is reminds me of the idea of DNA as living information: From John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” and Revelation 1:8 “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”
Zawinski’s law: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Cool Tools / Software / Internet — Comments Off
22
Feb 08

Using AdWords for Keyword Monitoring

Keyword monitoring One thing that’s difficult in search engine marketing is finding good data on search traffic: how often a keyword phrase is searched, how one keyword phrase compares to another in total search volume, how well your competitor is doing relative to you, etc. There’s no real way to get this from the search engines in any usable form as this is essentially their secret sauce. Google has a service called Google Trends where you can compare the relative strength of one keyword to another, but, as far as I know, Google does not provide the public with exact data on the number of searches for say, “hot tamale” or “Chris Sivori” (that’s me).

However, if you’re willing to risk a little money, you can use AdWords to monitor particular search phrases. For example, a while back I started an AdWords campaign to monitor searches for both “chris sivori” and “sivori”. I was curious as to how many times my name popped up in a search. Obviously, it wouldn’t be that often as I’m far from notable, but this made it an even more compelling idea as I would be likely to know whoever would be searching.

Here’s what you do to start monitoring your desired search terms:

Create your campaign. Create an AdWords campaign and uninteresting ads (remember, you don’t necessarily want clickthroughs) for the search terms you want to monitor. Be advised, that popular search terms could result in you losing some money.
Set an acceptable budget. Set your daily budget low enough to where if you suddenly get tons of clickthroughs you won’t lose a lot of money. My daily budget is $1.00 (the lowest you can budget), so the worst I can lose is $30 a month. Usually, it comes out to around $2.00 or so a month.
Check the results. After a few days, log in to your AdWords account and view the impressions for every keyword your tracking. In this case, an impression is any time your ad appears. If your ad bid is competitive it is likely to appear for every instance of a search for your keyword phrases, so the number of impressions will give you a good idea of the total search volume for the keyword phrases you would like to track.

Keyword monitoring with this method will obviously work best with unpopular phrases. Obviously, if you wanted to track a popular keyword, you could spend a lot of money and burn through impressions pretty quickly without necessarily getting an idea of the total search volume. Another complication is that Google seems to mess with the default bids to keep people from using AdWords purely for this purpose. I’ve noticed that two equally inconsequential keyword phrases can have wildly different default bids. If I remember correctly, Google has a certain threshold for bids if the keyword is unlikely to be searched to prevent people from placing a bunch of five cent bids on long-tail keywords.

Other applications of this method:

Track the competition. Imagine you’re working for the McCain campaign, for example, and you want to stay abreast of interest in Mike Huckabee. You could place an ad luring Huckabee supporters to your site from searches for “mike huckabee”, “huckabee”, etc. while also using the impressions data to gauge changes in interest in this candidate. If you monitored your AdWords impressions, you might be able to see a sudden peak in searches, which might indicate growing interest. If you used this method with geographically targeted PPC ads, you could monitor interest levels over time in various battleground states, for instance.
See who’s clicking the ads. If you Google Analytics and add campaign tracking variables to the URL’s in your ads, you should be able to tie a particular ad clickthrough to a specific IP address, which will allow you to further drill down into the source of your clickthroughs and will provide information as to the time of day and specific information about the user including browser type, OS, screen resolution, ISP, company name, etc.
Reverse stalking. Monitoring your own name can be useful in certain situations. If your name is Google-able, you might see a pick up in searches following job interviews, client meetings, conferences, etc. It can be eye opening to see how many times someone Googles you. I welcome the transparency, although I hope I never do anything I have to worry about showing up online.

Got any other ideas? Suggestions? Leave a comment and let me know.

Technology — Comments Off
19
Feb 08

Knowing when to cut your losses

I’ve noticed a fair amount of traffic coming in on the search phrase “NCSoft layoffs”. The destination is a post I wrote a while back about the last NCSoft layoff on the back of a disappointing Auto Assault launch.

Regular layoffs are a fact of life in the hit-or-miss world of video game development, and I wondered if people in the company were worried about head cutting as this typically happens in the spring and fall. Curious, I searched around and found a report by the Korea Times (later repudiated by the company as inaccurate) that alleges that serious changes are in store for NCSoft’s Austin development studio as a result of the disappointing performance of Tabula Rasa, a game that took over three years to produce. To give you some idea, the typical development cycle for a large scale video game is eighteen months. So, to have a game slip repeatedly and then disappoint in the marketplace is a certain justification for trimming the budget.

It would be easy to play armchair quarterback and second guess decisions made, but since I’ve never been responsible for a large-scale project it’s not my place. I have a lot of respect for anyone that can spearhead a game development project of the scale required for a successful MMO (for example, World of Warcraft has 10 million subscribers). It does bring up an interesting question for companies and investors, however. When a project starts missing deadlines, runs over budget, requires multiple trips “back to the drawing board”, how do you know when to cut your losses? Is it a good idea to give project leaders a second chance or is it more effective to bring in new leadership?

Literature / Society — Comments Off
18
Feb 08

At a Long Enough Time Horizon

Yesterday I had an itch to set my thoughts careening by reading some good science-fiction. I went down to the library and picked up Vernor Vinge’s “Marooned in Real Time“. It did not disappoint. It was interesting enough that I ended up finishing it in one day. It has the perfect mix of intrigue and ideas that set your imagination afire. The basic plot is a murder mystery with the twist that it takes place as the cast of characters travels through time using bobble technology. Bobbles are basically stasis spheres, so you don’t really travel through time as much as everything remains in suspended animation while the world goes on without you. The characters in the book end up bobbling through millions of years of real time and are able to observe changes to earth geography and evolution in progress.

Far future earth evolution is exactly the kind of thing that’s fun to speculate about. How will life change? What new animals will arise from current forms? Will any creatures achieve sapience? Likewise, if we could travel through time for millions of years, how far could we go? What would happen to the universe? What would we see if we could stick around until the end of the universe?

The pleasant side effect of reading about the flow of millions of years is that it makes all of your problems shrink to insignificance. At a long enough time horizon, nothing really matters. When the going gets tough, this idea can provide relief and perspective. One of the humbling facts about existence is the knowledge that everything you do, everything you have, everything you know, is temporary… even humanity, even this world. If everything is temporary what is the proper attitude of life? How should this inform our conduct?

Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.