Newly Ancient

Smart People Cause Problems

2009-10-14T14:53:52-04:00

If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence...

That sentence, paraphrased: smart people started working on Wall Street. For most of its existence, Wall Street was mundane, run by Ivy League jocks with old money. It wasn't run by idiots, but it also wasn't run by geniuses. Then, with the rise in college costs and Wall Street income, truly smart people started showing up—the kind of people who would otherwise be doing precedent-setting legal work or breakthrough physics research. These geniuses weren't content with the easy wealth old Wall Street afforded—they wanted to experiment, they wanted to use their tremendous brainpower. And if they made boatloads of money in the process, that was just an added bonus.

The problem came when all that complicated math started collapsing under the weight of excessive greed and ignorant bosses.¹ An already complex global financial system become a tangled web of math which eventually unraveled. Some things, particularly economic and physical infrastructures, are best run by conservatively intelligent people who won't experiment. I don't want a genius doing my plumbing and I don't want one doing my taxes.

This excellent Op-Ed from the New York Times was recommended by John Gruber.

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Morgante Pell: The Making Of

2009-10-11T22:53:54-04:00

Billions & Billions

2009-09-30T20:36:13-04:00

Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they're usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large—but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.

Right: Visualization of budgets and other big numbers.

(Via John Gruber)

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In Pursuit of Meritorious Advertising

2009-09-25T00:02:41-04:00

My friend Joe Thibault recently emailed me about a new site he has started with Sean Behan (a crackerjack Ruby programmer). Their site, called PostLearn, is essentially an affiliate job board for education. While I wish them success in their endeavor, I won't be joining as I believe this model suffers from a couple of major flaws.

Right: Graph of PostLearn affiliate traffic, lead by freetech4teachers.

The greatest flaw is immediately visible from the affiliate graph: one site drives a vastly disproportionate amount of the traffic; Free Technology for Teachers alone accounts for over 90% of the traffic, and consequently will receive far more affiliate revenue. Except it will probably receive all of the revenue. In an affiliate model, there is a certain base amount of traffic required before you can get a single sale, a minimum that I doubt many of the others on the long tail (including yours truly) would reach. Effectively, the entire pot of affiliate money is controlled by a tiny oligarchy of sites.

This would be acceptable (it's a free market, after all) were it not for the fundamental flaws in the Internet economy. This flawed economy is controlled by a small oligarchy of noisemakers. This oligarchy isn't particularly hard to enter: just abandon journalistic ethics and post lists of the top n ways to write lists.¹ Boom! Traffic.

Unsurprisingly, just as in the larger Internet, the most popular PostLearn affiliate simply rehashes merit-less news stories and tips.² Looking down the page, lo and behold, we find a list of the aforementioned variety. Sadly, this content is rewarded far more generously than potentially more deserving comment.

Google AdSense grants us some slight freedom from this paradigm by democratizing advertising. Though the most trafficked sites still receive the vast majority of the revenue, smaller sites do share in some of the revenue, potentially enough to offset minimal publishing expenses. In this way, Google AdSense resembles most modern democracies: while the elite still maintain most of the power, the little guy does get a small voice. It's not perfect, but it's better than an oligarchy of the unthinking elite.

Above: The exemplary Fusion Ads logo.

However, we can do one better with a meritocracy. Rather than being a detriment, advertising can be a force for good on the web. Fusion Ads and The Deck are prime examples of this. Instead of rewarding breadth of content, these networks focus on finding blogs which consistently post material with depth. By handpicking their members these networks ironically end up leveling the playing field and giving quality content a chance to shine. I truly believe this is the advertising model that will save the web.³

With that in mind, I offer this challenge to Joe and Sean: devise an advertising platform which will improve the quality of the edublogosphere. In my opinion, such a model should observe three crucial principles:

Popularity doesn't necessarily correlate with merit. Meaningful blogs with strong reader relationships will, in the end, provide greater long-term benefit.
Be selective. The quality of small, niche groups is more easily controllable, making them more marketable.
Know the audience. Most readers are going to be job seekers (teachers) not job posters. The billing and payment strategy should reflect this.

Whether they choose to implement these ideas or not, I wish Joe and Sean the best of luck and look forward to their response.

Memorization Spacing

2009-09-07T04:49:12-04:00

Jack Cheng elaborates on a learning method developed by Paul Pimsleur for memorizing language vocabulary:

[Pimsleur] observed that the first time you learned a new word, you’d forget it almost immediately. But if you reviewed it again as you were about to forget it, each subsequent review would exponentially increase the staying power of the word. To put it another way, if you could only remember the word for 5 seconds at first, reviewing it after those five seconds would boost your retention time to 25 seconds, then 2 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on. At this rate, the tenth review wouldn’t have to take place until about four months after the first.

I've been employing a similar method for building my vocabulary (in preparation for the unavoidable SAT). Essentially, whenever I run across an unfamiliar word, I note it as an alarm in iCal set to go off 5 minutes later. Once prompted, I try to recall the word (and look it up if I forgot), then change the alarm to go off in 10 minutes, gradually increasing until it's up to a year. Right now, I'm working on writing some software to automate this process, including the ability to add words from my iPhone.

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La Premiere

2009-09-05T14:22:28-04:00

La Premiere is an excellent short film chronicling the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, whose last name appropriately translates from French as light. Watching it was delightful way to spend twenty minutes.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

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The Paradox of Craigslist

2009-08-29T17:48:06-04:00

Wired has published an in-depth article about Craigslist that exposes the peculiar personality of the site, and its founder. I have never been a fan of Craigslist—its usability is terrible. The Craiglist management has a somewhat hypocritical stance. Supposedly, the site is simple because business growth isn't a priority; it's all about the users. Yet those same users (or potential ones) complain about how backwards the site is, with extremely poor technology running it. Worst yet, Craigslist actively discourages innovation by not offering any kind of API to external clients. Hopefully, just as newspaper classifieds were defated by newer media, Craiglist will eventually fall to companies willing to innovate.

(Via Merlin Mann)

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Musical Sorting Algorithms

2009-08-21T11:13:33-04:00

Sorting algorithms (like Quicksort) are frequently represented visually, but they can also be represented musically. Through guitars and drums, a UCLA grad student has created auditory demonstrations of sorting algorithms. Showing what sorting algorithms sound like would be an excellent opener for a lesson. These demonstrations connect an abstract concept to something we can hear, making it far easier to grasp.

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Murinoids, Cretins & Boodles

2009-08-15T23:59:22-04:00

Are you a boodle? (That would be a stupid noodle.) Perhaps prothodaw more fittingly describes you as a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank. The Oxford English Dictionary contains many of these amusing archaic definitions, including murinoid: resembling the mouse or its allies. Sadly, with the online revision begun in 2000, these definitions are going the way of the Dodo. In a recent column for the New York Times, Ammon Shea morns their loss and highlights some of the more humorous specimens. An excellent read for a lazy weekend.

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iPhone Customer Satisfaction

2009-08-14T15:13:19-04:00

A survey by RBC Capital and ChangeWave Research found that 99% of iPhone 3GS customers are satisfied with their phone. Of them, 82% are very satisfied. These numbers are simply astounding; only 1% of iPhone 3GS are dissatisfied. This shows just what kind of force Palm and Android are up against. Palm's numbers—with 45% very satisfied with their Pre—are excellent, but pale in comparison to Apple's astronomical customer satisfaction.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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