Mahoo! - hope Google feels threatened

So Microsoft is acquiring Yahoo -- one way or the other.

Yahoo's been a disappointment for years, so that's no great loss for me. Really, Microsoft's recent work is much better than anything Yahoo's done.

The big upside though will be if it scares Google. Google needs a serious competitor, their pile of half-finished work is starting to smell a bit. I'm hoping Mahoo! puts the squeeze on ...

Charlie Stross profiles today's UK teens. Slashing?

Charles Stross, a top-rank science fiction writer almost as old as me, decided his business requires a profile of today's 18 year old. He's published a UK version of the Beloit College list he references:

Charlie's Diary: Youth of today:

I am a forty-something, which means I am out of touch with what passes for common knowledge among 18 year olds today. (Dodgy joke about keeping in touch with 18 year olds deleted in the interests of good taste.) Beloit College in the USA used to maintain a list for their staff, to explain what the world looks like to an 18 year old freshman: here's their 2006 list. It's heavily biased towards (obviously) American 18 year olds, but it got me thinking...

...Lots of people take antidepressants. Everyone slashes themselves; it's no big deal. (Statistics show a third of UK teens self-harm at some stage.)...

...There have always been cameras in shops and schools and other public places, although there are more of them than there used to be. Old folks grumble about privacy, but really, you're being watched wherever you are. If you don't like it, get a hoodie.

Slashing?! Geez, I really am a geezer. I don't think the US frequency is that high but I expect I'll find out (my oldest is 11). Forearm scars are not currently a winning point in job interviews.

Soon 18 year old Americans won't remember when smoking tobacco was a socially acceptable adult activity, but from a recent visit to the UK I know that's not true there.

Update: The comments are great, including some from the target demographic. I particularly liked Alex Gurney's remarks:

The word "digital" feels strange in "digital camera", "digital TV", "digital music", etc., since of course these things are digital. You have no idea why a "digital watch" or "digital alarm clock" would ever have seemed exciting or futuristic.

You either do not care about politics, or you obsessively follow political news, polls and statistics. Either way, you probably do not vote.

You think nothing of changing your phone handset or provider every few months. It would never occur to you to repair, rather than replace, broken electronic equipment. Even so, your data is far more important than the device, since you view phones, cameras and computers as essentially disposable.

You have never had to wait to get photos developed.

Anything which you have and don't want will probably get sold on eBay.

Obama and I are in 76% agreement.

FMH pointed to Glassbooth which told me: "Barack Obama shares a 76% similarity with your beliefs". Hilary wasn't far behind at 71%.

Oh, and who the heck is Mike Gravel?

I wish I'd done the quiz when Edwards was in the race. It's pretty sophisticated, and drills down by topic.

I discovered:

• I support gay "marriage" [1] Obama, doesn't (!).
• Obama was more willing to go along with the Patriot act than I would have been.

[1] Civil unions really. I think the state should do legal unions and religions can do what they like. Everyone who wants legal benefits would need a state sanctioned legal union, religious marriage alone should bring no legal privilege.

Wanted: examples of publicly traded companies with accounting solutions that support internal collaborative projects

It's an age-old problem for large publicly traded companies, regardless of industry.

Two groups want a new toolbox (for example)

They can each build their own to a local specification, or they can agree to build one toolbox:

Option I. Build a toolbox to local specification

Group A: $10
Group B: $10
Group A + B: $20

vs.

Option II: Build a toolbox to group specification

Group A: $14 (40% over budget)
Group B: $2 (80% cost reduction)
Group A + B: $16 (20% savings)

Options I works.

Option II saves the company 20%, but the manager of Group A is now unemployed and the manager of Group B is now a VP.

Back in Economics 101 we learned how markets solve this particular problem [1], but most publicly traded companies don't have internal markets [2].

I'm interested in examples of publicly traded companies, in any industry, that have made a go at mitigating this problem. If there are no minimally successful examples that's also important to know.

I'd be most grateful for examples of companies to look at, for comments or feedback, or for references to academic papers. Comments to this post or email to me are equally welcome!

(Brad, any thoughts?)

--

[1] See also: comparative advantage -- aka "I can do it better than you, but I have better things to do.").

[2] Apparently Czechoslovakia was relatively good at this sort of thing before the fall of the Soviet Union.

Update 2/4/08:

I now have run variations of the question: "Do you know of examples of publicly traded companies with accounting solutions that support internal collaborative projects by reducing the "cooperation penalty" problem?" by persons with knowledge of a reasonably large spectrum of public and privately held American corporations.

The answer, so far, is there is no answer. Here's my current summary:

1. Go head and reinvent the wheel, synergy isn't worth it unless the rewards are very large.
2. If there's enough money at stake do EBIT credits or some kind of internal accounting either formally or informally. This is rarely done however.
   
3. If there's a deep corporate strategic interest assign the synergy task to a very senior exec who can bang heads together.
4. In rare cases reorganize so the shared resource is under one cost center.
5. Outsource the service to an outside group who might be able to turn the need into a product or service with a larger market. An interesting variation on this is to decided that these unmet synergies are opportunities for employees to launch their own businesses with an initial guaranteed customer. This does require a robust level of corporate confidence however.
   

Update 11/25/08: As I worked this problem I became increasingly convinced I was heading into rough territory.

Time and serendipity have revealed the depths of the problem. Those depths include understanding why, on the one hand, large corporations exist, and on the other hand, why we have more than one corporation.

They take one into the Nobel Prize winning Coase Theorem, wonderfully summarized by Bruce Schneier (emphases mine);

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors. ...

In a related vein consider Coding Horror's discussion of the costs of software reuse.

The best reference on the Coase theorem I've found is from a 2007 Freakonomics article.

The synergy or collaboration tax in a large publicly traded corporation is a manifestation of the general scaling problem; it's one of the reasons corporations have effective size limits. To understand those limits though, we probably have to look beyond standard economics and consider the "military" aspects of corporate size -- the ways one can use size itself as a weapon.

At that point we move from economic theory to "nature red in tooth and claw". I suspect it's this reason that corporations can grow beyond what economic theory might suggest.

Microsoft's FeedSync: what the heck is it and why would anyone care about a trivial problem like data synchronization?

Jacob Reider, the master of the terse post, apparently likes Microsoft's FeedSync.

Of course, Jacob, you didn't bother to say why you liked it. Or even what it might be good for!

It turns out that FeedSync was originally a Ray (Lotus Notes -> Microsoft CTO) Ozzie project. I don't know what it started out as, but now claims to be an open source specification for enabling data synchronization.

Jacob is presumably interested for two reasons. One is general geekhood, the other healthcare related. First the geek stuff.

As a fellow-geek Jacob, like me, is constantly trying to synchronize data across platforms. Anyone who's been around the block with Outlook, Exchange, Palm, mobile phones, iPhones, Gmail, iSync, etc, etc, will have learned that this is a non-trivial problem even in the relatively trivial domain of synchronizing address books.

We geeks would like, for example, to move our images and metadata readily from Picasa to Flickr and back again. Good luck - even if Google claims they're opposed to Data Lock enabling synchronization between competitors is rather a difficult proposition -- particularly when the services define photo collections differently (include by reference or by copy?).

Heck, we'd like to move our metadata from iPhoto to Aperture -- two desktop apps Apple controls. We can't even do that. (ex: photo book annotations). Forget Aperture to Lightroom!

How hard is this problem? I have long claimed that data synchronization issues between Palm and Outlook/Exchange were one of the top three causes of the collapse of once promising Palm OS ecosystem. OS X geeks know that Apple has a long history of messed up synchronization even within the completely controlled OS X/.Mac environment. IBM has had several initiatives to manage this kind of issue (the last one I tracked was in the OS/2 era) -- all disasters. Anyone remember CORBA transaction standards? Same problem in a different form. The only experience I've had of synchronization working was with the original Palm devices synchronizing to the original Palm Desktop -- where everything was built to make synchronization work. Lotus Notes, of course, was into synchronization in a very big way -- that's how the different Notes repositories communicated with one another (hence Ozzie's interest). I don't know how well that really worked, but I'm told it took an army to make Notes work.

Personally, I think this problem gets fully solved about 10 milliseconds before Skynet takes over. There are too many nasty issues of semantics, of each system knowing what the other means by "place", to achieve perfect results between disparate systems. Even the imperfect results achieved by using language between mere humans requires a semblance of sentience, shared language, and even shared culture.

Reason two for Jacob's interest is, of course, his health care IT background. HL-7. SNOMED terminfo models. HITSP and Continuity of Care Records. Even Google's fuzzy Personal Health Record interchange services. Microsoft's various healthcare IT initiatives. Many HCIT vendor transaction solutions. They're really all about data synchronization on a grand scale -- even if the realities tend to be fairly modest.

Jacob, btw, is fond of those loosely-coupled mashup thingies.

So what's "FeedSync"? (emphases mine)

Windows Live Dev FeedSync Intro

The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.

The FeedSync specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

... FeedSync lays the foundation for a common synchronization infrastructure between any service and any application.

... Everyone has data that they want to share: contact lists, calendar entries, blog postings, and so on. This data must be up-to-date, real-time, across any of the programs, services, or devices you choose to use and share with.

Too often today data is “locked up” in proprietary applications and services or on various devices. As an open extension to RSS and Atom, FeedSync enables you to “unlock” your data—making it easy to synchronize the data you choose to any other authorized FeedSync-enabled service, computer, or mobile device. FeedSync enables many compelling scenarios:

• Collaboration over the web using synchronized feeds
• Roaming data to multiple client devices
• Publishing reference data and updates in an open format that can be synchronized easily

... FeedSync enables multi-master topologies,

... publish a subset of his calendar more broadly using a FeedSync feed. Consumers of the publish-only feed can only see a subset of the calendar, and don’t have permission to make changes. Because of the FeedSync information in the feed, though, they are reliably notified of updates to Steve’s shared calendar. And unlike current feeds, when Steve deletes an item from the calendar, the item is deleted on everyone’s calendar.

... RSS and Atom were designed as notification mechanisms, to alert clients that some new resource is available on a server. This is a great fit for simple applications like blogging.

But those feed formats are not a natural fit for representing collections of resources that change, such as a contact list, or a collection of calendar items. Atom Publishing Protocol is designed for resource collections, but it is a client-server protocol and isn’t suitable (by itself) for multi-master scenarios. FeedSync extends RSS and Atom so that FeedSync-enabled RSS and Atom feeds can be used for reliable, efficient content replication and multi-master data synchronization.

One of the great benefits of FeedSync is that it doesn’t attempt to replace technologies like RSS, Atom, or Atom Publishing Protocol. Instead, FeedSync is a simple set of extensions that enhances the RSS or Atom feeds that people are already using today...

There you go. Nerdvana indeed.

Grumph.

Ok, I won't rain too hard on this parade. I said "perfect results" weren't feasible. We can't do synchronization for anything that's not trivial -- at least not without monstrous effort. The interesting question is whether there's some kind of "good enough" compromise that we can start with that, with a lot of time and evolution, might lead to some sort of emergent solution. Preferably without Skynet. Something that bears the same relationship to the original Palm synchronization that Google does to the original memex/xanadu vision...

Dyer: six articles for 2008

Gwynne Dyer 2008 has new essays on Kenya, Thailand, the papacy, the Tata Motor Nano, the Middle East and, of course, the US.

As has been true for years, his are probably the most read pages on the net that are strictly .txt files with hard coded line wrap. Reminds me of Gopher. No feeds of course!

This year he's introduced tables (!) to hold his article links, which make it impossibly tedious to copy direct links to the set of recent articles articles.

He is a character, no doubt. All the same he's a very insightful writer. Alas the .txt format means it's tedious to quote directly from his writings.

Hmm. You don't suppose that's the point?

Games the media play: the race card

I've been thinking the same thing for a while, looking for an opportunity to say it.

FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: How the press played the race card

... I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.

It's the same old game -- getting attention at any cost. The American public never learns ...

Florida's 90% better future means Edwards can be kingmaker

Months after he was written off, McCain is the GOP favorite. I assume the Trilateral Commission is at work, otherwise I can't explain this at all.

The GOP now has a choice between Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney and John McCain. Assuming continuation of bizarre trends, there's only a 1/3 chance of Romney winning. If Romney wins, I'm guessing, based on Florida numbers, that there's only a 1/3 chance of his getting the presidency.

So there's about a 90% [1] probability that America's next president will be Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain.

Right wing talk radio hates McCain; it's hard to imagine a better endorsement. I would be disappointed if McCain won, but I would not be thinking about emigrating.

So today we have a 90% probability of a better future for America.

Wow, I didn't expect to be thinking that already.

So how does this change my thoughts my thoughts ahead of Minnesota's primary?

If Florida's Dem delegates had counted, Hilary Clinton would now be planning to wrap-up the primary contests. If Giuliani had won Florida I'd be wearing my Hilary button now.

Today, though, I feel freer.

I think she's still the best option for winning the presidency, but I still don't care for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic progression. I still fear Obama can't win Florida, but if McCain is the nominee that might be a risk to consider.

Or maybe I should go with Edwards, and give him the power to choose both the President and the Vice-President.

Today I'm thinking I want John Edwards to be the kingmaker.

[1] 1 - (1/3*1/3) = 8/9 = 89%

Update: Ok, so much for that.

...top strategist Joe Trippi explained the timing of the decision like this: "It became increasingly clear on Sunday and Monday that we were totally blocked out of the news story. John Edwards didn't want to play politics. He didn't want to stay in the race to be a kingmaker or a spoiler. There was just not a clear shot at the nomination.

Who mourns for the loss of Apple's unique file identifiers ...

One of the most innovative features of the early Macintosh machines were that each file had a unique identifier. The file "name" was a user convenience, the software used the identifier.

Move a file? No problem. The OS knew where it was.

That's been more and more broken in the past few years. I don't know if the move is deliberate, or if it's a sign that Apple's most brilliant developers have all retired.

Alas, Time Machine demonstrates how broken this feature is.

Exploring the sands of Time Machine

...Time Machine doesn't handle the ol' switcheroo very well; renamed files and folders get backed up right alongside their previous iterations. This means that if you have a 2GB folder of images in your Desktop called "Purty Pi'tures" one day, then do nothing but rename the folder to "Rilly Purty Pi'tures" the next day, you just ate up 4GB of space on your Time Machine drive. Going further, Murphy Mac discovered that Time Machine makes some odd (and potentially unfortunate) decisions when throwing out backups. When Time Machine decides to retain a single backup out of the previous day's hourly backups, it chooses the first one of the day (presumably beginning at 12:01am). This means that some files could still be slipping through the sands of time (c'mon, I had to), depending on your computing habits...

It will be a sad day when Vista's file system is clearly better in every way than the Mac's.

To sleep, perchance to run lossy compression algorithms

Another NYT article on theories about why humans sleep:

Sleep - Brain - Neurons - New York Times:

...So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so that the synapses’ relative strength is maintained. Those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t....

Both autism and schizophrenia have, at various times, been connected with disorders of pruning neuronal networks. (Errors both ways -- too much and too little.)

Neural gardening is hard to get right, and, in fact, there can't be a "right" answer. The "right" answer will depend on environment, which is fungible.

I do wonder sometimes if the alleged benefit of exercise for dementia prevention is entirely related to the benefit exercise has for sleeping.

Incidentally, my recollection is that this original theory was found to be too simplistic. I recall that studies published @ 2011 showed that what's occuring in sleep is a refactoring of memories into a compressed formthat sacrifices accuracy for retrieval speed and lesser storage demands. I think the researchers found a curious correspondence to lossy fractal-based compression algorithms used in early 21st century computing ... [1]

[1] Sorry, sometimes it's hard for me to forget I'm not supposed to remember the future. I think I need more sleep.

Audio books for children: the list that's hard to find

Audio books are more effective than sleeping gas for quieting our kids in the car. Since I figured out how to use iTunes and Missing Sync for BlackBerry to put AAC files on my wife's Pearl I want to buy some more.

Of course I can't go to audible.com or the iTunes store or any of the obvious sources. The DRM makes these options unacceptable. I need a CD.

Surprisingly, Amazon doesn't have a unique collection. Google didn't help much either, though it pointed to a nice Kidsreads.com review.

Meaning, I had to actually think of a source rather than using Amazon and Google. I guessed a competing book seller might have taken a more thoughtful approach.

The great answer is the Barnes and Noble Children's Audio Collection. Today it shows 733 items, linking together the printed, CD and cassette versions.

So why'd Amazon miss this one? Is it because they have a growing business selling DRMd audio books? Is it because they rely too much on automated algorithms? Is it a sign that they've moved so far from their bookish origins that their original market is in play?

I clearly need to pay more attention to the B&N web site. Competition is good.

1/31/08: Amazon just bought Audible. I suspect their lack of an "audio book" CD catalog was not related to this acquisition, but it doesn't give them much incentive to push CD audio books.

Future shock: the Nexus 7000

I remember when putting 15 gigabits a second across a fiber optic connection was real research news. Rough Type points to today's NYT article about transmitting putting 15 terabits a second...

Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data...

... the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.

Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest producer of network equipment, offered a range of examples to try to capture the significance of the increase in speed. It said the switch could transfer all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds or send a two-megapixel digital image to every human being on earth in 28 minutes...

... In marketing the new switch, Cisco will emphasize that it will cut the energy costs of large data centers. Changing the design of a data center, made possible by the need for fewer networking interfaces, could reduce a data center’s energy use by 8 percent...

john

Minnesota's caucus and Florida's 71 to 22 percent preference: Clinton wins.

If I had the only vote in America, I'd probably vote for John Edwards. Otherwise, If he passed much more study than I've bothered with to date, Barack Obama.

Alas, I don't have the only vote in America. So my "vote" in the oddball Minnesota caucuses next Tuesday will be for whoever is most likely to beat Romney and/or McCain. That means whoever is mostly likely to win Florida, because, yet again, Florida will decide who the next President will be.

So I searched for a reference to guide me, and I found this ...

American Research Group

January 27, 2008 - Florida Primary Preferences

... Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among men 59% to 25%, with 13% for John Edwards, and she leads Obama 61% to 28% among women, with 6% for John Edwards. Clinton leads Obama among early voters 65% to 19% and she leads Obama among in-person voters 58% to 31%, with 8% for Edwards. Clinton leads among white voters with 64%, with Obama at 21% and Edwards at 11%. Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 71% to 21%. And Clinton leads among Hispanic voters with 71%, with Obama at 22% and Edwards at 1%.

My recollection is that, in Florida, it's the Hispanic voters that decide presidential contests.

So it's Clinton then. My personal preferences don't count.

Update: for a biting and darkly humorous perspective with a similar (implied) conclusion, read Jon Swift.

Boltzmann's brain hits the big Times

The New York Times that is.

In a reprise of John Tierney's NYT interview with Nick (we're in a simulation) Bostrum  Dennis Overbye writes about a topic featured in some of my favorite physics blogs - Boltzmann's brain ...

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times

...cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

CV fills in some more background

... The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy...

In other words, the silliness of the naked flying space brain demonstrates that we don't understand entropy and the arrow of time.

CV uses the same Bayesian logic used by Bostrum to point out that if our current model of entropy were correct then it would be overwhelmingly likely that you are a Boltzmann's Brain and I don't exist...

... In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain...

CV concludes today's essay with a, to me, tantalizing comment ...

...So what are we to conclude? That our observed universe is not a statistical fluctuation around a thermal equilibrium state. That’s very important to know, but doesn’t pin down the truth. If the universe is eternal, and has a maximum value for its entropy, then we it would (almost always) be in thermal equilibrium. Therefore, either it’s not eternal, or there is no state of maximum entropy. I personally believe the latter, but there’s plenty of work to be done before we have any of this pinned down..

That last link is to an 207 CV article on how it all began.

Undecided voter? You're in bad company

It's a little secret of national politics that, past the primaries, 99% of the electorate with any significant connection to reality has made up their mind.

So all the advertising, all the spin, all the media manipulation -- none of it is for you or me. We're just in the way.

It's all for the undecided voter and for the intermittent non-voter -- two groups that overlap.

Cosmic Variance has just learned the bad news. Sean is young I think, so no shame in being naive. For obvious reasons this isn't something politicians talk about. They may despise the chore of selling themselves to the arational and illogical, but that's what the game is all about.

There's a bright side. The next time you hear an astoundingly idiotic campaign statement, remember who it's aimed at. Politicians are not as a stupid as they sound, they're just profoundly cynical.