Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Unanticipated cloud app problems: The child
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The hungry city
Monday, May 17, 2010
Organlegging Neuromancer style – China’s liver trade
Organlegging was Larry Niven’s 1970s term for trafficking in human organs. Gibson’s fiction, including the fabulous (1984!!) Neuromancer, featured Chinese organ shops. Cross organlegging with Neuromancer and fast forward to 2010.
How do people not raised on science fiction get their head around the modern world? It’s really a disability of sorts.
Since my 2006 organ trade post (see also) the market has continued to mature …
Blood & Treasure- the liver trade
… Type in Baidu and search for “looking for liver, kidney” and so on words, tens of thousands of results show up, including QQ numbers*, cell phone numbers, some even operate like a company. They not only look for people willing to sell their livers and kidneys, at the same time they also advertise to provide livers and kidneys that match the patients. Reporter contacted number of organ trading brokers and found that they had a clear set of requirements, and the business also formed “one shop stop” service…
Liver segment and single kidney donation is usually survivable.
Is anyone in the US paying attention?
No, I didn’t think so.
… is the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Mainland China, and has over 856.2 million users. In April 2010, QQ.com ranked 10th overall in Alexa's internet rankings. The program is maintained by Tencent Holdings Limited (HKEX: 0700), owned in part by Naspers…
I’d never learn this stuff if I didn’t have my Chinese-focused blogs to read. The mainstream media is hopelessly lost.
Update: After posting this, I revisited a link in my 2006 post to a 2004 NYT article. There I found mention of "Organs Watch" - an organization tracking the global organ trade. The web site, however is "under construction"; the notice refers to an August 2009 update that never happened. Nancy Scheper-Hughes led Organs Watch, but the last news of her is from 2008. Reading between the lines of the Wikipedia article, I wonder if she might have gone a bit off the rails ("Israel" and "tentacles" in the same sentence is a bit of a red light). She was still teaching at Berkeley in Fall 2009.
Science fiction and ocean acidification
An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification by Carl Zimmer: Yale Environment 360
... Scientists have been scouring the fossil record for periods of history that might offer clues to how the planet will respond to the current carbon jolt. They’ve found that 55 million years ago, the Earth went through a similar change. Lee Kump of Penn State and his colleagues have estimated that roughly 6.8 trillion tons of carbon entered the Earth’s atmosphere over about 10,000 years.
Nobody can say for sure what unleashed all that carbon, but it appeared to have had a drastic effect on the climate. Temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 Fahrenheit). Many deep-water species became extinct, possibly as the pH of the deep ocean became too low for them to survive...
Krugman discovers humans are not rational
Paul Krugman is a fan of behavioral economics. He’s also fabulously well read, he must have read some anthropology, history, and political science at some point in his life. At heart though, Krugman is an economist. It’s hard for an economist to escape the prejudice that humans are fundamentally rational self-interest optimizers. It’s baked into their culture.
Alas, humans are only partly rational part of the time*. Obama, like every politician, knows this in a deep way. That’s why he ignores Krugman’s political advice.
Krugman can learn though. I’ve read him religiously since he became a byte-stained wretch, and he’s changing. He’s learning politics (emphases mine) …
Krugman - The G.O.P. - Going to Extreme - NYTimes.com
… Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.
True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.
That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis…
Better late than never. The new Krugman will be even more interesting than the old one was.
* I suspect on average, over time, the system in which we are embedded is more rational than it seems, but that’s another post. (Yes, sounds like “psychohistory”, and, yes, Krugman, like me, grew up on Asimov.)
Jean-Louis Gassée on Cloud 2.0 – post of the month
Jean-Louis Gassée blogs on Monday Note. He’s been doing it since Feb 4, 2008.
Gassée has done many things, but he’s best known for having been Apple’s CEO for a time. These days he’s a VC “general partner”. It’s safe to assume he’s rich beyond my paltry dreams of avarice. Why does he bother writing a not-terribly-famous blog? I don’t think it’s for the adword revenue.
My best guess is that he’s helping out the blog’s co-author, and that he writes for love. Alas for those who write to live, his free stuff is better than the best of the WSJ. Such is the curse of early 21st century journalism.
Today he takes on the Google-Microsoft cloud apps war. It’s fantastic stuff (emphases mine) …
… Last year, Microsoft’s total sales were $58B, down 3% from 2008 … Note the Operating Profit, 35%. The company spends 15% of its revenue in R&D and 28% in Sales, Marketing and General Administration….
… Compare this to Apple’s 29.5% Operating Profit, 3% R&D, and 9% SG&A [selling, general and administrative expense] with a comparable revenue level, in the $50B to $60B range annually…
… Microsoft’s Net Income is 25% of revenue, Apple’s is 22%….
… Microsoft Office represented 90% of the $19B Business Division sales, with a nice 64% Operating Profit … Roughly 60% of all Microsoft’s profits come from Office and a little more than 53% from Windows OS licenses (or what MS calls its “Client” business):
So… Office + Windows, 60% + 50% = 110% of Microsoft’s Operating Profit? The math is complicated by the losses in something called “Corporate-Level Activity”… …and, more importantly, by the hefty 73% operating loss in the company’s Online Services Business:
If I’m interpreting Gassée’s writing correctly, Apple’s numbers are only comparable to Microsoft’s because Microsoft “wastes” a huge percentage of revenue. Microsoft’s R&D percent spend is 5 times Apple’s and Microsoft spends 3 times as much on selling, general and administrative expense – not to mention “corporate-level activity”. If Microsoft were as stingy as Apple, their profits would be mind-blowing. Microsoft Office is a money-factory.
I’m reminded of an old Cringely column, in which he opined that Microsoft could have any profit number it wanted to have.
Gassée continues from numbers to user experience, saying the same things I’ve whined about but that, honestly, I never see mentioned anywhere else
.. Google Apps aren’t Office killers. I’ve been using Gmail in both the free and paid-for accounts. The basic email functions work well, but managing contacts is awful. (Months ago, I heard Google had an internal project called Contacts Don’t Suck. I’m still waiting.)…
… I’ve tried to use Google Docs to write, share, and edit these Monday Notes. Failure. Compared to any word processor, Google Docs feels clunky and constrained, and hyperlinks die when you download the document…
… Google Apps aren’t “there” yet. They’re still clunky, to say nothing of managing the “stuff behind the desk”. They’ve been quickly upgraded–perhaps too quickly– at the expense of the user experience. If managing Google Apps is as complicated as running an Office DVD install program, an important part of the Google theory falls apart. We see the trumpeted announcements of large organizations and governments that have turned to Google Apps, but what we don’t see is a courageous journalist going back to the proud early adopters a year later to tell us what actually transpired.
So why is it that only cranks like me and outliers like Gassée ever point out where Google fails? It’s a bit hallucinatory. Gmail’s contacts function has been terrible for years (starting with the weirdly isolated link to “contacts” in Gmail). Google Docs are still very weak (though about to move up a notch), and things are worse when you look at the channel confusion around Blogger, Google Doc, Buzz and Google Sites.
Really, I do love a lot about Google, but they have to give up on the idea that good design is emergent.
Go and read his Cloud 2.0 post and the “related columns” he references at the end. Don’t forget to marvel at the strange age we live in, where some of the best journalism is done for love*.
* P.S. As a bone to the pros, Gassée drops a broad hint on how they could write something interesting – go to the early adopters of Google Apps and tell us what happened.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
My top two blog posts - lessons in markets and humility
Thank you, Apple store couldn't fix the problem, they just sold me another battery, the new battery power was 50% of what it should be-the roaring fan being all consuming! Once I deleted the Canon printer and a dozen jobs stuck in the queue the fan stopped immediately after blowing for 6 months!The second is embarrassing. Warts are fascinating, but we really don't know if duct tape does anything special, or anything at all. This kind of unfunded research is, in its own way, as subject to publication bias as very well funded antidepressant research.
- I am very bad at judging what a large number of people will find interesting.
- If I were trying to attract readers, I'd write more wart posts.
- Apple needs to revamp their retail training and their technical support algorithms.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Fear the Cloud: Remember the Milk
Fear the Cloud.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Identity: Legion is a character defect?
It surprised me that I had to write the post. I thought it was self-evident that adults have many identities. Google's Buzz flop made me realize I was wrong. Obviously a lot of Googlers missed the obvious.
Google may be catching on. Not so Facebook's master - Mark Zuckerberg ...
An Internet Where Everyone Knows You’re a Dog — Crooked Timber
...While searching for evidence of Zuckerberg’s broader philosophy of information, a passage from David Kirkpatrick’s forthcoming book, The Facebook Effect, is quoted:
“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Zuckerberg is famously young, and famously wealthy. He has not had to grow up; he may never have to grow up.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Verizon iPhone – Can you hear us AT&T?
The WSJ is on board. The CDMA Verizon iPhone is expected after September (Sprint,also CDMA, too?). The AT&T iPhone will be shown in early June, probably available end of June.
My wife’s iPhone AT&T contract should be up in the Fall of this year, my contract expired last January. We have no reliable AT&T iPhone voice service in our St. Paul home. This is a big change from a year ago when iPhone service in MSP was fair to good. We’re paying for services AT&T can’t deliver – because they oversold their capacity.
We’re ready to switch.
If AT&T wants to keep our $2,400 plus/year family fees they need to do one or more of
- Fix our home voice service.
- Provide a free MicroCell for home use with some extra benefits.
- Dramatically reduce our phone bill.
It will be a great relief to have Verizon on board no matter what we do.
If we stay with AT&T, the combination of a likely 10% drop in AT&T iPhone users and a large decrease in new AT&T iPhone customers will improve service quality and dramatically reduce the cost of a used AT&T iPhone.
If we switch to Verizon (Sprint?) we’d get 3 new 4th generation iPhones and our old devices will become iTouch-equivalents.
Can’t happen soon enough.
Hours worked per year: Greece in #2 spot
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Google's DLF - The data privacy connection
google's letter to privacy commissioners. DLF cited as "[an effort] to protect customers' privacy and promote transparency."
Data Liberation gives people a way to revoke their trust in a company if they're not pleased with the way the company is behaving.
Whitewater age: Nashville edition
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Ken's Concertina
Ken's Concertina |
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Social Fail: Room for one more
Twitter: Missing multiple "account" (identity/stream) management. SMS based string limitation.
Buzz: Missing identity/pub stream management, overpowering ties to critical Google identity (heavy baggage, gmail, etc). Public profile by design. Lazy "if it sticks" design. Cross-Google coherence problem (Reader notes, Orkut, etc).
Facebook: Malign business model. Zuckerberg.Of course there are other alternatives to consider. There's AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Myspace, the Wall Street Journal, IBM, Oracle, Walmart, Newsweek ... Right. All equally irrelevant.
The big three are, amazingly, missing the target.
There's room for one more.
WWAD?
What would Apple do?