Be sure to try out Pandora. It’s essentially a music referral service, fun and easy to use, and pretty good at finding new music you like.
The Creative Generalist mentioned this service on the same day as Greg Hughes - dot - net discussed it.
What I find strange is that Pandora uses a manual process (described here) to extract the “genome” from music.
Firefly from MIT was one of the earliest recommendation systems.
The fact that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will be the Democratic party’s 2008 presidential candidate makes me hopeful for declines in racism and sexism, in the USA as well as the rest of the world. A recent article on NPR raised the question, “Which evil will fall first, racism or sexism?” It seems an awful question to people who desire the eradication of all forms of prejudice. However, as noted in Liane Hanson’s piece, African Americans got the vote before women did. Other countries have had female heads of state. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Golda Meir, India’s Indira Gandhi and Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto come immediately to mind. Countries with minority heads of state don’t come to mind as easily (although Peru had Alberto Fujimori). In South Africa, people of color were disenfranchised by apartheid law, so that doesn’t count!
If you can think of other historical precedents on either side of the question, please comment below.
Another reason organizations fail to invest in innovations is the difficulty of forecasting sales. It is hard enough to do sales forecasts on existing, mature products, much less on innovations that have never been sold before. In the absence of sales forecasts, the return side of an ROI equation is unknown, and an investment cannot be made rationally. If a forecast is calculated from market data, it remains risky because it lacks the commitment of salespeople accountable for delivering on it. And the propensity of rational salespeople will be to sell existing, mature products, rather than risking their compensation on innovations.
Some people think important subjects shouldn’t be made accessible to large audiences.
I am of the opposite opinion, that important or complex subjects should be made accessible. Indeed, some great works of writing and graphics have had this very goal.
NPR had a superb article on the importance of imaginative play in children’s cognitive and social development. It reminded me of the book Einstein Never Used Flashcards, which we have given to several new parents.
Considering starting to read blogs or write a blog?
Finding blogs to read:
Writing your own blog:
Recent controversies about the teaching of creationism in public schools has made me question the limits of free speech.
Like a good scientist, I try to be realistic about the limits of my knowledge, and open to novel ideas.
The problem is people demanding a forum in which to misinform or bias the public about subjects in which the public doesn’t have expertise. This is an exploitation of the openness of free speech and of the humility of science. You can’t “put both sides out there and let people make up their own mind” because falsehoods are often easier to communicate than the truth, and it is sometimes easier to question the truth than to understand it.
Other recent events are making me wonder how free speech might be limited to prevent such exploitation:
It has been said that all software engineering problems are solved by introducing a level of indirection. Is this tantamount to introducing division of labor?
A business usually has a core product. After experiencing some success with the product, the company may come under price pressure from customers. So it packages ancillary products with the core product in order to maintain the price. This is merely a symptom of the natural process of commoditization as competition increases.
Some companies fail to realize that, though they may have invested in product improvements, it is customers who ultimately determine the value of the product. Giddy with the past success of the core product, they assume that it is still as valuable as it ever was. Although the price charged for it may be the same as it ever was, value is shifting away from the core and toward the ancillary products. The reason this is a mistake is that the core attracts additional investment based on the large revenue attributed to it, but the returns on this investment are diminishing. The peripheral products are starved for investment because small revenues are attributed to them, but the returns on even small investments are superior.
Lately I have been doing some reading that made me think about pseudoscience. It seems like pseudosciences occur as a consequence of the following conditions:
So pseudosciences may start out as legitimate sciences, with people making observations, forming hypotheses, and testing them for predictability, but when the scientific method is not followed, they go awry. For example, astrology and astronomy both have their roots in the legitimate study of celestial objects and their movements. Unfortunately, astrologers jumped to the wrong conclusions about the earthly effects of those objects, and evangelized these conclusions without testing them.