No, instead I’m concerned about our country’s lack of vision for the future and the can-do attitude that we seem somehow to have lost — at least, it’s missing from most discussions on issues facing us today. In a nutshell, I’m lamenting the apparent mortal illness of optimism and ingenuity — the kind of spirit and drive that ignores all the negative issues in the news, the naysayers and the partisans and simply presses forward, driving toward solutions that benefit all of society.
I know we had that once, because the car industry as we know it today was not the invention of large and well-funded corporations. It was created and delivered by men who, though they often worked against the most incredible odds, never lost sight of their dreams and visions. With that focus — which often earned them scorn and insults — they changed the world for the better in a way that centuries of innovation hadn’t. And they did it in mere decades.
Category: Education
Plus Shipping and Handling……, Making Money on eBay
Would you rather pay $10 and have free shipping or pay $5 and pay $6 for shipping? Answer: you prefer the latter. Well, at least if you are like most bidders on eBay.
Morgan and co-author Tanjim Hossain, an assistant professor at Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology, held 80 auctions of new
music CDs and Xbox video games to test how consumers respond to
different price schemes. In the eBay study, they varied the opening bid
price and shipping charges on identical CDs, ranging from Britney
Spears to Nirvana, and video games, including Halo and NBA 2K2.…A
perfectly informed and fully rational consumer will merely add together
the two parts of a price to obtain the total out-of-pocket price for an
item and then decide whether to buy and how much to bid based on this
total price.But that’s not what happened
in their eBay auctions. Instead, they found that lowering the opening
bid price while raising shipping charges attracts earlier and more
bidders and ultimately leads to higher revenues compared with doing the
reverse. Those findings suggest consumers pay less attention or even
completely overlook shipping costs when making bids…The quote is from a writeup, the full paper is
…Plus Shipping and Handling: Revenue (Non) Equivalence in Field Experiments on eBay (subs required).Also check out the interesting data on online pricing at Nash-equilibrium.com.
The Economics of Mulch
ST. FRANCIS: You’d better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle, As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.
GOD: No. What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter and to keep the soil moist and loose?
ST. FRANCIS: After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.
ST. FRANCIS They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.
Interesting Collaboration Software Approach – P2P
The Berklee College of Music, in Boston, already supplies NoteTaker software to all 3,850 of its students and plans to issue NoteShare to them, too. David Mash, its vice president for information technology, wrote that because “notebooks are immediately available without servers,” students can “collaborate on projects as the ideas hit them.” For instance, they could “drag their music into a notebook, add some comments and ask for criticism” from friends and teachers on the network.
The interesting aspect of this software is that it does not require any expensive/time consuming server tools. NoteShare FAQ.
WebSudoku
Sudoku (??) is the number placing game taking the world by storm – see Wikipedia.
The rules of Sudoku are simple. Enter digits from 1 to 9 into the blank spaces. Every row must contain one of each digit. So must every column, as must every 3×3 square.
Each Sudoku has a unique solution that can be reached logically without guessing.Getting Things Done
All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen’s core mantra of “Do it, delegate it, defer it”. If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into “In”. Never.
On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen’s core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called “life hacks”. Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com – all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Intelligence in the Internet Age
Take Diego Valderrama, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. If he were an economist 40 years ago, he may have used a paper, pencil and slide rule to figure out and chart by hand how the local economy might change with a 1 percent boost in taxes. But because he’s a thoroughly modern guy, he uses knowledge of the C++ programming language to create mathematical algorithms to compute answers and produce elaborate projections on the impact of macroeconomic changes to work forces or consumer consumption.
Does that mean he’s not as bright as an economist from the 1950s? Is he smarter? The answer is probably “no” on both counts. He traded one skill for another. Computer skills make him far more efficient and allow him to present more accurate–more intelligent–information. And without them, he’d have a tough time doing his job. But drop him into the Federal Reserve 40 years ago, and a lack of skill with the slide rule could put an equal crimp on his career.Ray Kurzweil
Glenn Reynolds interviews Kurzweil, with some interesting charts on US science and technology education.
Tufte in Madison
Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course Taught by Edward Tufte is in Madison August 8, 2005 ($320/person):
- “One visionary day….the insights of this class lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual displays.” WIRED
- “The Leonardo da Vinci of data.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
- The Fee includes Tufte’s three books: Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and the 15″ x 22″ Napoleon’s March poster
I attended his course in Chicago last year. Highly recommended. More on Edward Tufte.
Steve Jobs Odyssey
A transcript of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech, given this past weekend.