Hoyas off season loss: Summers

Summers going into the NBA draft. Gtown needs him. Too bad. He was a loose cannon this year. Still: big loss for the Hoyas.

Experts Overrated? I want to be a fox!

I was drawn to this Kristof editorial someone emailed me at work (where I'm an expert of course -- but, aren't we all?!):

Nicholas D. Kristof: Want to play some darts?
Some quotes:

The best example of the awe that an "expert" inspires is the "Dr. Fox effect." It's named for a pioneering series of psychology experiments in which an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators.

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts' forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

I can relate.

At my old job, we tried a Dr. Fox thing at a conference – we hired a comic to start his presentation as if he were an outside expert. We fed him some verbiage to make him sound current, then he started to twist it, and finally he just admitted and went on with a comedy routine that naturally ended up with various stupid jokes. It was funny. And, yes, people were fooled.

Another time, a colleague and I were presenting at a Networld+Interop session and we had a typo on a slide. So, my friend said: “Oh by the way, how many of you are aware of the “XH1.59” (or whatever the typo was) standard?” At least half the audience raised their hand.

Beyond being an expert, if this article is right, I want to be a fox! Not a "Dr. Fox" fake, but the fox that's more successful in predictions than a hedgehog. I always wanted to be a fox. Or foxy. Or something. Uh. Oops. I guess I'm no expert.

And, in the "I hope so" dept.: Universal Charger?

Came across this: Mobile Industry Unites to Drive Universal Charging Solution for Mobile Phones. I certainly hope so (even Apple -- maybe convincing them to have a power and sound version). I hear they are already doing this in Japan. If only here. I'm all for it. In fact, for now, USB remains the only guaranteed charger for most of my stuff.

Balancing here ... this IS funny, Mr. Seagal!

Cracked.COM posting
Honestly, deep journalism like this strikes a chord with me. I confess: it's wonderful to see the high and mighty for what they really are. I knew what Steven Seagal was -- I've suffered through his well plotted and well acted movies before. But, to have Hollywood bent over a knee and spanked ... well, that's refreshing.

I need more flow charts.

Theory is definitely LESS funny than practice

Another day trolling the silly blogs and news in my reader program made me run into this:UK researcher identifies just 8 patterns as the cause of all humor. That looks interesting, says I. Maybe I can finally figure out how to tell a joke. Or, learn to remember them, so I can tell them later. So, I wing over there, and see quotes like this (just a subset):

"Basically humour is all about information processing, accelerating faculties that enable us to analyse and then manipulate incoming data."

I'm not discouraged: this could still be leading to something funny. I note that there's a web site for the book: "The Eight Patterns Of Humour" by Alastair Clarke. You can download a PDF copy of the theory of funny there. So I did. Here's a quote:

We may find anything funny at any time, and whenever we do so it is the result of exactly the same simple process, one whose economy and scope are unparalleled. Underpinning this system are just eight patterns, the recognition of which has produced all the humour that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or individual taste.

Pattern recognition theory is not so much a system for humour as a system for human intellect since they are, at the profoundest level of their mechanisms, one and the same thing.

And, I'm still not amused. What's funny? All I can see is, as usual with all things said with a British accent, the misspelling of the term "humour." Us Americans, we barely use that word anyway. Using it, makes it clear that something UNfunny is about to happen. That makes me laugh: separated by a common language.

Unfortunately, there's nothing funny about the theory of humor, spelled or misspelled. Oh well. Educational = not funny.

Gearing up ... or not?

Recently someone asked: what if Google failed? What businesses would be affected. I really don't thank that many. For example, I found this site that is tracking how many apps use Google Gears: List of Web Applications That Use Google Gears. Doesn't seem like that many (I count 11, and some are by Google itself). Is Google really a platform or just a zeitgeist? Hmm.

What is identity? What is a resource?

Hmm. I'm not sure I know. But, others discuss this, such as Thompson in What are URIs.

It's all very RESTful, though. Like Zen. Like ...

MySpace Music -- Ready (Better) or Not?

MySpace's new music offerings are described in today's NY Times "BITS" blog MySpace Upgrades Its Music Offerings.

To quote:

“Right now a large number of people are sharing links back to public playlists on MySpace. We are going to start to figure out how to go beyond that and we have some ideas,” he said. “The key for me is, I want to make sure we can create revenue from that. So far there is a lot of ‘hyper-syndication’ on the Net, and it hasn’t returned a high value. We want to make sure there’s a business to go with that. We don’t want to just do it.”

Ok, yes, make money. But, nonetheless: just do it! If you don't Google will. Or Amazon or someone else.

I want to be in the web-scale identifier business

I found this article The Simple Joys of Web-Scale Identifiers when reading my friend Nick Gall's blog: Ironick which is, perhaps it goes without saying when referring to a friend's work, FANTASTIC.

The point of the article is that we should stop inventing new GUIDs (globally unique IDs) and just reuse those others have already created. If we did, we could all find when we're referring to the same thing and perhaps leverage that. The article discusses this in the context of music -- identifying artists or songs uniquely so that everyone referring to a particular version even of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" would get the same version (e.g., live or studio). Then, we could take that to iTunes and/or Amazon or Last.FM to hear or buy that song. We could produce song lists that everyone could reuse against their own personal copies.

Life would be great. So, how do you get into the standard GUID business? How did MusicBrainz? These are the things I need to research.

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Music Shows Your Smarts?

This article (WSJ: Books and Music that make you dumb) makes me laugh:

What if you like both Radiohead (="smart") and Tool (="dumb"), like me? Hybrid?

Still, it IS interesting to leverage the data that the big social sites are collecting to learn more about tastes, not unlike NetFlix does for it's space. In fact, why can't Netflix gradually get clients on FaceBook linked up and then do this analysis for fave videos (or couldn't FlixSter)?

Love it!