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Of maps and men
A very cool visualization of the imigration / emigration data: To remember: the relative sizes of countries / continents on most maps is not representative of the true ratios, because most map projections were not meant for that. If you want to play around with different projections, here is a nice page from Wolfram (unfortunately…
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The myth of the cognitive quantum jumps
Update: see this presentation given by Scott Berkun at Google, which which explains my points much more eloquently. Very often media (and I’m using the word “media” here in its most comprehensive way – including things like blogs, Slashdot, etc) tells us the story of some uber-hyper-mega-cool new-unseen-until-now method of performing X. This leads many…
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Brave new world
What do you call a world where tens of thousands of people have the ability to take out considerable part of an important infrastructure item. This the world we live in. Tens of thousands of people can create botnets and use them to attack other sites. Most recently the Metasploit site was attacked together with…
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The Amazon Mechanical Turk
A good series of posts from the “A Computer Scientist in a Business School” blog on the topic of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (and using it to solicit reviews of products): Soliciting Reviews on Mechanical Turk Time Out New York and Mechanical Turk Is it unethical to pay for reviews? Monitoring the Dynamics of Mechanical…
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Rewriting history
I came over this article: Our Revised News and it reminded me of a huge problem: it is very easy to modify things on websites and then claim that “it was like this since the start of times” (sidenote: you can f’*** it up and let the HTTP server show the real update date in…
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Instruction Manual for Life
Via Neural Market Trends: It is worth watching, and it went in a totally different direction than I anticipated after the first seconds.
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Interesting thoughts from the Sophos blog
Niall from SophosLabs UK asks: why does spam work? and gives an interesting answer: In his opinion, although we think that claims made by spam is very “out there” and wonder why people keep falling for it, in fact it is no worse that what we see in other media (like TV commercials). On some…
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The Global Culture Sub-Layer
I’ve said it before and I’m standing by it: If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer However I think that a language and culture shared by many people would be a big step towards reducing the feeling of animosity we have between different groups of people. You see, people are selfish mostly. To…
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Influencing people – is it worth it?
I’ve recently read the book “Artful Persuasion” by Harry Mills (see the Amazon reviews). All in all, it was an interesting book to read, it contains many fun anecdotes and quotes which entertain the reader and illustrate the point. Many of the suggestions should be fairly obvious to us, cynical consumers who are bombarded daily…
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Beauty is all around us…
you just have to look. For example, we live in an overcrowded, noisy city and still, I was able to find these flowers on my way home from work. I’ve always said that I don’t need a camera phone, but this time it came in handy (and even the psychedelic effect it added to the…