Solvation

Pre-emptive strike

It's not April 1, but I can't help thinking this is meant with boatloads of irony:

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday. ...

The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.

I guess it's okay to arrest people who assumed they'd use their designated drivers, hail a taxi, or those people at conferences who were walking back to their hotels?

"People walk out into traffic and get run over, people jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss."

Oh. Well, in that case.... (Really? This is a problem in Texas? People jumping off balconies into a swimming pool - big cause of death is it?  But everyone wears bicycle helmets, I'm sure.)

I absolutely don't know what to do with this.  Is this humor?  Is this prohibitionism? Is it really a secret sting?  Do these people really think this is a good idea?

Online Research

OK, here's a pdf that should help you and your 10+ year old child become more efficient at online searching. 

Note that the biggest problems kids seem to have is that they type in their keywords, get the results and then just start reading.  They have to learn how to quickly sift and sort through the results for something useful, and then further to verify that it's really useful.

After they've done all that, they need to develop some systems for double-checking the validity of what they're reading.

(My apologies to everyone with graphic design sensibilities.  I began by using a template, but then it didn't quite fit and I started... adjusting things... anyway I hope it's still more fun-looking to read for the target 12-15 year old age group than the original 7-page small font Word document.  Feedback appreciated, both from a content and a design perspective; though I'm not a designer obviously when I hack around this much at things I need all the help I can get!)

Online Research

The Basics:

•    Best Dictionary:  http://www.merriamwebster.com
•    Best Dictionary for Slang:  http://www.urbandictionary.com
•    Best Thesaurus and coolest way to improve your vocabulary:  http://www.visualthesaurus.com
•    Best resource for "Why do we call blank, 'blank'?" questions: http://www.etymonline.com/
•    Best way to find driving directions: http://googlemaps.com

•    Best Sites on How to Write a Thesis Statement:

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/thesistatement.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/thesis_statement.shtml

•    More writing sites:

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/logic.html (how to form persuasive arguments)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html (how to write conclusions)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/intro.html (how to write introductions)

•    Multi-Language support: http://home.unilang.org/
•    Best English Grammar summary: http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/grammar.htm
•    Best free resource for self-teaching technology online (the top entry is HTML): http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

Sophisticated and Anticipatory Demand? Or two nations, under God?

Let's have a little reality check.

Nielsen published broadband penetration data (thanks to SmartMobs, btw).

So, as usual in these things, you can't really quite manage to reconcile the terms they use since they're never clearly defined. 

The original press release of the report says, "95.5 million users from home of active broadband," 68% of people who have internet have broadband, and "internet penetration in the US" is 74%.  Now, first note that it's very ambiguous whether they mean households, users, or home+office; but let's assume they mean users at home, since the data that they specify indicates this.  Let's also assume that they say the word "active" meaningfully, which is to say that there's also a non-active segment.

So, given this, that means there are 220.5 million internet users, of which 150 million are broadband internet users.  Of those 150 million, 95.5 million are "active" broadband internet users.  Keep in mind there are 298 million people in the US.

Now what does that mean?

That means that 54.4 million users have internet but not broadband and 29.5 have broadband but are not active!  And that's in addition to the 77.5 million who don't have internet connectivity at home at all.

If you know that the top 10 states in the US have over half the population (55% - California alone has 12%), and you think that "almost everyone I know in online a lot -- and pretty much everyone has broadband" you should realize that you're way on one end of the "active user" continuum!

The other thing they mention in their report is that the average "active" user is now at 30.5 hours per month (an hour a day) of home use online.  This means for every 4 hour per day, and 8 hours on the weekend news junkie (or porno surfer or everquest fiend) there are a lot of people who are counted as "active" users who occasionally go online to check email or whatever but who certainly don't live there.

Most tellingly, they point out that internet penetration has stabilized at around 74%.

IP is not the only intangible - new ways to go crazy

I wrote about this is my main blog.

Link: This Essay Breaks the Law - New York Times.

I own your friends

I've recently had the revelation that valuing intangible property has led to all kinds of dysfunction along the lines of simply patenting all kinds of stuff but never making anything.  In other words, the POTENTIAL for value creation is valued, regardless of any progress made on the realization of the potential.

Well, that's not so good.

But the thing that really concerned me came up when negotiating a contract a couple of weeks ago.  In some cases the language is structured to support vicious fights over the thoughts in peoples' heads -- assuming everyone has money and time for that.  Nowadays, the Supreme Court is all set to hear a case on whether someone can own a scientific fact (and thus any ideas derived therefrom -- thinking -- violates the patent).

So, if intangibles like relationships and personality attributes create environments that improve value creation, will corporations attempt to own your relationships?  Will they monitor personality and if an employee becomes withdrawn where it was assumed he was gregarious, declare, "Breach of contract"? Upon joining a company, with social networks online, will attempts be made along the lines:  everyone not officially joined to you, but who joins your network during the course of your work there be property of the company?  To what extent will I have to declare my social affiliations?

Like anything else there's always a potential for dysfunction, in this case for assuming that transfering control from the individual to the corporation would in no way disrupt the value creation process.

And then there are people who can see causality in a direction that enhances results:  if creating intellectual property enhances the value of the company, then this DOESN'T mean that the filing clerk needs to have a PhD, but it does mean that the PhDs need to be free to think.

More on Math and Science

I was a Destination Imagination event last weekend, where I met two engineers from India, one working in the US at IBM, the other at Oracle. In our downtime we discussed differences in math and science education in the US and India.  There were three things of note:

Pandora

Is this related to anything? No idea.*  But it's so cool!

* okay, a little idea: maybe, just maybe, the idea of popularity / collaborative filtering is being supplanted by the idea of genome, or understanding essential components of a complex system, and then pattern matching off an initial input of preference by just one person.