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What I read posted on September 6, 2010

General

The Atlantic has a feature in which people talk about what they read. The other day, I was reading Chris Anderson's (and was interested to see that he was reading BusinessWeek on his iPad). The idea in the series, not new to any of us, is that information is flooding into our lives, and we have to make decisions about what to consume. This has parallels to the decisions we make about what we eat. Food used to be scarce, and we were omnivores. And when food became plentiful, we had to learn how to diet. The same is true now with information.

So, what do I read? First, I should note that I left BusinessWeek in December and I'm writing a book. That has radically changed my reading habits. I used to cover social media and the Numerati stuff for BusinessWeek. Now I no longer have a beat. And I used to read a lot on the bus to New York. Now I no longer commute.

So. I read the New York Times, probably more on the iPad than the paper edition that I'm still paying for. I don't read it nearly as much as I used to. In my book-writing stage, news isn't as important as it used to be. I find much of it depressing. I spend more time reading sports than the opinion page. My paper subscription to the Wall Street Journal is running out, and I'll not renew. I'd pay maybe $40 a year for an online subscription, but that's not available. I'll do without. I've long respected the paper, but aside from the occasional a-head or narrative, I never enjoyed it much. My job no longer requires it.

I used to read loads of blogs, and I spent maybe an hour a day on Twitter. Now I spend a fraction of that. I'm no longer sitting in front of a computer in an office eight hours a day. Also, this book is keeping my busy. When I'm done, in February, i may turn more to social media. But I'll probably look for a different blend, maybe more science and philosophy, less tech, advertising and media.

I still subscribe to the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Wired and the New York Review of Books. I don't read them nearly as much as I used to. (No more commute) I used to get Newsweek for $10 a year. Now they want $50. I've let it lapse. Magazines have become something I carry for the 20 minutes of taking off and landing in airplanes. Sad but true.

I'm reading a lot more books, many of them on my iPad. Just yesterday I downloaded Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and am enjoying it. Over the summer I read Moby Dick. I'm working my way through Richard Holme's Age of Wonder--How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. (I'm seeing some parallels there between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson.) I'm also reading Tony Judt's Postwar.

For my book, I've read lots of books about artificial intelligence and the brain. A couple I'd recommend include Alex Wright's Glut, Mastering Information through the Ages, and James Bailey's Afterthought, a fascinating history of science and math. Another one I'm nearly through is George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

The big point about my changing reading is this: Most news matters less to me. (I'll learn about it tomorrrow, or next month, and I'm not making any investment decisions.) The most valuable information generates insights and ideas (and fun). It changes the way I think. That's what I'm after.

The TV revolution: Changing the players posted on September 3, 2010

General

Picture the American industrial economy in about 1960 (before the global and information economies rejiggered things). In the middle was the car. A host of industries, from steel and rubber, to glass, chemicals, oil, fed into it. Putting aside other (and overlapping) industries, such as aviation and armaments, much of the economy revolved around the car.

In the entertainment/information economy, the same could be said for the TV. The car moved our bodies; the TV filled our heads, and continues to do so. Even with all of the other media available, each American watches it for an average of four hours per day. An enormous industry of manufacturers, advertisers, producers and programmers has developed around it.

Now, what happens if the very nature of TV changes? Dave Morgan explores the the possibilities in his latest MediaPost column. People have been expecting this battle for the living room for more than a decade, but he thinks it's starting now. He begins with Apple, and its push into TV. But pretty soon you realize that virtually every company that touches information, whether it's Samsung, Microsoft, Comcast, Netflix, Dell, Verizon, Facebook, Cisco or Google, they are all going to be involved in a free-for-all over whatever you want to call the TV market over the next several years.

It has a parallel to what happened to cars. Globalization opened up the car industry to new players, and new approaches. It became a free-for-all. Detroit cratered, Japan boomed, and later China and Korea. The process took decades. But in industries that move bits instead of atoms, things move a lot faster. Morgan, incidentally, is hoping to cash in on this revolution with his advertising start-up, Simulmedia, which delivers data-driven promotion to TV viewers.

Using predictive analytics for fantasy football posted on September 2, 2010

General

You'd think that a master of predictive analytics would steer clear of emotional entanglements with the lowly Detroit Lions. But hometown sympathies resist the power of reason and statistics. As a Philadelphian, this is something I know.

In any case, an IBM analyst named Hetal Thaker reports great success using predictive analytics for her fantasy football team. For 11 years, she chose her roster the old-fashioned way, by the gut, and won her league only once. For the last five years, she's been building predictive models and using them to pick her players. The results: Three wins in five years.

She says she has developed new metrics over the past years. One, for example, is called the "team factor." She explains:

"[It] takes into account not only the player, but his supporting cast. This is very important because you can haave the best wide receiver in the league, say Larry Fitzgerald of Arizona, but if he doesn't have a good quarterback passing to him, he's unlikely to have the fantasy value you would anticipate."

As a gut-driven fan, I have to quibble here. It seems to me that some of the statistical superstars often play for middling teams, because the great teams have a more balanced attack. If you think of the greatest running back, by stats, from OJ Simpson to Detroit's own Barry Sanders, they were often one-man shows on teams going nowhere. Walter Payton's Bears finally won a Superbowl, but long after his prime.

Still, she's right about quarterbacks. Without a good one, receivers are lost. That said, this discussion inspired me to look at Barry Sanders highlights on YouTube. It's almost enough to make me cheer for the Lions.

Why count on the brain for truth? posted on August 31, 2010

General

Try this. Hold your thumb as far away as you can from your eye. That represents about one percent of your field of vision. When we see things, that's about the extent of our focus. The rest of the picture is supplied by schema that we fill in from our memory.

I was discussing this yesterday with Rich Carlson, a psychology professor at Penn State. He said that we have limited capacity for new sensory input. And much like a computer on narrow-band, we store a lot of cached information to round out the meager flows we process. That's why people often experience what they believe, instead of what they actually see or hear. And it's why when their brains are busy watching a basketball game and counting the passes between the players, they miss other phenomena. (see video below)

These things have been known for a while. But now, increasingly, we have sensors to back us up: security cameras, digital recorders. And as those machines take over the monitoring and measuring of physical reality, our own views and testimony will be discounted. Referees in professional sports are already experiencing this. The testimony of eye-witnesses in court, I'm sure, will also be taken ever more lightly as digital evidence piles up.

My question: Is this progress? Will the brain simply be regarded as an instrument of art, feelings and communication, and an unreliable witness or judge of what's happening in the world? Is this a good thing?

Why trust Facebook with our history? posted on August 24, 2010

General

Scott Rosenberg discusses the digital records we leave of our day-to-day existence, and wonders why anyone would entrust them to Facebook. It's a good question. Many of us don't have the zeal of a Gordon Bell when it comes to monitoring and recording our lives. But we're recording big sections all the same, with our conversations, updates and photos. If that trove occurs on Facebook, how do we get our hands on it 10, 20 or 30 years from now?

You could ask the same question about many Web-based services, including e-mail accounts and photo services on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. But I find my stuff lodged with those companies easier to search and retrieve. (The key, as Bell will tell you, is being able to search it, because the bits of data we're dying to find will be buried under mountains of stored junk.)

Facebook, though, will likely have a richer stream of data describing our lives, especially if its new "places" app takes off. It would seem to me that Facebook could build a niche business offering to archive personal datastreams for premium customers.

Goldblatt exhibit: Eyes on South Africa posted on August 10, 2010

General

We finally got to the Jewish Museum in New York to see the David Goldblatt exhibit. He's a South African who photographed people in his country, white, black and "colored" alike, making their best efforts to live normal lives under apartheid, which created the most abnormal of circumstances. It's a wonderful exhibit if you get the chance.

Confessions of a geezer at the movies posted on July 22, 2010

General

I went to the movies last night and came to grips with a challenge I face: If I want to enjoy popular culture, and maybe even thrive in the work place, I'm going to need to achieve some level of expertise in video games. Games will provide the architecture, and increasingly, the interface, for much of what we do.

The movie was Inception, starring Leonardo di Caprio. In involves an adventure that continues through various levels of dreams. If it had just been about dreams and alternate realities, I think I would have loved it. But this movie behaved like an action video game. Loads of shooting and explosions, lots of buildings and bodies falling, and you're wondering the whole time: What level of the dream are we in? And you learn that certain people, when they're shot, descend to a lower level of dreams.

With all the pyrotechnics and the various levels, it felt like a video game. Leonardo had to descend into a series of alternate worlds and master them in order to reach his prize. As David Denby writes in the New Yorker, it had a thing or two in common with the Greek myth about Orpheus, who has to descend into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice. That would probably make a good video game too.

Tech designer Fred Brooks on designing life posted on July 20, 2010

General

I came across a wonderful interview in Wired with Fred Brooks, who oversaw the creation of IBM's System/360 mainframe. It's apparently not yet up on line. Here's another one with Brooks in ComputerWorld.

My favorite nugget is about designing for scarcity:

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

I think people make this mistake through entire careers and marriages regarding money. They tend to think that enough money will compensate for other things they have shortages of: time, love, fun. "Once I get more money, we'll have a chance to do that stuff. But not now..." This requires some recalibration, and it's hard, because our entire system, inside and outside our heads, focuses on what we can count. In that area, money has no rival.

Brooks also debunks a popularly held belief: that the software industry has been impervious to performance improvements. "Software," he says, "is not the exception. Hardware is the exception."

No technology in history has the kind of rapid cost/performance gains that computer hardware has enjoyed. Progress in software is more like progress in automobiles or airplanes: We see steady gains, but they're incremental.

If I lose my house should my car insurance go up? posted on July 17, 2010

General

I got a flurry of phone messages from my auto insurance agent this week. Great chance to save money! Well, that's one way of looking at it.

Allstate is jacking up my rates so high in my traditional insurance that they're practically forcing me to switch to a different plan, or a different company. The old plan, I learned, guarantees that they'll never drop my coverage, even if I wreck the car non-stop. The new, cheaper plan has no such guarantee.

OK, they want the flexibility to drop people. That makes sense from a business point of view. But what caught my attention was the shift in the data they're analyzing. In the old plan, which they're clearly phasing out, they consider a driver's age and driving record. In the new scheme, the agent told me, they focus largely on a driver's credit rating.

Clearly, there has to be a correlation between credit ratings and driving behavior. As the people at FICO have told me, high scores are a proxy for responsible behavior. But consider the exceptions. Just like the population at large, plenty of people who pay their bills have drinking problems or plow into traffic yakking on cellphones. (Of course, with these new policies, unlike the old ones, Allstate can drop them after a few mishaps.)

But it's the other side that's more concerning. Consider a highly responsible driver who lost her house and job in the recent crash, and then blew out a credit card or two. Is there any reason she should suddenly have to pay higher premiums for auto insurance? It isn't fair. But that's the nature of the data economy: If the Numerati cannot measure your specific behavior, they measure something else and then draw statistical correlations. It works for groups, but individuals can get mauled.

World Cup tie-breaker: Pull the goalkeepers posted on June 30, 2010

General

I've made this suggestion before, and my European friends sigh and tell me that I don't understand or appreciate soccer. I disagree. And as a fan of soccer, I loathe the tie-breaking ritual of penalty kicks. They eliminate the beauty of the game, the team aspect, the passing, the strategy, and reduce it to something closer to Russian Roulette.

So here's my suggestion. In the second 15 minutes of overtime, pull the goalies. Each team will have to keep attacking and playing defense, but there will be possibilities for dramatic goals, some of them perhaps from unthinkably long distances. Will teams deploy more players forward, hoping to position themselves for strong shots? Or will they keep a couple of fullbacks defending the goal with their bodies? I'd love to watch it. And it would be a fairer test of soccer than penalty kicks.

@MichaelPizzo My pleasure. Another book u might like is Afterthought by James Bailey. Not new, but puts data in context of sci/math history

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