My 'opinion cloud', or oops I think I just coined a phrase.

I am in the middle of about half a dozen big projects at the moment and I can not concentrate on any of them.  So I thought I would get a little blog writing in, and maybe get my brain back on track. 

About Three weeks ago I was in Boston to take part in an interview with some marketing types that are working for The Science Channel.  They found me through my meetup.com profile where I guess the meetings I go to are sufficiently geeky as to blair loud and clear to anyone interested that I am someone who is likely to watch science television.  Lo, their assessment was dead on, and I am as predictable as I feared. 

Anyway, they had me come into the Boston and sat me down on a nice couch in the Ritz Carlton and asked me what would I do if I could remake The Science Channel.  I rubbed my hands together and for the next hour and a half brain dumped all kinds of ideas about science and tech television.  What I liked, teeny tiny detailed, statistically accurate,  fiddly programming.  What I hated, showing off the latest gun, without going into the engineering of it, or the Man vs Wild fiasco, with him getting a proper camp site and three square everyday. 

In the middle of all this I mentioned that the more REAL they made the science, the more believable they made the programming, no matter how geeky and seemingly impossible it would be for anyone to stay interested in the topic, the more props they would get from the internet sites I frequented.  When he asked for which sites, I casually said, "you know my 'opinion cloud', Digg.com, Slashdot.org, Space.com, various blogs, some personal online groups I am part of like Gweep.net, and my Facebook.com friends and meetup.com groups. 

His face twisted into this really neat comical mask, like he was tasting some very strongly flavored exotic fruit he wasn't sure he liked or not, but he was sure other people would like.  "Your 'opinion cloud' hmm? and should we be trying to create our own opinion clouds to get people interested in The Science Channel?" 

"Oh no, no!" I said "Just make super detailed really scientific programming, and not the little technology montage programs they have out there now, and they the opinion cloud will naturally drift over to your programming faster than you think."

Now the fun thing here is i thought up the phrase that moment just trying to explain all the places I get interested in 'some new thing' and the guy kept asking questions about opinion clouds instead of The Science Channel.  I think it really got his brain working.

So, if in a few months you see some marketing for the next great opinion cloud, you know where the word came from.

Blogged with Flock

Hi! I'm testing Jott...

Hi! I'm testing Jott sent into my Polymathmatics Blog for fun. We'll see if it works, I have no idea. And I have no idea to even [...] as a published or just as a draft. Well, will be [...] to you. There's a bunch of speakers in the background and I'm using my bluetooth headphones. [Poor Audio Quality, Please Listen] listen

Powered by Jott

Updated:
I am leaving the above as it came in from Jott just to show how it did. I was not trying to speak loudly anymore than I would to someone I was talking to on the phone. I don't know if I will use this for much, but it is nice to have. It certainly is a good fast way to make a quick draft of an idea, but it requires me to go in a clean up my common ticks of speech and any mis-transcribed sections.

I've got too many hacks

iPhone Hacks: Running out of Application space on your iPhone or touch? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I finally jailbroke, jailbreaked  (what is the past tense of jailbreak?) my iPhone a bit ago and after playing around with all the hacks out there, I seem to be running up against the ~300MB limit for files in the user directory.  I found this explanation on TUAW but have only done half of it.  It looks straight forward enough, I just need to ssh into my iPhone from my computer because typing in unix command lines on the virtual keyboard is WAY too annoying to do anything more than a few lines long.

Blogged with Flock

A moment away from work...or securing iPhone WIFI over EDGE

I have been plugging away at some rather dull CSS issues and my mind kept wandering to the hacks on my iPhone. I am in a coffee shop just down the street from my place, and they have open WIFI.

I kept thinking about the new installed apps on my iPhone and how it would be nice to just grab whatever open WIFI signal that was around without worry. Then I realized there are two radios on the phone. The EDGE data connection can act as a low bandwidth channel to send encryption data to any site, and the WIFI can send content data. The WIFI connection can connect to the main site with a suffix from the phone number. The encryption can be updated in real time say over an SMS message. So the only thing that gets sent over the clear would be the web address and that could be scrambled with a VPN like middle man server.

I did a quick search and it doesn't look like anyone is doing this yet. The programming is beyond my kung-fu but I would love to feel comfortable using open WIFI hotspots as well as the ones I have to pay for the encryption.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds

I found this article by way of Slashdot and I love the idea.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds: "Conventional wisdom says that the primary reason why so many people do not accept Darwin's theory of evolution is that they find it threatening to their religious beliefs. There is no question that religion is a big part of the reason behind the large number of people who reject evolution. But I am convinced that just as often, the cause and effect is reversed: people hold onto their fundamentalist religious beliefs because evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many."

This has the same flavor of the reason people find thinking out of the box to be unprofitable. The key ideas are both about starting at Knowledge point (A) and trying to get to Solution point (Z). Most people try to just barrel through the first step then the next BCD...until they find their solution. Instead taking a step back and asking what alphabet of solutions you could be dealing with lets you easily eliminate huge numbers of wrong steps. I will have to see if I can come up with an easy explanation that I can use this technique with in regards to Tomorrowish when I am explaining it to people.

Fwd: Iphone posting

So here is my first post from my new iPhone.  It is also my first meal at the new "Natick Collection" (aka natick
Mall) with quite a few new expensive stores.

The Met Bar here has a good burger, even if a bit small, it is tasty.  Unfortunatly for me they still are not stocked with any beer other than Bud.

The iPhone typing is working quite well and the mall has several different free wifi networks.  Once I logged onto the network here the speed has been good, and videos even downloaded quickly.

So far I am loving the iPhone and a big thank you goes to my family who chipped in together to get it for me since I really am enjoying it a lot


Sent from my iPhone

DVC Learning Styles Inventory Results

According to this test from Diablo Valley College my learning style is Visual / Nonverbal. The irony is that all the techniques that it says to use are ones I have tried on and off, and have never been comfortable with. They are techniques that include lots of stuff that requires more organizing skill to keep using. When I used these techniques I couldn't keep using them long enough to incorporate a second and then a third learning technique.

My only consistent and slowly improving technique is to use and organize as much on my computer as possible. GTD and online tools like gmail and gcal have helped me a lot recently and I am sticking with them long enough that I am multiple techniques can now add to each others effectiveness.

DVC Learning Styles Inventory Results: "The results of Mick Mouse's learning inventory are:

Visual/Nonverbal 34 Visual/Verbal 24 Auditory 20 Kinesthetic 30

Your primary learning style is:

The Visual/ Nonverbal Learning Style


You learn best when information is presented visually and in a picture or design format. In a classroom setting, you benefit from instructors who use visual aids such as film, video, maps and charts. You benefit from information obtained from the pictures and diagrams in textbooks. You tend to like to work in a quiet room and may not like to work in study groups. When trying to remember something, you can often visualize a picture of it in your mind. You may have an artistic side that enjoys activities having to do with visual art and design.

Learning Strategies for the Visual/ Nonverbal Learner:

Make flashcards of key information that needs to be memorized. Draw symbols and pictures on the cards to facilitate recall. Use highlighter pens to highlight key words and pictures on the flashcards. Limit the amount of information per card, so your mind can take a mental 'picture' of the information.

Mark up the margins of your textbook with key words, symbols, and diagrams that help you remember the text. Use highlighter pens of contrasting colors to 'color code' the information.

When learning mathematical or technical informatio"

McAfee SiteAdvisor - Phishing Quiz

McAfee SiteAdvisor - Phishing Quiz

Can you tell a fake Web site from a real one? Do you always know which e-mails are legitimate?
Take the McAfee SiteAdvisor phishing quiz and get your safety grade!

This is a pretty tough quiz to see if you can tell the difference between official and scam websites. I got 8 out of 10 but it wasn't easy, especially since they remove the biggest useful clue, the URL, from half of the sites.

Gas Hoarding for the Environment

A Great little piece over at Overcoming Bias: "How Biases Save Us From Giving in to Terrorism" that provides great food for thought when people try to introduce 'out of the box' strategies to accomplish popular yet difficult tasks.

Terrorists are hampered by biases as much as the rest of us. In a Wired commentary 'The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail' Bruce Schneier discusses the interesting findings of Max Abrams in his paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work (International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 42–78).

Basically, terrorists run into trouble because people use correspondent inference theory to infer the intentions of others: the results of their actions are assumed to be concordant with their intentions. If a person sweeps the floor we assume he wants it clean (but he could just be working off excess energy). If somebody hits somebody else, we assume the intention was to harm (but it could just be a game). Similarly, people infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of a terrorist - which likely leads to a misunderstanding of the real goals of the terrorist."

I had a simple idea just a little while ago that led to this dissonance when just explaining it to people.

Imagine a credit card that when you filled up your gas tank would also let you buy a percentage of oil and place it in storage for some determined time. Then when the oil was sold after a the time period you would be credited with the value minus some handling fee. If the environmentalists drove efficient vehicles but bought the equivalent of Hummer drivers the price of gas would go up for everyone. The economic pressure on gas guzzlers would increase and the economic value of efficient vehicles would increase, as well as the value of the stored oil that our envirohoard credit card users have credited to them. So when they finally release their hoarded oil the uses would likely be more efficient as well.

So the dissonance arrives when the public equates the action, hoarding gas, with the goal, to create a more efficient fuel economy. How to switch this up again to make the actions and goals seem to more obviously and positively align I leave as an exercise for the reader to post in the comments.

Autodesk Freewheel API - ProgrammableWeb Profile

Autodesk Freewheel API - ProgrammableWeb Profile:

"http://freewheel.autodesk.com/developers.aspx
Description From their site: Autodesk Freewheel is an Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) based web service/application built to provide CAD model viewing, printing and collaboration, through the dynamic rendering of DWF file data and graphics information. You can think of Freewheel as a set of componentized Web Services and JavaScript frameworks. Together these components make up the Interactive Ajax DWF Viewer."

This sounds great if it works easily and more importantly, with regards to AutoDesk programming, reliably. Way back in 1996 or so, my first real program was a AutoCAD drawing database that also provided a preview and printing functionality. When I later tried to make a simple Web interface around 2002 the constant AutoDesk drawing format changes kept mucking with the viewer. Hopefully with this API they will have put some forethought into how they plan to make it future-compatible as they inevitably change the drawing formats.

Definitely, something to keep an eye on and I may try and write a few little apps with it.

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

In his Wired article Clive Thompson writes

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

And that is almost enough to get me to try to start Twittering right there. But this is the epitime of the network effect in how useful it is. For me I would need at least my wife and family to keep up to date twittering to get that kind of value out of twitter.

My friends from Gweep have had the Plan-O-Rama for years as the collection of all our .plan files from our shell accounts on a shared unix system our friends grew from a personal BBS from the early 90's pre-web. The earliest archive material was dated March 2002 and I know that we had been using it prior to that because the messages from that day are with well established social routines. It has died off tremendously in the last year or so as Gweeps are busy with other things and their connections to the old shell system become more infrequent.

The Plan-O-Rama did provide a sense of community and just general knowledge about each other. Most of our friends announced engagements and births there and even spread over the country we could feel like we had something to talk about when we came together for those weddings and summer picnics.

Welcome

I have tried this several times on various blog sites and personally setup web applications. Some of them I have kept up to date and others I have not. The point of this Blog will be my personal idea melting pot. Hopefully as a central repository for my various interests, it will allow me to focus tighter on the more topical blogs and sites online.

If this works as planned I will be dropping a large variety of stuff on here. From general stuff found out on the web to my own ideas and projects. I might also include some of the standard blog naval gazing, life stories that are part and parcel of the blogosphere. However, I personally tend not to read those when other people write them so unless some personal story has topical relevance, you are unlikely to read it here. Besides if I wrote all my inner thoughts and daily travails all my mystique (all 0.0001 units thereof) would disappear.