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.