Apr. 11 2009

I share, therefore I am.

re: shared narratives.

Apr. 06 2009

Elastic Happiness - Anil Dash

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to extrapolate on the political impacts we’ll see from a generation growing up seeing elastic artificial intelligence as an important part of keeping harmony in a community of people playing the same game.

Apr. 05 2009

Al Zacharia, apartment broker extraordinaire

marco:

I wasn’t just paying him for 30 minutes of his time — I was saving weeks of mine.

classic argument.  i’m very much a fan of this.  i have no problem paying for something that gives me exactly what i want and need.  isn’t that why currency exists in the first place?  it’s your fault if you don’t use it to maximize the one thing you can never get more of:  time.

recently - everything, in my head, is coming back to a few key words:  authority, direction, curation, editing and value.

too many people are missing the point that amazing value might come in a package that, quite simply, saves me time.

Nov. 22 2008

ratcliffe-lee:

A Theory of Human Motivation by psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in his paper in 1943, explains why our digital world is driven by non-digital elements, for every word written and spoken has pretext and motive behind it.

Nov. 21 2008

Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize. And while “Napoleon Dynamite” is the worst culprit, it isn’t the only troublemaker. A small subset of other titles have caused almost as much bedevilment among the Netflix Prize competitors. When Bertoni showed me a list of his 25 most-difficult-to-predict movies, I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”

So this is the question that gently haunts the Netflix competition, as well as the recommendation engines used by other online stores like Amazon and iTunes. Just how predictable is human taste, anyway? And if we can’t understand our own preferences, can computers really be any better at it?
The Screens Issue - If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize

Oct. 23 2008

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
Hemingway’s Twitter
 (via riazm)

Oct. 10 2008

pennykim:

The psychology of trust goes beyond the obvious.

Oct. 03 2008

Why Really Smart People Disagree On Who Won The Debate

great perspective and reasoning why most of your favorite major media outlets are balking on this.

seperately, that wasn’t a debate.  it was someone trying to have a conversation with someone else who could only vocalize canned, memorized responses.  no original thought process and, quite frankly, an insult to the intelligence, forum and needs of this country and it’s political process.  you should be ashamed of yourself.

Sep. 12 2008

What Makes People Vote Republican?

..the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.” - Jonathan Haidt (italics as in original text)

interesting.  part human nature, part dependence, part religion (i have very distinct arguments against religion but not necessarily faith).