“I’ve been reading Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. The book covers the Monty Hall problem, Bayes’s Theorem, availability bias, the illusion of control and so forth. If these are unfamiliar, look no further for an…”
via Marginal Revolution
Archive for July, 2008
A Girl Named Florida
Friday, July 11th, 20081938 Media Loses Verizon Deal Over Racism Charges
Friday, July 11th, 2008“1938 Media’ s distribution deal with Verizon, announced just a week ago, is history. Yesterday a group of civil rights activists protested the deal and threatened to boycott Verizon. The reason? A 2007 video that Feldman created called TechNigga that the groups say is racist. The video was not included on Verizon, and television reports that Verizon [...]”
via TechCrunch
Google Launches Virtual World Called Lively
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008“Well, this sucks for Second Life. Google is launching a new service today called Lively, a browser based virtual world add-on that lets users create and customize avatars and worlds, interact with other users, and generally have a richer social interaction than is offered by GTalk today. Worlds can be embedded int web pages, although only [...]”
via TechCrunch
Onion Futures
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008“There are none. The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion…”
via Marginal Revolution
Friendfeed v. Twitter: Half The Followers In Five Months
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008“Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing – many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too. I joined Twitter when [...]”
via TechCrunch
Lose the Blogger 15: 25+ Web Apps for Dieting & Getting in Shape
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008“At least a couple of us here at Mashable are fighting to keep off the Blogger 15. So where do technology bloggers turn for help when trying to lose weight? Web apps, of course! We’ ve put together a list of over 25 Web apps that will help you count calories, find support, [...]”
via Mashable!
Think Before You Voicemail
Monday, July 7th, 2008“Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, [...]”
via TechCrunch
Bargaining with your roommates
Monday, July 7th, 2008“Joseph, a loyal MR reader, asks: I recently leased my first apartment…with a friend who just graduated from college with me. It’s a nice apartment, and spacious, but it has one bedroom that is larger and nicer (better views, bigger…”
via Marginal Revolution
Why Less Is More And How To Unlock the Web
Friday, July 4th, 2008“Features, I’ ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. The more powerful an application is, the more specialized it is, and thus with increased power its intended audience shrinks, and ironically, it becomes more, not less, vulnerable to competition. Specialization, traditionally, is a good thing. But, as Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist argue in [...]”
via Mashable!
Could Social Media See the End of Google’s PageRank?
Friday, July 4th, 2008“One of my favorite bloggers; Alexander van Elsas, has been penning a series of posts having to do with Social Media and People. Today he wrote something that sparked a lightbulb: Instead, having instant access to information will drive a need for knowledge. A deeper understanding of the inner workings. And where is this knowledge to [...]”
via Mashable!