It has been an interesting few days in our coverage of the ongoing Jamie Moyer saga here at Dubsism. First, on Saturday Moyer seemingly put an abrupt end to his … Continue reading →
A few minutes ago, the child molestation trial of former Penn State Jerry Sandusky went to the jury. Now that we are on the verge of the end of this … Continue reading →
Originally, I was just going to comment on this piece written by Grant Bisbee from the San Francisco Giants blog McCovey Chronicles. But, the more I explored his theory, the … Continue reading →
From PennLive, the following is offered completely without comment… BELLEFONTE — An Internet-born character called “Pedobear,” which mocks pedophiles or is their mascot, depending on which website you believe, is at … Continue reading →
Remember the other day when I called the Washington Nationals a bunch of “pimply-faced prodigies who by graduating from Harvard at age fifteen have already accomplished more than a middle-aged … Continue reading →
It’s been a tough 2012 if you are Giants 1B/OF Aubrey Huff. In fact, it’s been a downward spiral for Huff ever since his arrival in the City by the … Continue reading →
Call it what you will, but this weekend’s series between the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees could be seen as a possible World Series Preview. It could be … Continue reading →
Last Saturday, Moyer made his debut with the Norfolk Tides, the Triple-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. He dominated. In five innings, Moyer allowed only a single while notching his first … Continue reading →
The University of North Dakota won its only NCAA Football Championship in 2001. But now it has two championship banners, thanks to a shipping mistake (from the Grand Forks Herald). … Continue reading →
If you're trying to keep up with the rapid progress in synthetic biology or genomics generally, here's a nice get-you-up-to-speed primer (PDF) from Scott Mohr. Dating from mid-2007, it only contains one of three sections advertised in the front matter, that on 'Molecular Biology for Novices', but that's 73 pages of reasonably dense material right there.
I grew up on "Blue Book Biology" a 'few years' ago, and amazingly it's still in print, in its ninth edition. That plus the intervening years of perusing the odd Scientific American (more recently, American Scientist) article left me able to follow things like the Church and Venter talk, but lacking confidence that I had the whole story. Mohr's piece is a good level set for those with similar aging or informal backgrounds. What's interesting is that the understanding of what is going on in the cell hasn't changed that much from my high school BSCS days, but the understanding of how it happens has grown immensely more sophisticated and - increasingly - modifiable.
Posted on August 10, 2009 at 13:40 in Citizens' Media, Old Farts, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sovereign Risk. Everyone who's pitched knows about the 'grin test' - where you get to take your best shot in front of the executive staff/board/investment committee/limited partners, and then have to smile - and mean it. Just now a lot of hedge fund managers are thinking about that test as it regards investing in unionized companies in politically charged industries. Wonder what that means for the unionized, leveraged, leftist newspaper industry?
I learned to drive on my father's 1967 Pontiac Catalina station wagon. Big honkin' V8, 3-speed manual shifter on the column, as long as my current F-150 and probably weighed more. It was a pig, and even more fun when towing a trailer. It was years later when someone informed me that I'd taught myself double clutching to keep it (and my later VW bus) from ripping out the clutch. Here's some other memories of Pontiac for those who date. Good bye, GM, you're dead to me.
Bankrupt in Sacramento. The electorate paints the state red as the Democrat and RINO taxes and budget fiddles fail big time. Except the proposition to cut legislators pay when there's a deficit. Let's see: no deficit, no new taxes, and no budget chicanery. Just what part of stop spending can't the political class understand? Under the Democrat legislature and Schwarzenegger, the annual budget has increased $41 billion in five years - nearly 40% - while businesses and citizens flee the state. Meanwhile, Ahnuld is in DC, hoping for a bailout. How pathetic is this?
So if I'm only doing the VC thing part time, and don't currently have my fingers in a startup pie, why the relatively slow rate of posting around here?
Why? One level of answer is that I missed being able to build my own tools. Since HyperCard finally died I've had no environment for knocking out quick hacks, unless you count Excel, and I don't. I also found my engineering feasibility and schedule BS detector becoming fuzzier and less useful given the accumulating years since being hands-on.
But Rich Miller didn't buy that motivation when I laid it on him, and you shouldn't either. The second level answer is that I'm playing around with a set of notions about social software, and have some specific ideas that I think worth implementing at prototype level. Exactly what is a matter for later posting. Being acutely aware of the overhead involved in building a team and raising funding, and wanting to remain agnostic about where these ideas were on the spectrum from hobby to serious business, I decided to just have a go at it myself.
My last serious code (defined as something used by another human) was in a combination of C and various scripting languages. Perl has a familiar feel to someone used to C syntax, immediate gratification, and loosey-goosey typing. Object orientation in Perl is only skin deep, so I can decide how deeply I want to buy into it for a specific project.
CPAN has an awesome collection of libraries with mature functionality aimed right at my tasks of interest. Even the not-so-mature bits are useful cribs for a newbie. While the excitement may have moved on to other languages, the archives of accumulated Perl wisdom at places like Perl Monks saves a lot of frustration when hitting a real puzzler.
I deliberately punted the choice between the leading languages du jour, Ruby and Python. A combination of avoiding premature commitment, and deliberately creating the potential (necessity?) of shifting environments when going from batch-like personal prototypes to possible future web services.
Finally, I've got 40 years worth of computer language history and syntax buried in my hind brain, all the way back to assembler and Fortran II. Reading the camel book alone can't suppress all those years of bogus instincts. I need live code and a motivation to screw around with it to make a new language natural. Fortunately, one of my other avocations provided both: geocaching, of all things. One type of geocache is the 'puzzle' cache, where one has to solve a problem to find the actual coordinates. Given the Silicon Valley environment, a lot of the puzzles around here are rather nerdy - math problems, word puzzles, and cryptograms, many of them most efficiently solved with code. And the lingua franca of the code snips passed among would-be puzzle solvers is Perl. That gave me lots of little challenges and quick rewards while getting started, culminating in writing a hill-climbing solver for substitution ciphers.
Those toy programs barely touched the Perl libraries, and went just fine with a plaintext editor and the command line. That's not enough power for a real project, and misses the point of modern development environments anyway. So I've ended up working in an Eclipse environment, using the EPIC plug-in, all on my trusty MacBook Pro. I'm using git for source code control (it's good enough for perl, it's good enough for me), but mitigating its rather arcane command line interface with the GitX GUI for commits and other common tasks. The developers' suite that comes with OS X provided a nice stable Perl 5.8.8 configuration, which I'm sticking with for now. All in all, probably overkill for a one man project, but you never know.
None of this is meant to provoke a religious discussion about languages and environments (YMMV, and I've seen so many flame fests that they are just boring) but as a bit of background for upcoming posts about the actual topics of interest.
The big reason you aren't seeing the public shedding many tears over the demise of the NYT is that we all know that they've dug their own grave. The impending demise of the NYT isn't tragedy, it's justice.
What he said. Mind you, I don't think the NYT will actually fold up in one step, but at least the Sulzberger family's equity and control is going to be largely or completely washed out. Could the Times regain some part of its former position when Pinch is finally walked out the door? We'll see.
Buzzword Heat Death. Kudos to Jeff Nolan for calling BS on the viability of many so-called Web 2.0 startups. The steadily dropping capital costs of creating Web-based component software has meant that it's easy to get something of the sort started, resulting in an over-crowded marketplace and little differentiation. Many Web 2.0 startups built on underpants gnomes business models are running into unsurprising viability and exit problems in a hostile capital and credit environment. Jeff may be right in tagging Michael Arrington as one of the least critical promoters of the meme, but he shouldn't have the whole albatross hung round his neck: I seem to recall John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly and a few others ginning it up to create a trade show / conference sized aggregation of post dot-com innovations.
Somebody's Paying Attention. My article on the Caja safe Javascript dialect is getting an increasing number of hits, nine months after it was published, coming in from a combination of Wikipedia, Google's developer pages, and plain old searches. Something's going on out there. If you're seriously interested, you should also check out architect Mark Miller's note on performance implications, number 3 on this thread.
I Know, For I Was There. Jack Shafer has a worthwhile article at Slate on the newspapers' multiple tries at online presences that still left them missing the boat. He nails two core issues: The newspapers were reacting defensively to perceived technology threats, and stepped back each time the threat proved minimal, leaving them unprepared when it finally became mortal. Second, the content and platforms used were always "non-generative" in the sense that creation and provisioning was always centrally controlled. That's correct as far as it goes. When I was involved with CompuServe, putting up user interfaces and content involved writing code, and deploying it onto central servers one at a time. There were no such things as user-accessible markup or distributed data centers on a routed network. What he misses, though, is that content was never central to even early online services. The use of person-to-person communications functions - e-mail, chat, bulletin boards and file libraries - was the greatest predictor of customer loyalty and driver of revenue, even then. With their "Content is King" attitude, newspapers missed the fact that even the early online service business relied on what we'd now call "community". They still haven't learned it.
Posted on January 07, 2009 at 13:38 in Citizens' Media, Old Farts, Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Just what you've suspected. Math and computer science professors Mark Schilling and Len Adelman (that's THE Adelman, the 'A' in RSA), analyze the various tracking polls from March through this week, and lay out their systematic bias. An overview here and the original paper here. Unsurprising, the polls run by the MSM are biased significantly to the left. Keep it in mind in the next few days.
A good read for beginning entrepreneurs. It's been out there a while, but I just bumped into it: This piece is a useful reflection on the old 'youth and enthusiasm meet age and cunning' rite of passage. YMMV re the applications to the current scene, but it's worth a read. Via TJICistan.
Deflation again. The MSM catches the meme. Unwinding leverage at all levels from i-banks to consumers puts pressure in this direction. The Fed et. al. are trying to compensate by injecting hundreds of billions in both usual and 'one time' ways. You've only to look at Japan after its real estate bubble collapsed to see what they are worried about. The least likely outcome is stability: What are the odds that this shoot-from-the-hip monetary policy happens to just compensate for the deflationary forces?
And I thought I could get obsessive. Everything you ever wanted to know about bands' recording studio setups and much, much, much, much more.
Dissecting the crash. American Thinker has a well documented blow-by-blow of how CRA lending and Fannie and Freddie helped create the mortgage crisis, and how they were politically forced or enabled. It's damning enough, but I think they err in emphasis on at least one point: Once the GSEs and the regulators and raters had been debauched, it wasn't CRA debt that made up the bulk of the never-should-have-been-written loans. With the door open and no rationale to keep them out, it was real estate punters plus average Joes trying to live above their means who made up the bulk of the bum loans. Update: More here.
You can see this graphically by replicating an experiment I did after my driving vacation in September: Bring up the curiously named but useful real estate service Hotpads, and click on the 'Foreclosures' tab. Search on your own metro area, or one you know well. Unfortunately, Hotpods doesn't have a 'satellite' view, so crank up Google Earth in another window. Now look for clusters of foreclosures in Hotpads, and then use GE to see what's actually on the ground. When I did this for four different metro areas (Medford, Vancouver, Boise and Reno) I found that the biggest clusters were associated with recent tract developments, the kind with the postage stamp lawns and the huge houses packed in tight. That's house flipper territory. When I do this on Bay Area regions that I know, there's a wash of possible CRA foreclosures in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park and Fair Oaks here on the Peninsula. But if you want to see the neighborhoods that have been hammered, you jump out to the growing edge of the East Bay beyond Dublin, or all the way out to Stockton and Merced in the Central Valley.
Posted on October 31, 2008 at 10:34 in Old Farts, Politics, Venture Capital | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Tags: bias, cra, deflation, entrepreneurship, gses, inflation, monetary policy, msm, polling, polls, real estate
Once is an accident, twice is coincidence... Jeff Weiner. Jeremy Zawodny. JR Conlin.. All apparently headed to startups or funders thereof. (Update: Usama Fayyad as well.) Come on, purple and yellow, don't just lie there, do something! Even other people's startups have figured out how to leverage your under-worked community assets.
Forex for Dummies as well as the rest of us. Here's a well-done tutorial on the ups and downs of the dollar, from a group of Bay Area money managers.
This is your brain on credit. A fascinating study suggests that paying with credit rather than cash partially disengages the cost function. (HT: Maggie's Farm.) So there's a scientific basis for the recommendation of some of my favorite personal finance books to dump the credit cards. I'd also say, from personal experience, that running a rigorous household budget may have the same effect, assuming you pay off your cards each month - and you do, right? Whether it's cash, debit or credit, it all gets marked off against a balance, the only thing that varies is when. Most people can figure out that pain delayed is still pain, but...
This is your brain on cigs. The latest American Scientist brings a piece on another study, a combined behavioral and MRI look at differences between nicotine addicts and others in a stock market simulation. Seems the addicts lose the ability to process what the experimenters call 'fictive signals' - what those of us with an economic bent would call opportunity costs. Do you suppose these two groups of researchers should be comparing notes?
In the belly of the beast. Adjunct 'Professor X' at Unknown College pens an Atlantic piece on the woes of teaching English lit and comp to those of marginal academic abilities. This all sounds very familiar. About 25 years ago I spent some time as an adjunct, in computer science, at a community college in Flint, Michigan, motivated by a need to keep the wolf away from the door as well as sampling the teaching option before plunging into the commercial world. Two weeks into the first term I was bemoaning the fact that I could see myself easily flunking half the students, based on their complete inability to handle systematic problem solving, let alone actual programming. My fellow slave laborers opined that it was normal, and the best thing I could do is persuade them to drop the course while they could still get a refund. Yeah, I been there.
Glenn Reynolds has talked about a current bubble in higher education, and if you count back the years, my experience was at the height of the fad for retraining autoworkers. There is one other factor in common: Some of my students were driven into the classroom to escape the consequences of a local economy wrecked by a combination of auto company management incompetence and auto union arrogance. And a lot of today's lower echelon students are driven there because their high school diplomas mean little as a credential, due to...