But the Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.
Tim Bray in The Listening Engine.
I’m building a very thin Web interface for an internal application. The back end is built using Java, and I’ll be providing a Web service for use by the front end, which is built using PHP and JavaScript. The question is, if you were starting from scratch today, what would you use to glue the two together?
Options include:
I have been leaning toward the JSON solution, but I’m curious to know what other people think.
Over at the Flickr developer blog, Kellan Elliott-McCrea interviews Simon Willison about how his new project, Wildlife Near You, uses the Flickr API. Simon explained how the site came to be here — it was built by a team of geeks who went to an exotic locale to see what they could build in a week. The interview is a great read if you want to get jazzed about Web services — providing a robust machine interface to a site’s functionality can really unlock a ton of power.
Wildlife Near You is definitely worth browsing as well, just as a primer on what can be done quickly these days if you have a lot of talent and you’re starting from scratch. I particularly love the lists of species found on the place pages. They’re the most aesthetically pleasing and useful tag cloud implementation that I’ve seen.
Update: I left out the link to the interview itself.
I’ll probably never be a guest on the Daily Show, but Ethan Watters’ advice for guests was interesting anyway. I’ve seen this advice from several former guests:
Don’t try to be funny unless you ARE funny. If you are not sure if you are funny, assume that you are not and if you try to be in this situation you will look like an incredible jackass because you are sitting next to someone who is preternaturally, almost freakishly, hilarious.
Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else.
Matt Haughey say something both true and profound.
Most people know that the employment situation right now is pretty terrible, but the precise way in which it is terrible is poorly understood. The absolute numbers are very high, but the suffering is not evenly distributed. The statistic I see getting thrown around a lot is that unemployment for college educated people is 5% — essentially full employment. Nobody I know has had any luck hiring programmers lately. Unemployment among those with only a high school degree is at 15%, up from 12% this time last year.
Over at FiveThirtyEight, bonddad breaks down all of the unemployment statistics to provide a broad picture of what’s going on in the job market. Here’s the conclusion:
The great recession wiped out lower education/manual labor jobs. And the experience of the manufacturing sector after the last expansion indicates those jobs aren’t coming back.
Given that, it seems easy to argue that our number one long term domestic priority should be to pursue policies that educate more people by improving schools, making college more affordable, and removing obstacles that prevent people from going to school. There’s a lot of talk about cutting government spending, but the best and most realistic option for tackling the deficit long term is to lower the pace of government spending increases (most importantly on health care) and increase the amount of revenue through economic growth rather than tax increases. How do we do that? Educate our citizens.
If there’s one person I listen to on health care, it’s Atul Gawande. His piece on the problems with fee for service in health care was probably the most influential piece on health care costs that anybody wrote last year. Salon magazine just ran a new interview with Gawande about his book on checklists and more generally the importance of building effective systems rather than focusing on individual performance. I think there are lessons for everyone in both observations. Gawande was also a guest on the Daily Show this week.
Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works:
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology. Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.*
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
The metaphor of the bike shed discussion has served me well over the years. Here’s a theory of how it applies to politics:
In the book “Stealth Democracy” (which I previously blogged on here), John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that voters have very weak policy preferences. Indeed, you can get a lot of people to change their mind on policy by asking them whether, thinking through the potential consequences of that policy, they’d like to change their mind. You can get even more of them to change their mind if you pay them a compliment first.
Which makes sense. People don’t know very much about policy. The twist in Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s argument, however, is that people do know quite a bit about process, or feel they do, and in contrast to their weak policy preferences, they have very strong process preferences. The strongest among them is the belief that the people sent to do the people’s work shouldn’t be working on behalf of special interests, which explains the fury over the Nelson deal. Similarly strong is the aversion to partisan conflict, as most people think that these problems have common-sense solutions, and too much conflict suggests the two parties are deviating from that middle path.
People may not know the details of the health care reform bill, but the know that the legislative process that produced it stinks.
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One philosophy for running a business
The New York Times interviews George Cloutier, business book author and CEO of American Management Services. You might argue that he comes from the Genghis Khan school of management, but I honestly found very little to disagree with in the interview.