Rafe – Page 77

Author: Rafe (page 77 of 989)

The problem with multitasking experiments

Tyler Cowen on the problem with multitasking experiments:

To sound intentionally petulant, the only multitasking that works for me is mine, mine, mine! Until I see a study showing that self-chosen multi-tasking programs lower performance, I don’t see that the needle has budged.

Treme episode 8 essential reference

June 8, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Mardi Gras was the star of Treme this week, with all of the attendant cultural references. Probably the first thing to understand about Mardi Gras is that there are a number of parades spread across the weekend of Mardi Gras right up to fat Tuesday itself. Here’s the 2010 schedule from nola.com.

Personally, the one parade I always wanted to see that I never got to is Bacchus, the big parade on Sunday night. The Bacchagator is legendary. Endymion was mentioned and dismissed. It’s a huge parade that’s popular with tourists because it’s on Saturday night, the night of Mardi Gras that suits the schedule of out of town visitors the best.

The Krewes of Momus and Comus stopped parading rather than agree to ban racial discrimination.

For the full rundown of Mardi Gras info for this week, check out the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Treme explained. A Blog Supreme once again comes through with the details on the music from this week’s episode. They also have an interview with Blake Leyh, the show’s music supervisor.

Treme Explained summarizes the episode (and Mardi Gras) well:

This episode expertly and seamlessly walks viewers to and from multiple Mardi Gras experiences, from the creatively costumed free-for-all in the Faubourg Marginy to the see-and-be-seen pre- and post-parade gatherings Uptown to Zulu’s Basin-to-Orleans jog toward the club’s Broad Street den to dozing in front of PBS affiliate WYES-Channel 12’s live coverage of the Rex Ball. It happens pretty much just like this every year on a weekday during which the rest of the world is at work checking e mails and sitting in meetings.

As mentioned in the NPR interview, there was nothing unusual about the police shutting down the city at midnight on Mardi Gras. When the clock rolls over to Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras is over and everything closes. As far as I know, it’s been that way forever.

How the credit crisis affected Zappos

June 7, 2010 / Rafe / 11 Comments

Anti-bailout sentiment certain runs high these days, and I think it’s because people don’t see the effect that the credit crisis in the fall of 2008 was having on non-financial businesses. In an article in Inc explaining why he sold the company to Amazon.com, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh talks about the effect of the credit crisis on his company:

At the time, Zappos relied on a revolving line of credit of $100 million to buy inventory. But our lending agreements required us to hit projected revenue and profitability targets each month. If we missed our numbers even by a small amount, the banks had the right to walk away from the loans, creating a possible cash-flow crisis that might theoretically bankrupt us. In early 2009, there weren’t a lot of banks eager to give out $100 million to a business in our situation.

That wasn’t our only potential cash-flow problem. Our line of credit was “asset backed,” meaning that we could borrow between 50 percent and 60 percent of the value of our inventory. But the value of our inventory wasn’t based on what we’d paid. It was based on the amount of money we could reasonably collect if the company were liquidated. As the economy deteriorated, the appraised value of our inventory began to fall, which meant that even if we hit our numbers, we might eventually find ourselves without enough cash to buy inventory.

These are the problems most businesses were facing in late 2008. You can oppose the bailouts on principle, but doing so is a luxury afforded by the practical effects of those same bailouts.

Racism in America

June 6, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

This weekend I read a blog post that made me as angry as anything I’ve read recently, maybe ever. At Wonkette, Ken Layne writes about a mural at a school in Prescott, Arizona featuring kids who actually attend the school. The school attracted attention from racists in the town, led by a city councilman with his own radio show, and eventually the school principal decided to have the painters lighten the skin of the students of color in the painting. The facts speak for themselves, but do read Roger Ebert’s post on racism, written after he read about the mural.

Political science vs political journalism, continued

June 5, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Christopher Beam illustrates the point I was trying to make about political journalism and political science the other day with humor:

A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.

Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.

He goes on. Funny, and accurate.

The greed of AT&T

June 4, 2010 / Rafe / 4 Comments

I’m fine with AT&T moving to a tiered pricing schedule for the data plans it offers to mobile customers. They have no obligation to offer an unlimited plan, and both of the new plans are cheaper than the old unlimited plan. The people who use a whole lot of data are going to be unhappy, but given AT&T’s capacity problems, implementing even this rudimentary version of congestion pricing should help them out a little bit.

That said, AT&T is implementing two downright customer-hostile policies that show that they look at your wallet the way BP looks at an oil reserve. The first is the extra charge for tethering. Charging $20 a month for tethering would be fine in conjunction with an unlimited data plan. Using tethering will probably increase overall data usage. But once AT&T has contracted with a customer to sell them a specific amount of bandwidth, they ought to be allowed to use that bandwidth in whatever way they choose. Despite AT&T’s arguments to the contrary, charging extra for tethering is just a way to extract more money from existing customers.

The second affront is the schedule of fees for overages on the 200 megabyte a month Data Plus plan. It seems reasonable to me that if you exceed your 200 megabyte limit for the month, AT&T should bump you up to the 2 gigabyte Data Pro plan for that month and charge you $25. That’s not the way it works. AT&T will charge you an additional $15 for every 100 megabytes you use over the limit. Felix Salmon has more.

AT&T is able to implement charges like these because of their US monopoly on the iPhone. Thanks, Apple.

The Gaza blockade

June 4, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

More Palestinians have died this year in generator accidents than died in the assault on the Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara on Monday. Gazans are forced to rely on generators for electric power because Israel will not allow them to rebuild their power plant, having attacked it in 2006. Foreign Policy has the details of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Collective punishment is a violation of the Geneva convention.

Update: This post by Jim Henley is the single most insightful thing I’ve read about Israel and Palestine in a long time.

FiveThirtyEight.com joins the New York Times

June 3, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

My post yesterday was a well-timed given the news today that Nate Silver’s political blog will be published by the New York Times:

Some exciting news this morning: We have reached agreement in principle to incorporate FiveThirtyEight’s content into NYTimes.com.

Read the rest at FiveThirtyEight.

Why journalists should learn to program

June 3, 2010 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Financial journalist Roland Legrand argues that journalists should learn to program. He says:

All of this takes time, and maybe you’ll never find enough of it to get good at all this stuff.

Still, we must try. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you become proficient at the latest language. What is important, however, is that you’re able to comprehend the underpinnings of programming and interactivity — to be able to look at the world with a coder’s point of view.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if most journalists would benefit more from learning how to crunch numbers, compile statistics, and derive meaning from them than they would by learning HTML and CSS. They should be reading this book, not this book.

How Android is like Windows

June 3, 2010 / Rafe / 8 Comments

I’ve been saying for some time that in the smart phone market, Google is Microsoft and Apple is, well, Apple. Apple was never going to be the dominant player in this market in terms of market share, simply because they only have one or two phone models at any given time, are only on one carrier in the US, and won’t license the operating system to any other handset makers. They want to sell enough high margin products that people love to be extremely profitable, and are very successful with that strategy.

Google, on the other hand, gives Android away to anyone who wants to put it on their handset, and have been rewarded with rapid growth. But I don’t think that Android’s user experience will ever match the iPhone’s. For one thing, because Android is used on so many different kinds of hardware, it will be difficult to achieve the level of integration that Apple has with the iPhone. And for another, the carriers and handset makers are guaranteed to make the Android worse, just as the PC makers have consistently made Windows worse over the years.

This is from Eric Burke’s review of the HTC EVO:

Android makes vendor customizations possible and this phone demonstrates just how poorly that can be done.

He has a list of examples. That’s just not something you have to settle for when the iPhone is out there.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held