hschenker
> Tweets have no value
For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners).
Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.)
For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment.
Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.
This might be because of my typical seated posture - I lean quite far back in my chair.
If, however, I slouch forward towards my monitor, with my shoulders off the back of the chair, the increase in elbow angle when moving my hand 10 inches to the right is much smaller.
Ha ha. Irony of ironies. Keeping your hand farther away from your body is actually good because it guards against cubital tunnel syndrome: http://www.eatonhand.com/hw/hw007.htm
The person paying builds up "you'll owe me later" points; the rest of the table saves money, at least in the short term.
The people who've already been served get to eat immediately, which they probably want to do anyway; the others who haven't received their food yet can stop feeling guilty for stopping the others from eating.
Overall, a whole lot of uncomfortableness is avoided by agreeing to the ridiculous reason.
Compare that to the the territorial conflict example, in which one of the two parties wins nothing, and instead, loses something very important to them.
A non-human analogy given by Cialdini (see http://www.bainvestor.com/Influence.html) is the mother turkey who simply responds to the cheep-cheep of its young to determine what nearby moving objects needs to be taken care of. The turkey, of course, can be tricked (by human researchers, usually) into responding the same way to an inappropriate animate object by spoofing the sound.
BUT - and this is where Scott Adams's analogy goes awry - in humans, this automatic response to "because X" generally only applies to inconsequential situations.
The marked contrast between the situations he compares (restaurant conundrums and territorial conflicts) is what gives away the flaw in his argument. If the outcome of a bad decision is just a cold bowl of soup, you can risk making a thoughtless choice. If the risk is continued territorial angst and loss of life, a decision is likely to demand a little more scrutiny.
He's either making a poor attempt at humor (which is very possible, since he probably feels compelled to try to write something at least mildly funny every day), or he's not aware that he's coming across as very disingenuous.
Or is the issue that people with "locked-in" syndrome often can't even move their eyes? (If they could move their eyes, even a little, then surely an eye-tracking device would be a better interface - where a predefined movement, say, looking to the left twice, would count as a click.)
4 days a week: cardio. 3 days a week: weights.
For cardio, it's most often the stationary bike in my condo gym. I pedal as fast as I can get to 1,000 calories (about 32 minutes). I sometimes go for a 10k run instead, if it's nice outside (about 45 minutes). In the summer, soccer with my work team replaces cardio once a week.
For weights, I run through a circuit of exercises in about 35 minutes. On a universal gym: seated bench press, quadricep extensions, hamstring curls, tricep extensions, lat bar pulldowns. With free weights: back flys, shoulder lifts. On a mat: various situps. To finish off: 2 minutes of very high-intensity cardio on a stairclimber.
Weekdays, I do my workouts right after work, before dinner. I don't think I've missed a workout for about four years, except when traveling. (When traveling, I do a 25-minute body-weight "core circuit" of situps and pushups in the morning immediately after getting up.) Weekends, I get the workout (usually the cardio) out of the way as soon as practical...usually after getting laundry or some other task started.
If doing this every day without fail seems rigid and bordering on obsessive, it's because I've learned for my own personality type, it's vital to make it part of my daily routine. The less I have to think about it, the more likely is that I'll stick with it and make no excuses. There's now never any question as to whether I will or won't exercise on any given day - it's as routine as eating dinner.
Some examples seemed gimmicky and of questionable value (e.g. dividing the price of gold by the price of silver) - but given the right context, I'm sure it could return useful results for more realistic queries as well.
In one instance, he used the wrong tense ("is" instead of "was") in a query ("How old is Barack Obama in 1967" or something like that), and no results were returned - but the error message wasn't smart enough to suggest why it didn't work.
One big challenge will undoubtedly be to "curate," as they say, enough common data sources to make it useful nearly all of the time...rather than just some, or even most, of the time. I think there's a threshold of usefulness (measured in percentage of successful queries - perhaps 98% or more) that Wolfram will have to reach if it intends not to languish as a mere curiosity like Cuil. Given that they've already got 200 people doing curation of just their existing data sources, and they plan to add many more sources, that seems like a pretty significant financial barrier to cross - I don't know whose pocketbook got the project to this stage, or how they intend to continue before it starts generating income.
If Wolfram Alpha IS a success, it seems like it could change the behavior of web users in two ways:
1. People will start expecting a higher degree of authoritativeness from information they refer to on the web. For instance, if you're making a decision with a committee, and there's an email thread going around that sums up facts upon which the decision will be based, nowadays those facts might include links to "non-expert" sources like Wikipedia. If you have the option of linking to the same information in Wolfram Alpha, you'll probably choose to link to Wolfram instead, since you know the information has been vetted by paid experts. There also appeared to be a "References" link at the bottom of each results page that had an AMA-citation-style list of sources. Although Wikipedia also often links to sources, it's arguably more of a crap shoot as to whether you should trust the source, the editor referring to the source, or even that the reference was made in the right context.
2. People will start using Wolfram as the single (or at least the first) place that they go to for factual, authoritative information. For example, nowadays, if I want authoritative information about a stock, I can go to Yahoo Finance and pull up the financial details - and be reasonably certain that it's accurate and trustworthy. However, if I also need to refer to another type of data - for example, official population data for a region - I'd have to find another authoritative source - perhaps the CIA world factbook. Instead of having to remember multiple sources, it's much easier to go to a single, trusted source for all types of factual data.
I know this is completely irrelevant to the linked article, but using white text on a dark background is such a significant violation of readability and visual comfort (unless you're reading several such articles in a row) that I can't help but be completely distracted from the article at hand.
Even the reasoning for the map device itself is tenuous at best, since the outline of America is barely recognizable and the graphics bear no relation to their locations on the map, except perhaps for the "inmates in custody" square, which is in the general vicinity of Texas.
Here's one attempt at an awkward translation of the introductory paragraph:
"Have you ever come across a situation in which you would have wanted to move part of a window to another location? Your task won't be successful without expanding the set of Basic instructions. It adds to QL's selection of commands the GMOVE command, with which you can move a graphic, for example, within a drawing program."
But that's not really a fault with Basecamp itself - it's just as much of a problem with any system that allows users to create their own categories or folders, like SharePoint.
It was doubly annoying that I was forced to use two systems for communication - Outlook and Basecamp. First someone would go into Basecamp and write a message - and because they had subscribed me to it, I'd get an email with their note included.
To reply to it - instead of using Outlook, which normally would be dead easy since I could just click "reply all," I'd have to figure out where to go in Basecamp to reply to it - which was so difficult to do that I never did. Instead, I'd typically just reply to the message using Outlook, which of course defeated the purpose of Basecamp.
If so, my complaint goes back a couple of years - when someone on my team suggested using Basecamp for managing our web site projects.
Without too much thought, we signed up and began to use it. To pay for it, I used my personal credit card. Of course, that meant I had to expense it.
To give you some perspective, the expense system at our 5,000-plus person enterprise heavily weights ass-covering over ease of use, meaning that it takes about 30 minutes, 85 clicks, two printouts, an in-person signature from a superior, and a short jog up the stairs to deposit a hard copy in a finance department inbox, regardless of whether you have one receipt or ten.
I didn't think much of it the first or second month I paid, but by month three, I was thinking, boy, there must be a better way. At least let me prepay for a year of service, I thought - and I looked around the site for just such an option.
Not finding one, I sent an email to the site admin to ask if I could prepay for a year, or preferably even longer.
The reply I got was: "We only bill monthly, sorry."
Thinking that perhaps they hadn't considered the reason I might be asking, I replied and explained just how arduous the expense process was at my organization, and suggested that offering a prepayment option might make it more likely for large enterprises to start using their product.
The following was the reply I got:
"I understand your position, but we are a month-to-month service. Some of the largest companies in the world use Basecamp and gladly pay month-to-month. And the smallest companies in the world love it too."