I really thought this little guy had character. He should – his parents certainly do :)
I know there are a number of companies that try to trawl the web and search for patterns. There are also companies and organizations that track and compile all sorts of statistics for researchers to pore over at a later date, and at a price. Even I have been tempted to write about leading indicators of different kinds and what they could mean. Mostly, that desire is driven by my aging white male’s fear of things changing. Changing, naturally, for the worst.
And so I get worried about torrential rains with lightening that actually hits people, and heatwaves, but mostly I worry about power outages. I am sure there is a strong correlation between bad weather and power outages. As of this writing, the power is still out in parts of Queens, NY, St. Louis, Missouri. It was recently out in portions of California and UK. Most of the outages are due to inclement weather, so one would hope that as soon as a particular heat wave or storm subsides, the service goes back to normal.
Still, would not it just make a great beginning to a sci-fi story of how people came to think of power – to move things, to move themselves, to provide light and heat as a given, and the historical events in this post were some of the first signs (since august 2003 at least) of the inevitable collapse of the non-animal powered civilization? I am curious whether anyone tracks MTF (mean time between failures) for US electrical grid and distribution systems and makes the data public…
ps. and of course, there is someone with a fine paper on the topic titled “Complex dynamics of blackouts in power transmission systems” with the following statistics,
“…The average frequency of
blackouts in the United States is about one every 13 days. This frequency has not changed over the last 30 years. Also the probability distribution of blackout sizes has a power tail; this dependence indicates that the probability of large blackouts is relatively high. Indeed, although large blackouts are rarer than small blackouts, it can be argued that their higher societal cost makes the risk of large blackouts comparable to or exceed the risk of small blackouts…”
and the following chart showing the distribution of blackouts:
Ed Sim makes a lot of good points in his “When to hire a VP of Sales“. I would particularly like to comment on the following statement:
“In addition, over time the sales team will get frustrated if the product is not ready for primetime and they will be out looking for a new job in a couple of quarters making all of this effort a very expensive experiment.”
That is absolutely true, and I think only comes with experience (or reading Ed’s blog). It is hard to underestimate how quickly sales people become frustrated if they feel the product is not saleable, especially if the market for the product is new in general or unfamiliar to the sales person.
Another aspect of sales hiring, very important to understand before multiple sales people are brought on, is the length of the sales cycle. It is pointless to expect a sales person to produce even after two quarters when the average sales cycle for your industry segment is nine months. So one has to remember that a sales person will use up most of their year getting that first sale, and that despite being “theirs”, the senior technical or business personnel will actually do most of the work in getting that first, or even second and third, sales for every sales person hired. It is annoying for a bootstrapping company to babysit someone who is supposed to be brining in sales and income – but there is often no other way to get the sales people to understand the new technology they are selling to new customers they are engaging.
“…rather than hire a VP of Sales first, I would encourage you to focus on generating leads and hiring a sales rep or two to follow up on them. This way you can take a smaller step to refine your sales model and product before going big.”
Absolutely. This is sage advice (don’t I sound fawning?)
Read two articles today, one about a strike by crane and other heavy equipment operators that has stopped all major construction projects in NYC – including the WTC rebuilding, and another about a billionair hedge fund manager complaining about the lack of US-born and educated Ph.D’s to use in his quantitative funds…
Obviously lack of Americans getting graduate degrees in science and math has been a topic beaten to death by every pundit out there. Examples of payscales for medical practitioners and laywers vs. scientists have often been used to explain the disparity. How about payscale for unionized workers?
The Post aritcle about the strike contained a table, missing in the online edition, listing the average salary for a “nuclear scientist” (however defined) at $32/hour or so. That’s around $65,000 a year. Nice, but that’s nothing compared to $80/hour for crane operators. Why would anyone want to get a math Ph.D when they could make twice as much money operating a backhoe or a construction crane?
I do not see why MIT math Ph.D is not going to be good enough for Simons’ office, but it is easy to imagine that there just are not enough MIT, Cal.Tech. and similar Ph.D’s awarded to feed the US Market. By contrast, someone like Pavel Volfbeyn or Alexander Belopolsky (discussed in the Simons article) with degrees from a Russian MFTI (MIT equivalent) cannot possibly make as much money in Russia as here (requesting 3-4 miliion per year), at least legally.
As any other self-respecting blog-head, I have a proposition. If indeed the demand for mathematicians and scientists is so great, their prospects so bright, then why does not Simons and other people who hire them give every US-born or -eduated Ph.D a 2 or 5-year contract to work in their firms. Let them make enough money to go back to being professors or high-school teachers. In fact, you could make it a condition. I do not know if it is going to change the reality of how many people can graduate from MIT and the like, and that other countries will have bright graduates from their countries’ top schools who will come to US to make their millions because they cannot do so in India or Russia or China. I do know that you are not going to get more people to study math when one can make twice as much money working for a union that would go on strike when offered a contract like this:
The workers, who run cranes, backhoes, compressors and other pieces of heavy equipment, earn $73 to $82 an hour, including benefits.
They’re among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the city.
They rejected an offer that would have given them 6 percent raises annually over five years, with a guarantee of no layoffs.
signing off…
It was nice, refreshing, slightly wierd.
Such things are always easy to spot, since there is a small crowd of tourists milling around, trying to photograph the landmark this way and that. So did I.
I get asked whether this is photoshopped. It is not. Strangely, I have had trouble finding its exact provenance on the net. I know the original fountain is called the Medici Fountain with a sculpture of Galatea by Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin, but I could not figure out who put the “face” there, and why.
I have always been a fan of one-time use credit card numbers. Certainly, for someone who shops on a number of web sites, they are a nice way to not get “too much” information stolen. It is not that I do not trust proprietors of smaller internet ventures, but… Well, I do not necessarily trust their information transmission and retention policies. Recently, I had just the excuse to the use a one-time number myself. I was buying something on a foreign website, hosted in a country known better for gathering information that securing it. “Perfect”, I thought, “I will be safe with my citibank visa!”
And now we can talk about how companies shoot themselves in the foot when their marketing gets ahead of their capabilities. Citibank, for example, runs a series of hilarious commercials warning of the dangers of Identity Theft. Despite the message saturation; however, it is impossible to find out how to generate one-time numbers for citibank issued credit cards from the site. At least my searches revealed no obvious way of doing so. A number of blog entries alluded to the fact that Citigroup (parent company of Citibank, N.A.) indeed provides a generator, but no links were posted. Luckily, I have friends who are much better at web sleuthing, and soon I had in my hands the link. Continue reading
That’s right folks, turns out this weblog is the place for posting del.icio.us feature requests. Now, I have been a user for a long time, and like just about everything about the service. Like it well enough to ape some of the features in proposals to clients sometimes.
Still, some things just are not perfect, for me. Recently, I noticed that I can now mark my post as “do not share.”
I think; however, that this option does not serve me all too well. More often than not I do not mind sharing the post. After all, the links I bookmark are on the public Internet already. What I do mind sharing, sometimes, are the tags, or specifically some personal tags which I do not necessarily want others to know. For example, if I am doing some research for a client project, I would like to tag relevant links I find with the project name, but am afraid to do so because I do not want to accidentally divulge priveleged information. Often a great deal can be inferred about a project based on the links I catalogue.
So, I would like del.icio.us to add private tags. Just like I can create tag bundles right now, let me mark some tags as private, which means they do not show up as tags for users other than than myself. I can then continue safely tagging items as “software” or “SocialBookmarksForNerds”, and then quietly smile with quilty pleasure when I add the “IdeasToSteal” tag as well.
I have been blogging, under various semi-transparent nicknames for over two years now. Two years ago, it was pretty simple to get started – not too many people blogging, sharing their intimate thoughts for everyone to see. Still, the key to success has aways been to post continuously, according to some easily discernable schedule. Stick to the topic you know something about, etc.
To gather search engine rankings I should now declare that there are 7 rules of blogging guaranteed to make you a success.
(amazingly google does not find any entrees matching that string. yet.)
One of the reasons I sometimes feel like writing is to express my old-timer’s dissatifaction along the lines of “worst website ever.” I am sort of an old-timer for the Internet, and increasingly it feels that way. How do I know? Well, when I see the same idea making rounds for the third time, having ignominously died twice before, and pitched by different people but never anyone over 25, I get a strong sense of deja vu.
Sometimes, however, I feel like this whole Web thing might work out after all. I still (sometimes) get the same thrill from using Amazon as I did in 1996. Then it was the sheer exhiliration of ordering a real book through virtual ether. Now, it is the quiet happiness of a parent who can find and order four different books and have the receipt for it in under one hundred seconds and truly expect them to show up at the house in three days. Sure, I handed over all sorts of information to the good folks in Seattle. They have my birthdays, addresses, even credit cards. But then I can order four books in one hundred seconds (I warned you about deja vu) and go have tea after a stressful day.
Tomorrow is another one. See you then.
One of the benefits of starting anew is the shameless way in which old content can be reused. Below is a photo near my house taken in late November 2004.
