Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Algorithmic Management


This is not an example of the machine taking over the human. It only makes management sense to let algorithms do what they do better.

Machines manage people to do work machines can not do. That is a tongue twister, if you ask me.

Human Workers, Managed by an Algorithm
the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts. .... The best-known crowd marketplace is Mechanical Turk, which Amazon launched in 2005. ..... Turkers, who are based mostly in the United States, make only $1 or $2 per hour. ..... 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results ..... Consider inDinero, a three-year-old San Francisco Web startup whose software helps small businesses track their finances. Businesses can e-mail or upload scanned receipts (including handwritten ones) that then need to get logged—so inDinero sends the images to MobileWorks, which in turn farms them out to workers in India or the Philippines, who transcribe the receipt amounts into online forms.

Microgrids And The Indian Power Outage



I think it is first and foremost a demand and supply problem, not a grid problem. Although I think microgrids can help. But the real solution is on the moon.

How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided
Some 600 million people in India have been left without power after parts of the country's massive electricity grid collapsed Tuesday. ..... the simple backup diesel generators that are keeping many essential services in India going right now ...... distributed solar can be cheaper than running diesel generators alone for backup power. "Solar power is very attractive when compared to diesel generators in the daytime" ...... While news reports suggested that there are 600 million people who lost power with this week's outages, that's almost certainly an overestimate—if only because hundreds of millions of people in India didn't have grid power to start with.

It's Climate Change, Stupid


A few years back random fires were getting started all over Greece. The authorities went ahead and arrested the known arsonists.

It was climate change.

This past winter in NYC was unusually warm. That was climate change. This summer in NYC was unusually hot. That was climate change.

This thing is for real.

Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought?
In large parts of the Midwest, the drought has reached the worst classification possible, a D4 drought that could bring "exceptional and widespread crop and pasture losses" and "water emergencies" due to shortages in reservoirs, streams, and wells ....... the drought will worsen. ..... we're seeing, not only here in the U.S., but across the globe, events that we've never before witnessed in our instrumental record, and it's quite apparent there's a human contribution ..... You actually see more precipitation in the mid and high latitudes like Canada and the northern U.S. border, less precipitation in the southwestern U.S. and along the subtropics. You're seeing a whole shift in the atmospheric circulation system
The time to act was yesterday.

Facebook Eating Into Its Ecosystem

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Right before Bill Gates retired he was talking in terms of baking anti-virus software right into Windows. He had been doing things like that during the entire life of that operating system. Remember when he baked the web browser into Windows and got into trouble?

I think it is but natural for Facebook to eat up into its ecosystem. Instagram owed no small amount of its user base growth to the fact that it used the social graphs on Facebook to spread the word. And guess what happened.

Mark Zuckerberg Reveals He Is Open To A Radical Change In Facebook Strategy
Facebook's sudden openness to owning more of its platform
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Republic Wireless' $19 Feast

It should not be possible to escape wireless broadband. Anywhere. In that ocean smartphones should float. Voice is just data. It can be super cheap.


Republic Wireless reopens its unlimited $19 per month beta, starts offering Motorola Defy XT
the Motorola Defy XT, an Android 2.3 device with a 3.7-inch display, 1GHz CPU, 1650 mAh battery, 5MP camera / VGA front camera, 1GB of ROM and microSD slot. It can be your for $249
Republic Wireless Outs The Defy XT, Reopens Beta For $19/Month Unlimited Wireless Service
For just $19 a month customers get truly unlimited data, voice and text messages. Plus, this is offered free of a contract. .... The Defy XT .. won’t topple any of today’s flagship phones .... But thanks to a deal with Sprint, the phones also work wherever there is a cellular signal. ..... the company is going to be a disruptive force in the wireless industry. Republic Wireless isn’t a scrappy startup either. It’s a division of the Cary, North Carolina-based Bandwidth.com, the VoIP company responsible at least in part for Google Voice, Skype, Pandora and many more data services.
Republic Wireless reopens $19 service, sells Motorola Defy XT
Let the Waves Begin!
It’s a great phone, and it’s incredibly durable. ..... With the DEFY XT, you don’t have to worry about expensive replacements and insurance policies. This phone is the real deal, with Corning Gorilla Glass and an IP67 Rating for solid particle and water resistance. .... at a time when Big Cell is busy making more money at higher prices, with more restrictions and continued confusing business practices.
Republic Wireless now brings Motorola Defy XT to its $19 unlimited monthly plans
Republic Wireless is an unusual carrier.
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Half Of India In The Dark

electrical sunset grid
electrical sunset grid (Photo credit: soonerpa)
Time to work to commercialize Nepal's 43,000 MW hydroelectric potential.

Something like this happening in the US would have been a terrorist attack.

The unofficial power grid is like the Indian economy's informal sector. It is kind of important.

Power Failures Hit Half of India
About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country’s northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day. .... The outage stopped hundreds of trains in their tracks, darkened traffic lights, shuttered the Delhi Metro and left nearly everyone — the police, water utilities, private businesses and citizens — without electricity. .... an unofficial power grid in the form of huge numbers of backup diesel generators and other private power sources..... The failure happened without warning just after 1 p.m. ..... supply and demand may not explain away this week’s grid failures .... state governments which were overdrawing power. .... “We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world .... “We had never anticipated such a thing” ..... over 26,000 megawatts of power stations are idle due to the nonavailability of coal
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Fighting Over Rectangles

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
That is nicely put. Apple is fighting over rectangles. It is being unreasonable. If Samsung is a copycat why is it beating Apple in both the smartphone and the table space by now?

Samsung Product Chief: ‘It’s Unreasonable That We’re Fighting Over Rectangles’
the most important patent dispute of the decade ..... the ongoing patent wars that have spawned dozens of lawsuits across the globe, involving not only Samsung and Apple, but also HTC, Motorola and Microsoft ..... Samsung owns more than 100,000 patents worldwide ..... Kevin Packingham ... Samsung's Chief Product Officer .. There are times when I’m absolutely appalled that we sell what I consider to be the most innovative, most secret parts of the sauce of our products to some other manufacturer — HTC, LG, Apple, anybody. ..... these very broad design patents like a rectangle. ..... “How is this possible that we’re actually having an industry-level debate and trying to stifle competition?” Consumers want rectangles and we’re fighting over whether you can deliver a product in the shape of a rectangle. ...... the patent system is broken. .... there’s just one company that’s firing the first shot consistently
Fight it out in the market, not in the courts of the world. The real news here is that the patent system is broken. The industry itself has to take the lead. Policymakers will follow.
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