Come hear the Yahoo! VP for Advanced Development give a talk at U of Michigan


Bradley Horowitz, VP for Advanced Development at Yahoo! will be a Guest Speaker on campus next week Tuesday, November 27 from 4-5pm in the 1670 Computer Science Building on North Campus. He is being co-sponsored by SI and CSE and the topic is of clear SI interest “Innovation and Evolution – How Search, Social Media, and New Ideas can Shape the Next Web”.

status

13hrs of billable work to do before tomorrow
only 703 steps on my pedometer so far today (it’s 11:55am)

40 emails in inbox (dating to Aug 7th 2007)
89 written to do items (very mixed granularity)
1/2 ft of paper in paper inbox
28 people in my “to write to” email folder
707 entries in my “to read” email folder
132 entries in my “to listen to or watch” email folder.

2 cups of coffee and slice of spicy pumpkin pie as present fuel.

go.

“Live more gooder!”

Nice brief article in the Guardian by George Marshall on changing “save the planet” to something more effective, that carries a message of positive growth and change. He presents the new message as a testimony:

“I have embraced a lighter lifestyle because it is the smart, cool, intelligent and healthy way to live. I want to live in the present and the real world, not be tied to an outdated and dangerous 20th-century way of living. I live this way because I love it, because it makes me feel good and because it is healthy and gives me freedom.

“I feel that I am setting the pace for the 21st century and I am excited to see people all around me trying to catch up. If we all work together we can build a world that is cleaner, fairer and happier and that is what I want to leave my children.”

Nice.

computer actions rippling the sea, upon every word

Interesting article on “quants” in trading.

“Linked with high-frequency trading is the developing science of event processing, in which the computer reads, interprets, and acts upon the news. A trade in response to an FDA announcement, for example, could be made in milliseconds. Capitalizing on this trend, Reuters recently introduced a service called Reuters NewsScope Archive, which tags Reuters-issued articles with digital IDs so that an article can be downloaded, analyzed for useful information, and acted upon almost instantly.”

I’m struck by the imagery of (if not already, then sometime very soon) the words in a speech being semantically indexed from a live broadcast, and each word effecting the markets. Stunning.

Also, how the different analysts are using computers to comb through all this data, looking for any discrepancies and capitalizing on that, but then I imagine the size of those discrepancies must be reduced by all the scrutinizing activity, and that the pattern hunters must now be analyzing and acting on a sea of behaviors from all the other pattern hunters.

The Third Place, and “Texting is the new smoking”

Said by Andrew Hinton, on the IxDA Discuss mailing list:

Even when people are at bars where it’s supposed to be a 3rd place
already, they’re constantly texting on their phones. It’s even worked
itself into our public body language — texting is the new smoking.

I love it. This is right on. There is considerable signaling going on while texting. It distinguishes a mind set, if not a generation.

also in his email:

If a Bowling League was the old 3rd place, the new one is still being
in the Bowling League, but having a bulletin board about it, a
MySpace group, and texting your team-mates (and your friends who
aren’t even there) during a tournament.