What is intelligence, anyway?
Isaac Asimov on intelligence:
Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests – people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
…
My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Have a little faith…
(My thoughts on the Singapore Presidential Election 2011)
Don’t oppose for the sake of opposing, oppose so that Singapore will get better. It is unconstructive to try to bring about change by subverting the proper processes and it sets a bad precedent for the future.
Have faith in the opposition MPs you guys voted in. Have faith that they will do a good job of keeping the government in check.
Having the President challenge the government publicly while having no actually power to change will only divide the country.
Losing the HP way
Robert Cringely on the end of HP in all but name:
We’ve all heard how great it is that Google allows its employees to spend 10 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google didn’t invent that: HP did.
And the way the process was instituted at HP was quite formal in that the 10 percent time was after lunch on Fridays. Imagine what it must have been like on Friday afternoons in Palo Alto with every engineer working on some wild-ass idea.
Sad to see a company like HP lose it’s innovative spirit as the MBA-types took over and gutted it. I feel that the shift towards enterprise software is more a reflection of the new CEO than it is indicative of the state of the PC/mobile business.
Don’t look down
One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions.
The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.
In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.
$2.5 billion Google-Motorola break-up fee
Interesting analysis on Google’s Motorola acquisition, based on a detail of the deal that has not been widely reported.
Florian Mueller:
It takes an unusual combination of two factors that companies agree on such an extraordinary break-up fee:
There must be a buyer who, besides having deep pockets, must be completely desperate. Otherwise the seller can’t possibly command such terms.
But sellers don’t ask for terms only because they can. If sellers don’t have profound concern over the probability of the deal going through, they don’t insist on an enormous break-up fee simply because it then makes more sense for them to optimize other deal terms than this particular one.
Stock Android experience
Ben Duchac writing in Betabeat:
I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched.
Marketing manufacturer/operator-customised phones as ‘Android’ phones is somewhat misleading, because the user experience of stock Android is so different. I guess a “premium Android experience” certification is necessary for Google to boost user confidence in the Android brand.
Space Shuttle: The complete missions
As the Space Shuttle enters history after its final mission last week, here is an amazing highlight reel featuring every one of the 135 shuttle missions.
Thank you, Space Shuttle, for inspiring me towards pursuing science and engineering as I was growing up. You did a magnificent job.
What do you use Twitter for?
I remember when I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was just another new instant messaging service (think ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype etc.), joining the already crowded market of IM services. Now that Twitter is 5 years old, the full influence of the service is slowly beginning to be understood. Not many 5 year old tech companies can make a star-studded ad like that.
Now, whenever there is breaking news, my first source of information would be Twitter. Updates on traditional news sites like CNN and BBC seem to take ages, compared to the near-instantaneous speeds that information travels on Twitter. Sure, not all the information posted on Twitter is reliable but since when is that the case for any source of information? It simply means that I perk my ears up a bit more when I read the news on Twitter but I believe that only serves to improve my own critical analysis on the reliability of information I come across.
Besides keeping updated on news, I also use Twitter to follow experts in my domains of interest. Photography, web design, mobile technology, entrepreneurship…the list goes on. Now, instead of having to click through thousands of websites to look for all these information, they simply show up on my Twitter stream, helpfully shared by people who deem the information useful for others. I have probably learned more useful things spending 30 mins going through my Twitter stream than I have from a day at university.
What do you think? Am I overstating the usefulness of Twitter? If you’re not using Twitter, why are some of the reasons you don’t think it is useful?
The Future of Owner Manuals?
The Hyundai Equus is the first car that comes with an iPad as the owner’s manual. It certainly won’t be the last car to do that, but is this a sign of a trend of what owner’s manuals are going to start to look like?
Owner’s manuals have always been drab pieces of documentation written in the most boring language possible. I usually find that they seem to be thrown in almost as an afterthought for many products and come in a multitude of languages that I’ll never be able to read, making at least three quarters of the pages useless to me. And the troubleshooting section at the back of most manuals usually feature the most inane problems and solutions possible. However, owner’s manuals are usually the first thing a user of a device sees when they open the box for a product and they are also the “first line of defence” for a manufacturer when a user runs into technical problems with the device.
A user manual that is designed well can create a favourable first impression of the product and also entice the user to find out all the capabilities of the device that they might not know about from playing with the device themselves. It could also reduce the cost of providing technical support over the phone, email or in person if the included documentation covers a wide range of issues. I don’t know why companies don’t put more resources into designing their user manuals. Is it because the costs of doing so outweighs the perceived benefits?
To that end, it’s heartening to see that Hyundai is willing to try something different and put an end to the days of the boring old owner’s manual.
Zeitgeist 2010: Google’s Year in Review
Google Zeitgeist looked at how the world searched in the past year and from that data, gleaned the issues that have captured the world’s attention. From triumph and tragedy, to Youtube drivel, nothing escapes the attention of Google. This is a nice video they made of the year 2010 in review.