Russian Literature and Twitter

What can a dead Russian writer Gogol teach us about social media? Marina Gorbis on Boing-boing has a brilliant post on how the current frenzy of collecting souls on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc was prefigured in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls more than 150 years ago. Money quote

So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more “souls” for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Spit and Polish in Software Products

Most users of great software simply do not understand how much effort goes into creating a powerful and polished piece of software. I have now some firsthand experience with developing www.mymoneymanage.com. The actual core functionality for the full product was finished in less than 3 months with a couple of developers, but when we got feedback from users we realised how much spit and polish was required.

This post by Benjamin Pollack really brings out in detail what goes into building a good product. He uses the real world example of Stack Overflow to make his point. But it is amazing how most developers simply do not understand and account for the effort that goes into developing something with polish.

Money Quote

The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend.

This brings me to all the hype around Google’s Chrome OS. It seems amazing to me that seasoned commentators are breathlessly going on about how it will change the world. Despite all the hype of Cloud computing and weekend hacking and Paul Graham’s promise of a new revolution, it’s still freaking hard to build a product.

The best quote so far is from FakeSteveJobs

Trying to make an OS out of Chrome is like saying you’re going to turn a Pontiac Aztek into a stretch limousine. I suppose it could be done, but why?

I think the definitive word on this is by Joel Spolsky Good Software Takes 10 years.

Correlation does not imply causation

The chief financial correspondent of NYT, Floyd Norris, citing an NBER paper by two economists says

Now two economists say they have found a reason that explains a large part of the increase. China has too many boys.

He quotes from the paper

“Across Chinese provinces, there is clear evidence that local savings rates tend to be higher in regions with more unbalanced sex ratios.”

This is clearly a classic example of how correlation has been conflated into causation. Countries like Malaysia and Thaland also have high savings rates and their is no unbalanced sex ratio in these countries.

In most of these countries the social safety network is low to non-existent, also all these countries are raising their incomes rapidly and most of the increase in savings simply can be explained that when incomes rise our propesity to consume does not rise at the same rate.

Shouldn’t it be the job of financial reporters to call such elementary mistakes out?

Droughts and Entrepreneurship

A very interesting post by J. David Foster on Aguanomics on how Droughts in India affect entrepreneurship. The analysis is mostly anecdotal.

One caveat is that it does gloss over the caste system which also inhibits entrepreurship in India as well as some patterns of land ownership under the Zamindari system in North India vis a vis absentee landlords in Bengal under the British which inhibited capital formation and investment.

The other outlier which is not explained by this analysis is Punjab which has entrepreneurship as well as big agriculture.

Overall an interesting idea but there are missing pieces and the casuality between droughts and entrepreurship is not as clear-cut as it appears.

HT (Infectious Greed)

Sentence for the day

“The optimal number of lifetime speeding tickets is greater than zero.” – Steve Horwitz

This is converse of saying if you never miss flights you are wasting too much time at airports.

HT (MR)

Sentence of the day

“I don’t mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.” – Fred Wilson on Paul Graham’s Y Combinator

Sentence of the day

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security. Bruce Schneier

Why do Airlines Hedge Oil Prices

Have been reading about contangos and backwardations and how oil is being stored in storage tankers due to a combination of low leasing rates and expectations of a increase in oil prices.

Most of this obviously has to do with Hedging against future prices increases. Now one the biggest buyers of forward contracts are airlines they consume 1.1 million bpd.

In earlier times it was understandable why airlines would like to lock in petroleum prices as they used to publish air-ticket rates upto the end of the year. These were then circulated to travel agents, but now why would they need to hedge so much. Ticket Prices change on a almost hourly basis reflecting yields, it cannot be too difficult to plug in a variable for oil prices as a factor for price changes.

Inquiring minds wish to know?

Sentence for the day

And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world. 

Barack Obama, Speech in Cairo

Google Vs. Bing Vs. WolframAlpha search comparison on Factual Questions

Just did a quick experiment between the three search engines on a factual question. Results and comments below

I simply asked for the GDP for Malaysia. Google obviously gave the most hits 2.75 million. It also pointed me to the official statistics website for Malaysia in first 3 hits. Bing is far behin with 1.15 million hits but I like their side bar with related searches. It’s more elegant than one at the bottom for Google.

However I found the Alpha results the most useful. The graph trendline is a nice touch, it converts to local currency on current date.

Going forward this is my search strategy for factual questions, give wolfram a try first, then go to Google for comprehensiveness and then maybe Bing.

Will try some more combinations and post results when I more time.