Month: May 2005

ui failure

yesterday, we came back from DC, and when we wanted to get on the T at airport station, there was a huge queue. apparently, MBTA had decided to replace the one, 2 second process of “hand over $1.25, get token, insert token, pass barrier” with a 2 minute ordering process with their new ticket machines. the new machines had such a lousy UI that each machine had an MBTA employee assisting with the ordering. instead of a big button to get your damn ticket, you have to wade through a forest of choices (hablas espanol? single ticket, monthly pass, lifelong membership? pay with card, check, sale of daughter? receipt? fries with that? sign up for T frequent commuter miles?) with that familiar touch screen experience (ie, 50% of the time the screen doesn’t recognize your choice). given that just about everyone just wants to get a single ticket and has $1.25 ready, not making that a default accessible with one push is mindless. at least you can recharge your charlie card..

Debre damo

Some 4 hours drive from Axum – plus a further 2 hours stiff uphill walk from the point where the road ends – lies the spectacular monastery of Debra Damo, situated on an isolated cliff top in one of the wildest parts of Tigray.
Damo is unique and unforgettable although, as with most Ethiopian monasteries, women are not allowed to enter it. Even so, there is a daunting obstacle to the monastery: the only means of access is a climb of 25 meters up a sheer cliff. Monks lower a safety rope which visitors tie around their waists. Then they use a second, thicker rope to climb with. Some may reflect, as they make their way to the top, that because of this arduous, dangerous ascent the art treasures of Debra Damo have remained intact through the monastery’s 1400 tumultuous years of history.

when the history channel is not showing yet another nazi documentary (yawn), it’s pure crack.

Open-source business infrastructure

commerce.net has set up a lab to explore decentralized electronic markets.

We propose developing an open-source toolkit for creating markets, called Zocalo, in order to catalyze broader adoption of markets in academia, industry, and throughout society. We are primarily interested in prediction markets, which allow traders to buy and sell securities that pay out based on the outcome of some future event, but Zocalo would also be useful for creating markets in other goods.

6 reasons from the linked paper why prediction markets are a good choice for decision support applications:

  1. They give continuously updated dynamic forecasts
  2. They aggregate information across traders
  3. These markets give unbiased, relatively accurate forecasts well in advance of outcomes
  4. They can outperform existing alternatives
  5. market dynamics overcome biases that individual traders may have, effectively eliminating [the biases] from forecasts
  6. They can be designed to forecast a variety of issues and provide a variety of types of information

with luck, efforts like this (or ubl) might make hacking on business problems sexy / interesting enough to foster new open source communities. ideally, all these efforts nudge corporate entities towards peer production (bye bye HR raffles, bye bye conference room campers)

Cog in the crawler

Now that Google is helping me to surf faster (works as advertised, by the way), I have effectively become a cog in a huge distributed crawling machine. Obviously, this is only the first step (alexa-style traffic analysis is naturally already happening). If you control the proxy that people use, annotation and tagging at internet scale are suddenly becoming feasible. ‘tag this’ button in the google toolbar anyone? This will lead to a repeat of the third voice lawsuits, but these features are too useful to be derailed by these problems for long. Years ago at KPMG, I experimented with the office server extensions annotation system, and I am eager to see it return in a cross platform way. People have been pointing out the possibilities for adsense (targeted ads based on your surfing history), personalized search and cobrowsing