Thursday, March 29, 2007

Voting with our pockets.. up the google list

I find the four-leafed clover in google's toolbar the ultimate act of trust in a brand. punch whatever you want to know about in the text box, and get ready to be taken straight to where you want to go. But that assumes that you really want to go to the first link in google's search results.

Up until 6 months ago, searching for BVSP in google would take you to the site of the Bundesverband Selbständiger Personalleiter e.V. or to the on of the Bellevue State Park.. but it seems that all it took was a boom cycle in the São Paulo stock exchange (Bovespa) and a few obsessive clickers of BVSP (the yahoo finance ticker for knowing the value of the index).. and now that is the first result in the list.

ainda bem..

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

the man behind "How to Lie with Statistics"..

There's this small little book that helped changed the way I saw numerical information in the media... kinda becoming a self-convicted skeptical on how media can cherry-pick numbers to try to make their point, and what is most amazing about that book is that it was written on 1954. Fifty three years ago and still being relevant is not a small feat for a book.

A clever title helped making it popular, but it also shocking how a person with no formal training in statistics can write a book that became the most widely read book in history.

The man in question was Darrell Huff. He passed away on 2001, and here you can find a small description of his achievement and his life.

Friday, March 16, 2007

My uncle's encyclopedia wasn't that cool...

I didn't have an encyclopedia at home when I grew up, but sure I spent whole evenings at an uncle's place just browsing their encyclopedia (it was quite a bit more usage than what my cousins')... but it didn't have features like this.



Ségolène Royal is a key political figure in France, an a candidate on the '07 Presidential Election that will take place on April 22nd. When I went to wikipedia, I found the warning note that you can see above. cool, isn't it? Content that is dynamic enough - and honest enough- to warn the reader that the information on the topic is changing real time.

It actually reminded me of that magic book on the Neverending story film (1984)

I can't stop liking wikipedia ;-) !

Thursday, March 15, 2007

problems in paradise (a tiny case, though)...

Google had taught me to pretty much expect anything wonderful from them, and there is one particular feature that i use a lot: searching for "define: XXXXX" to find a fast, short list of definitions of that word in english... and it had always worked, until today, where I found for the first time a word that it couldn't find a definition for (despite google itself linking to the american heritage dictionary for the definition.

I am a subcriber to The Economist online services, and one of their recent articles describes markets as "twitchy".

...sometimes is fun to find a black spot on a normally spotless service...;-)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Incentives, incentives, incentives...

I was fascinated when I first read freakonomics about the unintended consequences that setting incentives might generate. Their first chapter in particular makes a dramatic case describing the story of a babycare center in Israel that faces issues with parents showing up late to pick the kids up, and after implementing a "negative incentive" (a fine), the found [shock!] that the number of parents arriving late to pick their kids up increased rather than decreasing.

Now, fresh from the freakonomics blog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYVTsxJssjk ) .. do incentives make sense for organ donors.

A couple of considerations.

Is the altruistic aspect of an organ donation contaminated if prisoners get an incentive (like shorter time in prison) if they commit to donate their organs once the die?

or an even bigger case...

If younger patients in need of an organ transfer get prioritized higher in the list of recipients (one can argue they will use the organ for a longer time)... is this action implicitly stating that the "value" of the life of older potential recipients is lower?

have a look... a fascinating case.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

kick-butt presentations... radical approaches

We end up nowadays having to communicate publicly quite often (at school, at home, and even raising issues of common interest to friends and family). Most of those cases do call for how to deliver the message well in a limited amount of time.

Then most people gravitate to overusing Microsoft's powerpoint in a couple of areas: visual clutter and sheer number of slides.

I wanted to share a couple of pointers to content on the web about effective presentations that I find worth considering.

1. the anything but powerpoint approach. Have you wondered how historical speeches might have been if the powerpoint plague was around at the time? in particular.. how the temptation to abuse the tools can damage the message? have a look at the Gettysburg address by Peter Norvig, and don't miss "the making of"

2. the don't-you-dare-to-blink style (aka. the Lessig Method of presentation). What I like about this type of presentation is how it debunks the myth of the "slides budget" and simplistic rules-of-thumb suggesting 2 minutes per slide or so. It clearly calls for a proper rehearsal (since timing is everything), but it boasts an amazing visual simplicity. Here it goes in 2 versions, the first one on Larry Lessig's speech of Free culture and the second one on less earth-shaking topic by Dick Hardt at OSCON 2005.

I found those cases thought-provoking, especially given the thousands of hours that most of all have to leave just feeling that somebody is pushing powerpoint slides down our throat without much previous analysis. Sure there are more effective ways of communicating