Raquo Journal

Less than free

In the summer of 2007, excitement regarding the criticality of map data (specifically turn-by-turn navigation data) reached a fever pitch. On July 23, 2007, TomTom, the leading portable GPS device maker, agreed to buy Tele Atlas for US$2.7 billion. Shortly thereafter, on October 1, Nokia agreed to buy NavTeq for a cool US$8.1 billion. Meanwhile Google was still evolving its strategy and no longer wanted to be limited by the terms of its two contracts. As such, they informed Tele Atlas and NavTeq that they wanted to modify their license terms to allow more liberty with respect to syndication and proliferation. NavTeq balked, and in September of 2008 Google quietly dropped NavTeq, moving to just one partner for its core mapping data. Tele Atlas eventually agreed to the term modifications, but perhaps they should have sensed something bigger at play.

Read the whole article.

Inattentional blindness

Hyman designed a pair of studies where he had subjects walk across a certain path without distraction, while listening to an iPod, while talking on a cell phone, and while walking and talking with another person. He found in the first study that people talking on a cell phone walked more slowly, and had to make more course corrections than the other groups.

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What this all might mean is that there is something about talking on a cell phone that is particularly demanding of our attention – more so than listening to music or talking with someone who is physically present. These results also support the hypothesis that talking with a passenger is not as dangerous because the extra pair of eyes increases the chance that someone will notice a sudden obstacle or unexpected traffic pattern.

Read the whole article on the Neurologica blog. See also: Cognitive biases.

The essence of entrepreneurship

You can’t burn 6 minutes of your time any better than watching this video.

Find their weakness

Anyway, the one down there was a McDonald’s. It did awesome lunch business and was extremely well-run. One of those McD’s where even if the drive thru line went all the way to the road (which it always was at lunch), you still knew you’d be through in 10 minutes and your order would be right.

Of course, this kind of success attracted competition, and a Wendy’s was built very close-by. It was to open on a Tuesday.

So what did McDonald’s do on Wendy’s big grand opening day?

Cognitive biases

Being aware of common perception and cognitive fallacies will help you be more rational and make better choices if/when you so desire. Must-reads:

Maps of bounded rationality: a perspective on intuitive judgement and choice
Nobel prize lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks
A paper by Eliezer Yudkowski (part of Global Catastrophic Risks book).

Why Didn’t I Think of That?
A book by Charles McCoy.

Three Worlds Collide

This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, biotechnology only sort-of worked; and yet somehow humanity not only survived, but discovered a way to travel Faster-Than-Light: The past’s Future.

Ouch, thought Akon, I never realized how embarrassing that sounds until I heard it explained to an alien.

Up until then, all wars were wars of total extermination – but afterward, the theory was that if a large group of people could all do something wrong, it was probably a reasonable mistake. Their conceptualization of probability theory – of a formally correct way of manipulating uncertainty – was followed by the dawn of their world peace.

Akon waited. This was why he couldn’t have talked about the question with anyone else. Only a Confessor would actually think before answering, if asked a question like that.

A must-read story by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Read it online or download pdf. I don’t think I can explain the whole awesomeness of it without spoiling something. It’s not universally appealing though if you read carelessly. Don’t give up on it before the third chapter.

By the time you have read it, you’ll be wanting more, so here you are.