Raquo Journal

Less than free

raquo — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:10:09 +0000

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

raquo — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:52:26 +0000

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.

…

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

raquo — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:11:22 +0000

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

Find their weakness

raquo — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:50:28 +0000

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

raquo — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:45:42 +0000

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

raquo — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:14:55 +0000

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.

Adobe Magic

raquo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:21:46 +0000

Just in case your jaw is ready for the floor again (remember Seam carving?), here are some Adobe technologies that will soon make it into CS5 and other products.

Structural image editing with constraints

See also: more details [pdf], and a similar technology [pdf] for reducing the distortion of wide-angle photographs.

Enhancing video with images

Panoramic video

raquo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:55:31 +0000

OK, Google street view (above) is nice, but what if you could look around… in a video? Turns out you can (and it’s actually old news). A company Immersive Media makes 360˚ cameras and has demos online: whales, ski, roller coaster. To look around in a video, click and drag the mouse inside the flash player. (For best experience open only one video at a time and wait for it to load fully before playing it.)

I’m back

raquo — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:05:57 +0000

Oh well, I just noticed that some people keep coming here even though I haven’t posted anything for years. Coincidentally, I’ve seen too much magic floating freely in the intertubes recently and I’ll be posting it some time soon. At first it may be a bit outdated, but you know, not everyone lives in the internet.

P. S. Sorry there are no comments yet, I’ll enable them as soon as the flames of laziness subside below the action threshold.

An American self-portrait

raquo — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:32:46 +0000

Chris Jordan makes numbers look huge and frightening.

Image cropped from “Light Bulbs”

“[The image] depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.)”

Ditching is not a suicide

raquo — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:45:14 +0000

Yesterday an US Airways Airbus 320 (flight 1549) landed in the Hudson river after both its engines were hit by birds. What’s really stunning is that everyone onboard survived (150 passengers and 5 crew) — nearly a unique outcome in such situations. New York Times has a nice visualization of the incident, and Wikipedia gives more details.

I am really impressed by the perfection of all this. The flight’s captain, by the way, has an interesting background.

Image cropped from grego!’s photo at Flickr

Photos → the first published photo @ Twitter, by grego! @ Flickr, and at TimesOnline.

Update: Videos of the splashdow is now available (in the second clip action starts at 1:58)

In 1996 Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 was hijacked and crashed into the sea as a result of running out of fuel. Upon impact, the plane broke into millions of pieces and only 52 out of 175 onboard survived. Below is the footage of the impact.

In 1963 a small passenger jet, Tu-124, landed in the Neva river in Saint-Petersbourgh, USSR, with no causalities. The story behind it is so bizarre I would not believe it had not it happened in Russia. Note how close a bridge is to the crash site.

How Porsche hacked the financial system

raquo — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:03:16 +0000

Here is a very well explained example of a short squeeze.

Via HN.

A year of OpenStreetMap edits

raquo — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:49:04 +0000

OpenStreetMap is a free world map that anyone can edit (like Wikipedia). The video below shows a year of people adding and editing roads and highways all over the world. Sometimes some country’s network lights up at once when a bulk of data is added.

via FlowingData

Markets in everything

raquo — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:32:07 +0000

If you haven’t already subscribed to Marginal Revolution, do so now and never miss a single “Markets in Everything” post. It’s just too awesome to ignore.

Some editions: Xmas, Customer service, China fact of the day, Boxing day and many more.

The authors (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok) are great blog writers — if you’re trying to make your blog interesting, you better learn from them. “Markets in Everything” series is just one way of keeping readers come back.

Falkirk wheel

raquo — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:27:07 +0000

Awesome engineering and design.

Business models of the new web: the economics of content, software and social networks

raquo — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:46:24 +0000

In my graduation paper, I take a look at current monetization strategies of various online properties like newspapers and social networks and explain in plain language (supported by previous studies and my own research), why these business models survived and not others.

New business models and strategies for monetization are proposed for online content and social networks. Also, there is a brief explanation of the startup market (meaning the acquisitions of startups). I guess this would be insightful for anyone who is about to launch a startup or have built a social application that he has trouble monetizing.

Here is the paper in PDF, it is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.