December 2008
12 posts
2 tags
Visual Search
I recently wrote that the reason we can now get some real AI results is that we have a large body of data available. One area in which this applies is visual search. There are already some fantastic examples of what can be done with a large number of images in the work that has been done on pulling images from Flickr to assemble detailed views. There are also a couple of visual search...
4 tags
No Such Thing as Too Much Seed Capital...
NYC EDC has been meeting with entrepreneurs, VCs and others from the startup community in New York City to figure out whether it is possible to create more startup jobs. I recently participated in a discussion on this topic and there was an interesting discussion about the availability of seed capital in New York. Several folks made the argument that there is already enough seed capital...
3 tags
Grinding Versus Transforming
I have been thinking a bit about the pros and cons of grinding it out versus transforming a company. By grinding it out I mean pursuing a path on which you are making progress but very slowly. So I am not talking about situations in which a company has not figured out at all what they are doing or is completely failing, but rather a situation in which every bit of growth takes a huge amount of...
4 tags
AMEE
A few weeks ago, my daughter came home quite distraught from school. “Daddy, the polar bears and penguins are dying and it is our fault” she declared at the dinner table. Having spent many hours admiring the polar bears and penguins at the Central Park Zoo, this was something that all three of our kids immediately agreed was to be stopped. So they wanted to know what could be done...
3 tags
Electronic Voting
We have been having an interesting discussion in our village on the feasability of Internet voting for local issues. In general, I am wary of electronic voting systems because they have the potential for manipulation at large scale. I certainly think that the closed source model that has been pursued to date is completely broken. Any effort on the federal and state levels should be open source...
4 tags
Human Vs. Machine 2
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Those of us who have been around computers for a long time have lived through many letdowns when it comes to AI. The promise was frequently grand (cf various Herbert Simon quotes) but the actual results were disappointing to say the least. But a funny thing has happened over the last decade on the web. The grand promises have (mostly)...
4 tags
Human Vs. Machine
This is of course one of the all time great (geek) topics: who will rule in the future — humans or machines? I was reminded of it by discussion of Techmeme’s story selection. It should not be surprising that a single algorithm — in Gabe’s case link analysis — is not always successful at picking out the important stories. One of the things that makes our human...
Dangerous Interregnum
It is the worst possible time for us to have a lame duck administration. The contraction that is taking place has a lot of self re-enforcing loops. People are getting laid off in droves — that scares everyone else — people stop spending — demand drops off — companies need to cut back — resulting in more layoffs. Monetary policy is essentially useless for breaking...
4 tags
Kaizen for Developers: Custom(ized) Tools
Another key Kaizen technique is the customization of tools or even the creation of entirely custom tools. In one of the early posts I wrote about how a Japanese automotive supplier was able to switch parts in injection molding in minutes whereas a similar German supplier needed almost 12 hours. The basic setup they were using was quite similar, but the Japanese supplier had made extensive...
4 tags
Kaizen for Developers: Root Cause Analysis
In manufacturing, when stuff goes wrong, there tends to be physical evidence, such as a part with holes in the wrong place. It is therefore often easy to find the immediate cause of the problem, which might be to say that the wholes were drilled in the wrong place and go yell at the person who does the drilling. But in Kaizen, the immediate cause of a problem is only the beginning of the...
3 tags
Kaizen for Developers: Visualization
One of my favorite Kaizen techniques is visualization. On the shopfloor this takes the form of large signs that graphically display key quality metrics. The charts show overall trendlines but also break out individual teams. This is a powerful motivator. When there are large gains in quality, the credit can go to the team(s) that produced the progress. Conversely, when the overall chart shows...
5 tags
Please Don't Give (Me) Stuff!
Holiday gift shopping is in full swing and I have had a number of relatives ask me what I would like to get. I always say, please don’t give me more stuff. Stuff basically includes any and all physical objects (excluding books). I have long ago crossed the threshold of having too much stuff and find myself spending more and more time getting rid of stuff to unclutter my life. Paul Graham...