Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious types of searches: people based on interests, places, movies, books, music, etc based on people. This is of course what Google has been fearing and why Google has been doubling down on Google+ at every turn ...

Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious types of searches: people based on interests, places, movies, books, music, etc based on people. This is of course what Google has been fearing and why Google has been doubling down on Google+ at every turn ...

This will be almost the last Tech Tuesday post in the initial series on programming. The basic premise of this series was that programming is a lot like giving a person instructions for how to do something. As I had mentioned in the very first post of the series and then again in the recap, one challenge is that we may not be the only one providing instructions. And from every day life we know how hard it can be to be on the receiving end of this. Imagine for a moment working in a matrix orga...

This will be almost the last Tech Tuesday post in the initial series on programming. The basic premise of this series was that programming is a lot like giving a person instructions for how to do something. As I had mentioned in the very first post of the series and then again in the recap, one challenge is that we may not be the only one providing instructions. And from every day life we know how hard it can be to be on the receiving end of this. Imagine for a moment working in a matrix orga...

The latest round of fighting coming out of Washington is disheartening because we all seem to be caught up in discussing the tactics of the trillion dollar coin. All the focus is on a single battle and the objective of the war seems murky at best if not entirely forgotten. Even the less spending versus more revenue versus some mix of the two discussion is almost entirely devoid of actual content. The real question we should be debating is what kind of society we envision ten or twenty years f...

The latest round of fighting coming out of Washington is disheartening because we all seem to be caught up in discussing the tactics of the trillion dollar coin. All the focus is on a single battle and the objective of the war seems murky at best if not entirely forgotten. Even the less spending versus more revenue versus some mix of the two discussion is almost entirely devoid of actual content. The real question we should be debating is what kind of society we envision ten or twenty years f...

China is going through a crack down on social media and is apparently now requiring verified real identities online. This is very clearly an attempt to silence criticism and suppress unrest by making it easy to track down who said what online. I am strongly in support of pseudonyms which is one of several reasons why I prefer Twitter to Facebook. It is also why recently proposed bills to outlaw online impersonation are potentially problematic. But what about going the opposite direction? What...

China is going through a crack down on social media and is apparently now requiring verified real identities online. This is very clearly an attempt to silence criticism and suppress unrest by making it easy to track down who said what online. I am strongly in support of pseudonyms which is one of several reasons why I prefer Twitter to Facebook. It is also why recently proposed bills to outlaw online impersonation are potentially problematic. But what about going the opposite direction? What...

In my blog posts about employment I have made the point that computers are getting better and better at carrying out tasks that previously required humans. The strongest case in point here are Google’s self driving cars. As recently as 2004, the year of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, it looked like a driverless car was a long, long way off. We seem to have hit a major acceleration point in what can be accomplished at the intersection of large and real time data sets, massive compute power a...

In my blog posts about employment I have made the point that computers are getting better and better at carrying out tasks that previously required humans. The strongest case in point here are Google’s self driving cars. As recently as 2004, the year of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, it looked like a driverless car was a long, long way off. We seem to have hit a major acceleration point in what can be accomplished at the intersection of large and real time data sets, massive compute power a...

Money Ball was a good movie (I have to admit to not having read the book) with a crucial theme: statistics beats human intuition in complex situations. With the predictions for the 2012 elections we saw the same theme play itself out as Nate Silver crushed the pundits by using data. There are is also a fantastic example in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I did read) of a relatively simple data based model outperforming all “experts” when it comes to predicting the future pric...

Money Ball was a good movie (I have to admit to not having read the book) with a crucial theme: statistics beats human intuition in complex situations. With the predictions for the 2012 elections we saw the same theme play itself out as Nate Silver crushed the pundits by using data. There are is also a fantastic example in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I did read) of a relatively simple data based model outperforming all “experts” when it comes to predicting the future pric...

In marketing a site or service, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. For market places such as Etsy and Shapeways this is easy because they can lead with pictures of some gorgeous products available for sale. But what about an abstract service such as payments? For a long time Dwolla’s home page had text and even stylized diagrams of payment flows. They provided a fair bit of information but were not engaging. I was therefore thrilled to see the Dwolla’s new home page feature photog...

In marketing a site or service, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. For market places such as Etsy and Shapeways this is easy because they can lead with pictures of some gorgeous products available for sale. But what about an abstract service such as payments? For a long time Dwolla’s home page had text and even stylized diagrams of payment flows. They provided a fair bit of information but were not engaging. I was therefore thrilled to see the Dwolla’s new home page feature photog...

For many years we used to have Au Pairs to help with our children. The screening process to find a new Au Pair was quite cumbersome and mostly paper based. It was difficult to go through many possible candidates and try to form an opinion on them. That all changed when the agency we were using asked Au Pairs to start recording short videos of themselves. Now we were able to skip many profiles after just a short look at the video and focus on the ones we could imagine living with us for a year...

For many years we used to have Au Pairs to help with our children. The screening process to find a new Au Pair was quite cumbersome and mostly paper based. It was difficult to go through many possible candidates and try to form an opinion on them. That all changed when the agency we were using asked Au Pairs to start recording short videos of themselves. Now we were able to skip many profiles after just a short look at the video and focus on the ones we could imagine living with us for a year...

Welcome back to Tech Tuesday. We are still in the process of wrapping up the initial series on programming. In the interim review I had identified a couple of high level questions that had not yet been answered dealing with code that has been written. Just before the end of the year we looked at bugs and debugging and I mentioned that there are two types of testing: unit testing and black box testing. More on these today. One key purpose of testing is to identify bugs before they are exposed ...

Welcome back to Tech Tuesday. We are still in the process of wrapping up the initial series on programming. In the interim review I had identified a couple of high level questions that had not yet been answered dealing with code that has been written. Just before the end of the year we looked at bugs and debugging and I mentioned that there are two types of testing: unit testing and black box testing. More on these today. One key purpose of testing is to identify bugs before they are exposed ...

The Internet changes everything. Aaron Swartz knew and embraced that at an age when most of us think that the biggest problem we are facing is this week’s home work assignment. For the first time in human history we can connect to each other independent of where or who we are. We have at our disposal the ability to collaborate on ideas globally and advance knowledge and society. Aaron lived a life committed to furthering and protecting that newfound capability. In the process he sometimes pus...

The Internet changes everything. Aaron Swartz knew and embraced that at an age when most of us think that the biggest problem we are facing is this week’s home work assignment. For the first time in human history we can connect to each other independent of where or who we are. We have at our disposal the ability to collaborate on ideas globally and advance knowledge and society. Aaron lived a life committed to furthering and protecting that newfound capability. In the process he sometimes pus...