Category: Web/Tech

Prizes and Open Source Software

Richard Branson and Al Gore announced today a $25 million prize for the best way to remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Prizes can draw on dispersed knowledge to produce solutions that were unlikely to have been foreseen in advance.  Open source software has a similar advantage –  with enough eyes all bugs are shallow. 

I think prizes are becoming more common not because people have suddenly learned of their advantages but because the internet has magnified their advantages.  A prize today can at low-cost attract and draw from a much larger pool of contestants than in the past.  The rise of open source software and the rise of prizes are thus similar responses to the same improvement in communications technology.   

Thanks to Lance at A Second Hand Conjecture for the pointer.

Letters to *The Economist*

They are all on a blog now, a very clever idea.  The deeper question is what the equilibrium for an open-source blog looks like, keeping in mind there is some small cost of writing a letter.  And how much does the name of the sponsoring entity — surely The Economist has a premium reputation — affect the quality of that final equilibrium?

How about doing the same but with an Amazon-like rating system, which would rank the posts, putting the most popular ones on top of the page?  Or just hire one smart person to "stack" them in the right order, or in the right categories?

I know that many major media outlets are looking to move into blogging, my kudos to the one which figured out that the readers should be the writers as well.  And they even let them sign their names…

Measuring the social impact of corporate behavior

The latest?  Do The Right Thing…a community driven site that collects information about the social impact of a company’s behavior…

How it works: Company names are submitted by users for a 60 day evaluation period, similar to an IPO evaluation.  During this stage the crowd pulls any information, historical or current, relevant to a company’s social performance.  At the end of that open period – a social performance score is created.  Right now there are 54 days left on the evaluation period for Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Whole Foods Market.  And after the 60-day initial rating a company’s score can always change as new information is collected.

Here is more.  My fear is that this will favor corporations with good public relations, damage corporations which benefit foreigners and the (non-Internet connected) poor, and damage corporations whose benefits are not especially visible to the public eye.  How many people will post "I bought my rubber ducky at Wal-Mart and saved thirty-four cents, thereby helping to employ numerous poor Chinese and lower global inequality"?

Here is one critical posting on the site itself.  Here is another.

The demerits of RSS

Is RSS going mainstream?

I’ve had my RA set up this technology for me but I still don’t appreciate it or even use it.  First, I like the look of individual blog pages.  More importantly, reading blogs for me is a matter of mood.  Right now I feel like reading, say Jacqueline Passey rather than EconBrowser, or vice versa, and I don’t want all the new posts thrust in front of my nose at the same time.  I also fear that ongoing use of RSS would lead to reading inflation; I would add new blogs to my feed because it is easy to do so, but encounter the intransitivity of indifference.  I would end up overloaded.

My current reading method "by hand" takes more time, but hey reading blogs is fun and it should stay fun at the margin.  Who wants to be satiated in liquidity?  My current method also brings more discipline.  Do you all have thoughts on this matter?

Bypassing computers to speak with a human being

Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately, the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few "invalid entries," although some IVRs will hang up. 

Talk. Say "get human" (or "agent" or "representative") or raise your voice, – or even just mumble. The IVR might connect you to a human being after one of these key or unknown phrases. 

Just hold, pretending that you have only an old rotary phone. 

Connect to account collections or sales or account cancellation. These groups always seem to answer quickly. When you reach a real live person, immediately ask for the representative’s name and rep number. This way, the rep knows that you are writing it down and is thus are more likely to help you. Then ask the rep to transfer you to the department you need. Sometimes you’ll be put ahead of the queue, but at other times, you will be sent to the end. In that case, you’re back where you started. 

Make a toll call. For service on credit cards, if the expected wait time is too long, hangup and try to call back on the company’s non-toll-free number, as these numbers often have shorter queues.

I’ve done best with number four.  "Small steps toward a much better world," as they say.  The pointer is from Natasha.

Small steps toward a much better world

Via Henry Farrell, the probabilistic alarm clock:

Lifehacker links to
an invention that I’ve thought for years would be a good idea (I’m sure
that plenty of other people have had the same thought).   Many people
have their clocks running a few minutes fast, to encourage them to
leave earlier for appointments to get there on time etc.  The
problem with this is that if you’re half-way rational, you’ll correct
for the error, making it useless.  So the solution is to have a
probabilistic clock, where the clock is fast, but you aren’t sure how
fast it is within a given and relatively short time range.  Thus, you’re
more likely to depart early for your appointments and get there on time
(or a few minutes ahead, most probably, in many situations).  This is
exactly what some bloke has programmed, although it doesn’t appear that it has an alarm feature yet.

Tim Harford covered a similar topic last week.