I like it. I think you've got one too many lines, though: you don't need both a confuse-o-meter and an understand-o-meter - they're reporting the same metric. I'd consider averaging them into one line for overall sentiment.
> A business is valuable to own if you think it may bring you more value in the future […]
The mistake is conflating money and value: money can be a value, but other things, like riding into space, the prestige of owning a paper, and general quality of life are also values. A decision makes economic sense if the value you gain from it exceeds the value you give up to get it, regardless of the form those values take.
Not to mention they're just Gorgeous. I had a set I picked up at a thrift store just for the look - Wikipedia's faster, but damn, Britannica had Gravitas.
In my rather limited experience as a sysadmin, I've found avoiding those calls to be one of my best motivators: My systems work like they're supposed to because I like my sleep.
Two reasons:
1. Logs filling up with login failures from drive-bys masks legitimate/focused hack attempts.
2. If there's a security vulnerability found for sshd, non-standard port choice reduces the risk of drive-by scanners.
Non-standard ports don't stop dedicated attacks, but they do reduce noise that can obfuscate a dedicated attack and can reduce your exposure to uncommitted attackers.
Aside from the privacy issues, I think this is the biggest cock-up of the whole thing: They managed to predict, with shocking accuracy, the fact that the girl was pregnant - yet they missed that she was a teenager living with her parents. This is why I worry about algorithms: We're extremely bad about identifying what's important information until we screw something like this up. In this case, the father called Target sheepishly. In other cases, he may have beaten his daughter or disowned her.
In this case, the difference is if Foozits were something you used to stop your whatzit from itching, the proprietor probably wouldn't mention that out loud in the company of others. Target, on the other hand, is fine sending you an ad for it - and I suspect when the day comes that they can announce that to you when you walk in the store, they'll use all the tact and grace they apparently used in divining a girl was pregnant without also divining her age.
I think part of the problem is that it's a very difficult question to quantify - we can't control the inputs, we're not totally sure what we want from the outputs, it's unlikely that a uniform process will work to get the outputs we want, and we don't have the materials to guarantee a uniform process from start to finish.
On the input side, each incoming class is different: they vary across geographic and socioeconomic lines, they're all affected by factors which occurred years before we ever got them in a classroom to begin with.
On the output side, we really _Don't_ know what we want. It's easy to say, "students who can read, write, and do math," but the devil, as always, is in the details - how do we measure that in a way that doesn't immediately become a metrics problem á la No Child Left Behind?. More than anything, we need to foster successful individuals - but we're not sure how to do that on a large scale and the education system is but one part of a child's life.
The answer in a lot of ways seems to be "Very Good Teachers" - but what makes a good teacher? What sort of support structure is required? Are we willing to pay for enough Very Good Teachers? Do we have enough? Can we train more?
Further, to what degree does the attempt to constrain the education system so we can quantify the results inhibit individuality? In assuring a child knows his multiplication tables, are we imposing a system that will prevent that child from the free expression that would eventually lead to a great artist? Many of our finest works - the pieces of art by which we define our culture, spring from people who would, by any other metric, be considered failures by a system intended to raise successful individuals.
All this is complicated by the fact that the end result of a good education system ultimately is a good society - something we won't know until 20, 30, 40 years later. Everything else is a proxy: We think a high college attendance or graduation rate will get us there, we think more scientists and engineers will get us there, we think more well-rounded individuals will get us there, but ultimately, we don't know what makes a good society, nor what works to get us there.
I think there are improvements we can make, teaching methods that work better than others, and probably ways to quantify some of those differences, but ultimately, we don't even know the bounds of the problem we're trying to solve in education.
I think it's worth bringing up a factor mentioned here a while ago - Piracy serves as a useful market signal. The fact that people are pirating content means there's demand - if they're pirating it, but nobody's paying for it, that means the rights holders are creating a product people want, but the price & delivery mechanism aren't right yet. That's an awful lot better information than just that people aren't buying something - and I'd argue it's one of the signals that got the record industry to actually start taking DRM-free music sales seriously.
Obviously it's not a great signal on price - piracy's always going to have the lowest price - but knowing there's demand means you can start to adjust your strategy to try to capture some genuinely lost sales.
Because then I've gotta deal with two windows. Cmd+~ : One's now in the background, the other isn't. Switch apps, one comes back, the other doesn't. Switch monitors, the sizing's off. Try to do anything other than 50/50 split, have to adjust manually. Try to use TM's project browser (seriously), doesn't work. Try to swap that second file for a different one, have to close the window, open a new window & reposition. It's generally a much clunkier workflow.
Granted, I only know that from using VIM (and occasionally SublimeText), but it's been one of my "Dear GOD Give Me This in TM" requests for a while. I've got SizeUp and love it - truly one of my must-have apps - but to me it's a hack, not a solution.
Because then I've gotta deal with two windows. Cmd+~ : One's now in the background, the other isn't. Switch apps, one comes back, the other doesn't. Switch monitors, the sizing's off. Try to do anything other than 50/50 split, have to adjust manually. Try to use TM's project browser (seriously), doesn't work. Try to swap that second file for a different one, have to close the window, open a new window & reposition. It's generally a much clunkier workflow.
Granted, I only know that from using VIM (and occasionally SublimeText), but it's been one of my "Dear GOD Give Me This in TM" requests for a while. I've got SizeUp and love it - truly one of my must-have apps - but to me it's a hack, not a solution.
Wealth accumulation roughly follows the process of "1. Earn money 2. Don't spend it" - It doesn't strain credulity that IQ might be correlated with the former, but not the latter.
I'm curious as to the effect on quality of life - measuring wealth in dollars is easier, but a pretty imprecise measure of the overall effect on someone's life of a few IQ points.
I'm even more curious as to the effects on happiness...
They've got the design down absolutely pat - the look of the item, the look of the print-outs, the site, the video - it's great.
They've also got some valid uses for it in there - yeah, we've all got screens, but those screens are used for an awful lot of other stuff - this gives one quick place to find a couple useful pieces of information, a whole lot faster than otherwise.
It is, however, absurdly wasteful. Anything I can read off that, I can save on my phone for a pretty comparable reading experience.
I think it's the software, more than the hardware, that's attractive - Give me that information in an app on the same schedule that little box would print it, and I'd use it. It looks like a pretty good filter and delivery mechanism, but I've got no use for a bunch of scraps of thermal paper…
Yeah, I wasn't sure of how to approach the mental aspect - I didn't mean to say construction or other physical labor required little mental ability, because I've done enough of it to know that's just not the case.
I think coding is different for two reasons - and please do excuse me, because while I've _done_ physical work, I don't do it for a living, so I'm coming at this slanted:
First, with physical work, you're doing, well, physical work. There's a correlation between physical activity and mental acuity, and, as you mention, you can take out some of your stress out on productive labor (if I do that, I have to buy a new mouse). You also have a balance between the physical and mental side - I'm not sure if there's a corresponding mental equivalent to muscle memory.
Second, you can 'outsource' some of the modeling to the actual physical object - the work you're doing has a tangible component, so you don't have to keep the entire thing in your head. That part, to me, is the most draining aspect of coding - I've gotten much better at structuring my code so I can compartmentalize most of that away, but when I'm working with older code or other people's code, I've basically got to have a very accurate representation of the entire program in mind the whole time. That gets really tiring really fast.
I think one of the other big differences, though, is that I can screw up an awful lot more than you can and get away with it - if I completely arse up a section of code, I can go back in and redo it at basically zero cost. If you arse up a floor, well, now we need to buy the raw materials for a new floor. The corollary between experts and amateurs mostly holds between construction and coding - give an idiot enough time and eventually you can have either a house or a program - the difference is he'll cost you an awful lot more trying to build the house. That breeds a level of patience and caution which, frankly, is probably better for one's outlook on life in general.
Anyway, again, sorry if I seemed to demean physical labor - I really didn't intend to. Like I said, I've seen enough experts in action to know the difference isn't in the hands.
First, "working hard" and working the sort of insane, body-destroying hours that Arrington & co are advocating are two different things. It's good to work hard, be diligent, and get things done, but balance is essential. Arrington doesn't agree.
Second, Work for our parents and grandparents involved physical labor in some degree - ours does not. Our work takes a huge toll on the body for what seems so sedentary, and requires (I'd suspect) much more demanding mental processes, which are also extremely draining.
So yes, work hard - as did your father and his father - but don't kill yourself, and don't spend it all in what my doctor calls the Chicken position.
That's about half of what got us into this mess, isn't it?
If you do this well, Yeah, I'd rather pay for it - we're not talking bank, but for a couple bucks a month, if you do what you say you'll do and I stop having to worry about whether Facebook's decided to loot my underwear drawer while I wasn't looking, I'll happily pay.
You could also consider a Cloudblaze-type model - some stuff for free to get the aggregated data you need, and some pay services. I just want to make sure I know which side your bread's buttered on.
Also, if you're at NYU - talk to the folks at ITP. Lot of interesting, privacy concerned people connected to that group.
Honestly, the biggest problem I have with this site right now is that I don't know how you're paying for it - or how you intend to keep doing so. That's pretty much the exact problem with the sites you're monitoring - if I'm not paying for the service, someone else is.
I'd pay for a service like this - hell, I'd _rather_ pay for a service like this.