TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
I stepped in from of the thermostat and waved my hand in front of it. Instantly it came to life, and presented me with a speech bubble that said, as best as I can remember, that “Away Mode has been activated. Press to continue.” I pressed the face of the thermostat and instantly the heat kicked on, bringing the room back to the desired temperature. Crisis averted.
Why was our thermostat set on “away mode”? Because every Sunday morning my family happens to be out of the house for a couple of hours. And our thermostat had learned that by watching us. See, we have a Nest thermostat.
How awesome is it that Nest is getting us excited about a thermostat?
January 12th, 2012Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising:
“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.
“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.
As Marco points out, this likely means they’ll insert photos from companies—advertisements—in our timelines. I’m not sure how they’ll do it otherwise.
This could be an interesting form of advertisement, if advertisers use it as such—rather than show straight print-like adverts, they could use it to tell stories about their products. Audi could use it to take well-done photos of their cars in use, ones that fit with Instagram’s purpose, to convey a more general feel of what Audi is to viewers, rather than simply try to convey specific information (e.g., “best-in-class safety!”). Of course, other forms of advertisements could be used in more interesting ways—print adverts in particular—but they tend not to be.
Advertisements could be done in an interesting and effective way, but not only is it likely advertisers won’t use it as such, but the entire concept walks a fine line. Delivering ads within someone’s timeline—a stream of photos from users the user decided to follow, and thus is inherently private—will likely end up feeling invasive. I wonder, too, if Instagram will target ads to users. What personal information do they have to target ads? And if they don’t, that makes the venture a lot less likely to be successful.
January 11th, 2012Thanks to HelpSpot for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.
At HelpSpot we’re big supporters of open source software and simply couldn’t run our business without it. So, 6 years ago we created Open Source Help Desk List to assist companies looking for an open source help desk software solution. It’s success has been beyond our wildest expectations; serving as an invaluable tool for thousands of companies to find the solution they need. We hope it can help you as well.
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January 11th, 2012One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring. What they need to understand is that there’s a big difference between “hiring” and “talent”. I’m continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It’s so prevalent, in fact, you’ll often see on a company’s priorities a bullet of “hiring”. And that slight shift in wording fundamentally sets up the wrong dynamics. Hiring, is a sub-bullet of talent and if you’re focusing on hiring you’ll be quickly setting up a revolving door.
I think that shift of focus changes who you hire, too—because if you’re focused on hiring, or getting the right amount of people to do what you need to do who have a specific skill, you’re focused on the micro rather than the macro. In a company, each new hire is not just an addition. They change the dynamic within the company, and thus what effect they have on the system has to be fully considered. For each potential employee, they cannot be considered in isolation.
(Via Marcelo Somers.)
January 10th, 2012Thank You, He Said
January 10th, 2012Thank you, he said. Maybe you don’t need me to say it, because I think you know, I think we’ve always understood each other, in that quiet and unacknowledged way, where you don’t say much but I know exactly what you’re saying, what you really mean—but I want to say thank you, he said, looking out into the distance for a second, beyond her, eyes unfocused, then back. Isn’t it funny that when you have something, you don’t realize what it is? That it’s something that won’t ever exist again, and you should thank God or nature or providence, or whatever it is—every second you have it, and every second afterward, too, because you had it, you were lucky enough to have that moment in time?
You infuriated me. You talked too much for too long. You made me listen, when I am the one who likes to talk. We infuriated each other. We argued about gun regulations, we argued about music, we argued about whether a restaurant was any good. You had to be right, and so did I, so everything was a potential debate just waiting for a spark. When you thought I was wrong, you said so. If you thought what I said was bullshit, he said, you said so. And when you thought what I was doing was right, you said so, too, because all you said is what you thought. Thank you.
You and I, he continued, were friends for eight years, through high school and college, and—the edges of his lips arced up slightly—wasn’t there a sort of strange symmetry there? You had such a difficult time in high school, you know, that stuff a lot of people go through then, not sure where your place was, who you were sort of, and we talked and talked, and I tried to listen and understand, but I probably wasn’t very good. And in the last year, I went through something where what I thought was my purpose dissolved and I wasn’t sure anymore—and you told me I needed to get stronger, what I was doing was right, and everything that happened would be for the better, that I’m capable of great things and I should achieve them—and I deserve someone great, too. You made me believe it. And you made me laugh—really laugh—when I hadn’t for weeks. Thank you, he said.
Between the tournaments, the classes and the lunch breaks, the movies, the breakfasts, the bon fires, the long conversations, the drives, the concerts, God—we had more good moments than any two friends could ask for. We did. A lot happened in that time, didn’t it? You and I graduated from high school, stopped speaking for a few years because of a disagreement (and doesn’t it seem so silly now?), you graduated from UCLA in three years, I started graduate school, we both had long relationships, we started speaking again the year before—calmer people, more willing to listen, less arguments, but that same understanding, that never goes away, I think—and you talked me through those few months where I didn’t know what was up and what was down, like we had never stopped talking.
Thank you, he said. A calmness rolled over him, like a slow tide inching along, because he had finally told her what he never had—the calmness that comes when a task of great importance is finished. But under this was a splinter, a small bit of pain almost unnoticed but unmistakably there, because he knew he would wake up soon. Thank you, he said one last time. Thank you for that time you were here, for that time we were friends, and I hope you knew what it meant to me.
Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile phones, it blew our minds, and shifted the entire mobile industry. And laid the foundation for the iPad, which is doing the same for computing generally.
Here’s a link to Apple’s video of the presentation. Here’s Ryan Block’s coverage of the presentation for Engadget.
January 9th, 2012The Labor Department announced today that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent. Most encouraging, though, is the decrease in the unemployment rate was not primarily due to people dropping out of the job market, as has been true in previous months:
Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report: the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all hiring.
200,000 jobs is significant, too, because it’s more than the 125,000 jobs or so a month required to keep up with population growth. We need much more growth than that to dig ourselves out of the hole the 2007-2009 recession dug, but at this point, any growth is positive.
January 6th, 2012Tim Ricchuiti’s Reply
January 6th, 2012Tim Ricchuiti takes exception with my characterization of Greece, Italy and Spain’s problem as being too much debt:
Not quite. It’s not the heavy weight of debt (as Krugman has posted about at length the past week, most notably in this column) that’s causing European nations to struggle. What’s causing those nations to struggle is their inability (until recently) to finance that debt at any sort of tenable rate (7% or under). The reason those governments couldn’t finance their debt is that investors don’t want to purchase debt that might not be paid back. The reason the debt might not be paid back is that, unlike the case of the United States, Great Britain, Finland, and various developing nations, European countries like Spain, Italy, and yes, Greece, can’t print their own money (their own money being Euros). Therefore, they’re at risk of not being able to pay back their Euro-denominated debt. The United States, on the other hand, will never be unable to print dollars, and will always be able to pay back its dollar-denominated debt.
Greece and Italy used substantial amounts of debt to sustain their welfare states, and while their economies are doing reasonably well, there’s no problem—they can roll over their debt before it comes due at similar interest rates and everything works out fine. The problem they now face is their economies are not doing well at all, tax revenue has decreased, and thus their deficits have shot up as they continue to fund their expensive government programs.
As their deficits have continued to grow, and their debt has continued to grow as a percentage of GDP, investors became afraid that they would not be able to pay their debt. Which is why, as Tim says, investors would not purchase their new debt at a sustainable rate: because their debt burden is too high.
Tim argues that this is only a problem because Greece and Italy are on the euro—rather than their own currency—they cannot “print” more money, that is, devalue their currency so the past debts are worth less now than they were then and are thus more affordable to pay.1 Tim further argues that the U.S. will never have this problem, because since we do control our own currency, and our debt is denominated in our currency, we can inflate our currency to reduce the magnitude of our debts.
That’s perfectly accurate, but that does not happen in a vacuum. Everything else is not held equal. Investors will factor the risk of intentional inflation into their investments, and expect higher interest rates for future debts, too. Perhaps Greece and Italy (and the U.S., if we don’t right our ship in the interim) will leave the euro, re-denominate their debt, and pay their existing debt of a smaller magnitude. But what happens when Greece and Italy go back to those same investors, who just received substantially less than they were supposed to from their debt, and ask them to purchase their new debt? It’s going to be expensive, and unless Greece’s and Italy’s economies begin growing strongly, they’ll have the same problem all over again.
I never intended “…the heavy weight of their debt” to be a conclusive summation of Italy and Greece’s problems. Their problem is a confluence of a very poor economy, low tax revenues as a result, and debt used to finance an expensive welfare state. It’s but a piece. A very large, very heavy, piece.
- Let’s set aside normative criticisms of this, which are substantial—”inflating” your currency for the purpose of making past debts more affordable is essentially stealing from creditors, because in real terms, they receive less than they were supposed to. [↩]
The idea that all this stuff is potentially grist for your mill has been very liberating. This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what postmodernism is all about. The result is a generation of people (some of whom are artists) whose tastes are wildly eclectic- people who are hip to punk music and Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the 7-11 one night and then invite you to a mud wrestling match or a poetry reading the next. If you’re a writer, the trick is to keep your eyes and ears open well enough to let all this in but also, somehow, to recognize intuitively what you should let emerge in your work, how effective something might be in a specific context. I know I don’t have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments, and I don’t separate literature from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film- all provide material in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious.
I’m not sure when this interview was conducted, but this couldn’t be more relevant today.
January 5th, 2012Idaho will require all high school students to take some online courses to graduate, and are giving each student and teacher a computer or tablet. Instead of lecturing, Idaho intends for teachers to increasingly provide guidance for students as they move through lessons on computers or tablets.
Unsurprisingly, many people are angry. One teacher doesn’t understand how this could possibly improve education:
Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a girl in a foster family in Germany during World War II.
Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?
…
She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”
She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.
Nothing wrong with the Socratic method—my favorite high school teacher used it extensively, and I learned more in that class than I did in many of my college courses—but perhaps Ms. Rosenbaum should re-consider her strategies if she has to “work each minute” to keep them engaged. There’s no way the Socratic method is effective for her if her students are so chronically disengaged.
In-person classes still require a lot of self-directed effort from students, like actually reading the material, and there’s nothing she can do if they aren’t doing it. The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology. Her problem is the same one all teachers face and that they will face regardless of whether there is technology involved or not: motivating her students.
Her job is not just to get her students through the material. Her job is to get through to them. Her job is to make them see why the piece of literature they are reading is relevant and meaningful and insightful. Without doing that, whatever teaching method she employs will be completely ineffective.
Which is why her criticism is completely beside the point: whether she has to adopt the state’s new method of teaching, or sticks with her traditional method, her primary purpose remains the same.
(Via Fraser Speirs.)
January 5th, 2012Ken Rogoff eviscerated Joseph Stiglitz in 2002, and it’s worth reading again, as Stiglitz hasn’t exactly gotten any better since:
Let’s look at Stiglitzian prescriptions for helping a distressed emerging market debtor, the ideas you put forth as superior to existing practice. Governments typically come to the IMF for financial assistance when they are having trouble finding buyers for their debt and when the value of their money is falling. The Stiglitzian prescription is to raise the profile of fiscal deficits, that is, to issue more debt and to print more money. You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government’s debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the IMF—no, make that we on the Planet Earth—have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably. Uncontrolled inflation strangles growth, hurting the entire populace but, especially the indigent. The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.
This is also worth reading because those same recommendations Stiglitz made for developing nations then are the same ones Krugman et al. are making now for European nations struggling under the heavy weight of their debt.
January 5th, 2012One Al Qaeda supporter says funding they enjoyed from Arab states is now going toward Arab Spring movements:
New recruits have stopped coming, Hanif says. “When new people came they brought new blood, enthusiasm, and money. All that has been lost.” The money may be a bigger problem than the manpower, he says. Al Qaeda used to receive millions of dollars a year from Arabian Gulf contributors, but Hanif’s uncle says his contacts tell him the donations have dried up. Instead, he believes, the money is going to the more productive and generally nonviolent Arab Spring movements in North Africa, Syria, and Yemen. “I think Arab people now think the fight should be political at home and not terrorism aimed at the West,” says the uncle. “The peaceful struggle on Arab streets has accomplished more than bin Laden and Zawahiri ever have.”
If so, that’s a huge shift in the Arab world. Before, after living under dictatorship for decades, Arabs were largely cynical and did not believe they could change their political system at home. That’s changed, and regardless of whether each country ends up a liberal democracy, channeling their frustration and energy into political discussion and reform is much, much more productive. Having a discussion about what kind of government they want, and what role religion plays in it, is an incredible step forward.
Of course, the Arab world is entering a period of instability. A better outcome is not guaranteed when regimes controlled societies for decades and weakened or destroyed political processes and culture in the process are suddenly gone. But peoples which suffered under dictatorship with no hope for a better future now do have that hope, and there’s no reason to have mixed feelings when that’s the case.
(Via Chris Martucci.)
January 5th, 2012The Textbook Project
January 4th, 2012Clayton Morris hears that Apple’s January event will be about iTunes U and the textbook project Steve Jobs was working on, as mentioned in his biography.
Walter Isaacson wrote:
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believes it as an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money. (pp. 509-10).
I am incredibly excited, if not surprised, that Apple is working on a project so integral to education. Our education system, from elementary school to university, is very much broken, both in its overall intent and how it uses technology. Education today is too expensive and too irrelevant.
Fortunately, though, that also means there’s huge improvements we can make. Apple has quietly built an incredible educational resource, iTunes U. Anyone, for free, can download lectures from some of the world’s best universities and watch them on their own time. They can be taught how to develop iOS applications by Apple engineers at Stanford, cosmology from UC Irvine, economics from UC Berkeley, China’s history after the collapse of the empire from Harvard University, or even how to bake and make pastries from the International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes.
It’s an incredible resource, one that we should probably all take advantage of more often. But what it also shows is that education does not necessarily mean attending a single university, choosing a narrow major to focus on, purchasing a $200 textbook, sitting through several lectures each week and taking a midterm and a final. It could still be all of these things, but it doesn’t have to be.
We need to begin finding new models for education, because our current one is failing us terribly, and certainly not sustainable, either. I don’t know what Apple’s planning nor the extent of it, but I’m glad to see that they are trying to improve education.
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January 4th, 2012Reihan Salam points out that until the 1980s, the growth in health care costs was in line with most of the developed world, and since the 1990s this held true, too. What this means is that while the U.S.’s health care costs are a larger percentage of our GDP than in other developed nations, this isn’t because our costs are growing faster—it’s because we started from a higher base as a result of outsized growth during the 1980s.
Salam argues this invalidates arguments that our higher health care costs relative to single-payer countries means single-payer is more cost-effective:
So if the real problem with U.S. health spending is that the U.S. diverged from its peer countries for a decade-long stretch, solving that problem isn’t quite as simple as mimicking the institutions and strategies of our peer countries, whether it’s Canada’s single-payer system or the hybrid models of France or Germany. Our peer countries are facing the same challenges we are, albeit with slightly more breathing room.
This isn’t something to celebrate, either—actually, it’s a warning sign that the rest of the world’s health care costs are growing at roughly similar rates to our own. If the rest of the world is in the same boat, there’s no easy solution to slow our own health care costs, but it’s something we’ll have to do. And we’ll have to find a way to slow them even more than the rest of the world, because we’re starting from a much bigger hole.
January 3rd, 2012-
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