WebSitesOfNote

An ounce of undo is equal to a pound of "Are you sure?"

Businesspundit: Entrepreneurial Strategy: Measure Something
I think Web2.0 is making me sick. It seems that every new company I
see launched or funded has the same strategy - grab eyeballs by
allowing users to do X on the web and then monetize the model by
selling advertising. That's all fine and good, and it is a valid
business model, but there are dozens of different strategies
entrepreneurs can use, so I've decided to start writing about
them on a semi-regular basis (I'll try to do weekly but that may
not happen) to jog the memory of those of you old enough to remember
that startups existed before the web, and to educate those of you
that think startups = new web businesses. Some of them will be basic
and boring, and some of them you may not have thought of before. I
want to start with one that is right in the middle: MEASURE SOMETHING
THAT ISN'T BEING MEASURED.
Business strategy is built in large part on probabilistic decision
making. No one ever knows with 100% certainty where markets are going
or how customers will respond to changes and incentives, so you have
to plan using a best guess. The more information you have, the better
that guess will be. One way to gain more information is to be able to
measure something that wasn't measured before. Don't believe
me? Think about this... would you buy a car if gas mileage numbers
were not available? You probably would if no car at any dealership
displayed gas mileage. But think how much better of a decision you
could make once someone figured out how to measure gas mileage and
posted that information on all cars.

For companies, better decision making means more money, and if your
product can help companies make more money, they will buy it from
you.

I happen to know of two local companies that got started this way.
The first was a company called Genscape. The two entrepreneurs that
founded Genscape are sort of local legends. The company:A good
description of the company comes from their press releases.

Genscape's information gathering and distribution system
consists of technology to monitor the real-time power output of power
plants and load on high-voltage transmission lines. Information
reported to customers includes highly accurate estimates of the
real-time power output for generating facilities and power flows over
strategic transmission paths in the U.S. and Europe and associated
information for the U.S. natural gas, coal and emissions markets.

Genscape Inc. is the only company to have commercialized the
provision of real-time power supply information to support
decision-making for energy traders, power plant and line owners and
operators, regulators, and other energy market participants. Genscape
maintains a 60 person staff and an international headquarters in
Louisville, Kentucky with additional offices in Amsterdam, New York,
London and Washington D.C.I've never met the founders, but my
understanding is they were both working on MBAs at the University of
Louisville when they got this idea to measure power transmission
information. They contacted an engineering professor and paid him to
design the black box that they needed. Then they began testing it,
tweaking it, and eventually selling it to power traders. The traders
could make more accurate decisions than before and thus be more
profitable.

Did Genscape have a good strategy? Well in 2003 they were featured
in Inc. magazine for having revenue growth of over 2000%. I think
that is pretty impressive.

The second company is called Two Dimensional Instruments. While this
company addresses a much smaller market than Genscape, the principle
is the same. 2DI makes temperature monitors that record the
temperature electronically at set intervals and allow users to
download that data. I know one of the entrepreneurs that founded this
company, and he said the idea came from a guy that had propped a
freezer open to load some things into it. The temperature had briefly
warmed to 37 degrees as a result, and an inspector (food inspector, if
I remember correctly) wrote him up for having a freezer too warm. He
protested that it was only that temperature for a few minutes, and
that this was just bad timing, but he had no way to prove it. So he
found some partners and developed a device that would help solve that
problem by measuring temperature at regular intervals.

If you are looking for a business idea, I think this is a great
place to start. Think about what needs to be measured at your work or
in your industry. Ask yourself if measuring such a thing would help
you make better decisions, be more productive, and be more
profitable. Then develop a tool, a device, or some software that will
do so. From there, execute like hell and after a few years of hard
work, you've got a very nice business.

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Second Generation Tag Clouds

February 23, 2006 05:34 PM | Posted in:

Lets build on the analysis of tag clouds from , and look ahead at
what the near future may hold for second generation tag clouds
(perhaps over the next 12 to 18 months). As you read these
predictions for structural and usage changes, keep two conclusions
from the previous post in mind: first, adequate context is critical
to sustaining the chain of understanding necessary for successful tag
clouds; second, one of the most valuable aspects of tag clouds is as
visualizations of semantic fields.

Based on this understanding, expect to see two broad trends second
in generation tag clouds.
In the first instance, tag clouds will continue to become
recognizable and comprehensible to a greater share of users as they
move down the novelty curve from nouveau to known. In step with
this growing awareness and familiarity, tag cloud usage will become:

1. More frequent
2. More common
3. More specialized
4. More sophisticated

In the second instance, tag cloud structures and interactions will
become more complex. Expect to see:

1. More support for cloud consumers to meet their needs for context
2. Refined presentation of the semantic fields underlying clouds
3. Attached controls or features and functionality that allow cloud
consumers to directly change the context, content, and presentation
of clouds

Together, these broad trends mean we can expect to see a second
generation of numerous and diverse tag clouds valued for content and
capability over form. Second generation clouds will be easier to
understand (when designed correctly...) and open to manipulation by
users via increased functionality. In this way, clouds will
visualize semantic fields for a greater range of situations and
needs, across a greater range of specificity, in a greater diversity
of information environments, for a greater number of more varied
cloud consumers.

Usage Trends

To date, tag clouds have been applied to just a few kinds of focuses
(links, photos, albums, blog posts are the more recognizable). In the
future, expect to see specialized tag cloud implementations emerge for
a tremendous variety of semantic fields and focuses: celebrities,
cars, properties or homes for sale, hotels and travel destinations,
products, sports teams, media of all types, political campaigns,
financial markets, brands, etc.

From a business viewpoint, these tag cloud implementations will aim
to advance business ventures exploring the potential value of
aggregating and exposing semantic fields for a variety of strategic
purposes:

1. Creating new markets
2. Understanding or changing existing markets
3. Providing value-added services
4. Establishing communities of interest / need / activity
5. Aiding oversight and regulatory imperatives for transparency and
accountability.

When Genchi Gembutsu goes Wrong in Software Design: "It isn't widely known that I went "to the scene" (Genchi Gembutsu) style and sat and watched bankers working and asked them questions about their work environment and what they were doing. I built several studies from which we derived requirements for the system and the user interface.

However, it wasn't a total success. The anthropological study revealed several aspects of how the bankers worked that hadn't been captured by the business analysts that wrote the original requirements. This on the surface looked like a flaw in the requirements and initially I was heralded as the guy who had uncovered the truth. However, it turned out that many of these were in fact aspects of a badly broken paper based system and had they been implemented as I'd recorded them, then they would have led to increased complexity in the system and would have digitally institutionalized inefficiency. The analysts had understood the depth of the banking system and had designed out these inefficiencies when they'd written the requirements. As the new guy on the scene doing surface deep user interface observations, I had merely sought to recreate their environment. We had to go back, rework the analysis, and devise a domain model that was optimal and a UI that would be intuitive and optimal. To do that we had to use our imagination. Going to the scene wasn't enough. It produced a local optimization because my visibility was local to individual users and not system wide. It took me several months to fully understand the wider banking system.
"

Design? Accident? Or Simulation?: From Walker’s posting: . “What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe.
. . “There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light.
. . “There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.
. . “Might we expect surprises as we subject our simulated universe to ever more precise scrutiny, perhaps even astonishing the being which programmed it with our cunning and deviousness (as the author of any software package has experienced at the hands of real world users)? Who knows, we might run into round-off errors which “hit us like a ton of bricks”! "

A nightingale choked in Berkely Square: " 'Who's there?' I called sharply. I turned and looked across the room. The window had been widely opened when I entered, and a faint fog haze hung in the apartment, seeming to veil the light of the shaded lamp. I watched the closed door intently, expecting every moment to see the knob turn. But nothing happened. 'Who's there?' I cried again, and, crossing the room, I threw open the door. The long corridor without, lighted only by one inhospitable lamp at a remote end, showed choked and yellowed with this same fog so characteristic of London in November. But nothing moved to right nor left of me. The New Louvre Hotel was in some respects yet incomplete, and the long passage in which I stood, despite its marble facings, had no air of comfort or good cheer; palatial it was, but inhospitable. I returned to the room, reclosing the door behind me, then for some five minutes or more I stood listening for a repetition of that mysterious sound, as of something that both dragged and tapped, which already had arrested my attention. My vigilance went unrewarded. I had closed the window to exclude the yellow mist, but subconsciously I was aware of its encircling presence, walling me in, and now I found myself in such a silence as I had known in deserts but could scarce have deemed possi"

Modifying library code: "One of the joys of developing software these days is being able to build on top of high-quality libraries. Finding just the right package to solve one of your problems can remove a huge burden from your development shoulders. Unfortunately, sometimes you experience the disappointment of realizing your beloved library has a flaw. A bug, a missing function, whatever. Then you have to try to fix it. If you don't have the source, forget it, you have to work around it. But if you do have the source, do yourself a favor: before modifying the code, put in some protection to make sure your product really is using the modified source. The problem with modifying library code is that you shift from using the library as shipped to using your modified version, and subtle changes is build or deploy environments can switch you between the two without even knowing it. For example, modified include files have to be found in a product tree before searching the standard include directories. So the first modification to the library should be to mark it as your modified version, and your product code should assert that it is using the modified library. For example, in C++, in one of the headers, add a macro definition: // ReportGeneratorLib.h header file#define INITECH_REPORTGEN_LIB 1//.. blah blah rest of the header .. Then in your code where yo"

"Rarely does a bad attitude solve the problem."

"Kanban
The story about kanban in The Big MOO is interesting, given that I'm thinking about accountability right now. Quickly: Japanese car manufacturers moved to only having one or so spare parts to replace defects discovered while putting cars together. If they ran out, the entire production line would be halted while a replacement was procured. Ends up no one wanted to be responsible for supplying defective parts to the car manufacturer that might stop the entire line and quality from suppliers shot through the roof. Simply because higher quality was expected of them and that they knew they'd be very obviously held accountable. It'd be much better for all of Microsoft to have obvious gates that stopped product development until the quality improved. Because, if we don't hold ourselves accountable, our users will."

RFID Virus Predicted: "Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum have a new paper describing how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses.

The underlying technical argument is pretty simple. An RFID tag is a tiny device, often affixed to a product of some sort, that carries a relatively small amount of data. An RFID reader is a larger device, often stationary, that can use radio signals to read and/or modify the contents of RFID tags.

Simple RFID tags are quite simple and only carry data that can be read or modified by readers. Tags cannot themselves be infected by viruses. But they can act as carriers, as I’ll describe below.

One common class of bugs involves bad handling of unexpected or diabolical input values. For example, web browsers have had bugs in their URL-handling code, which caused the browsers to either crash or be hijacked when they encountered diabolically constructed URLs. When such a bug existed, an attacker who could present an evil URL to the browser (for example, by getting the user to navigate to it) could seize control of the browser.

A virus attack might start with a single RFID tag carrying evil data. When a vulnerable reader scanned that tag, the reader’s bug would be triggered, causing the reader to execute a command specified by that tag. The command would reconfigure the reader to make it write copies of the evil data onto tags that it saw in the future. "

Compare the "authoritative figure" doing the editing versus an editor. What is the difference?

Wounding Wikipedia (continued): "I totally buy into the idea that the aggregated knowledge of the entire world has to be better than the knowledge of a few 'experts' who put together encyclopedias, which apparently the schools believe are trustworthy. Now we all know that at any particular time, there can be some inaccurate stuff in Wikipedia and that's certainly a problem."

Randall in the New York Times suggests that Wikipedia needs to take one more page out of the open source playbook and give each page in Wikipedia an authoritative figure who has the power to decide what edits to allow and which to disallow.

Jeff Bates of the Open Source Technology Group (slashdot, sourcefourge, etc) is quoted in Randall's column as saying:

In every open-source project, he said, there is "a benevolent dictator" who ultimately takes responsibility, even though the code is contributed by many. Good stuff results only if "someone puts their name on it."

SOFTWARE SUNSET LUNACY

Lee Gomes, the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, published a
terrific article in the Journal yesterday, 22 February, lambasting
software companies for periodically sunsetting products, forcing the
customers to upgrade or lose support.

He was talking about Quicken, a consumer product, but the same goes
double for the enterprise space, where I work. Why should you *ever*
sunset a product? Suppose you bought an annuity. Every year the
annuity company sends you a check, for which you have to do little
work other than opening the envelope. Yet after four years, you tire
of the annuity, and tell the annuity company not to send the checks
any more, because it's too much trouble to open the envelope.
What???!!!

Yet this is what most software vendors do. You have customers
regularly paying support fees. They are happy with the product. After
three or four years, most of the bugs have been discovered, and it
costs you very little to keep maintaining it. Yet you tell the
customer to either upgrade, at huge expense and risk to them, or
you'll stop supporting them. The usual excuse is that it is "too much
trouble" to keep supporting an old version. Too much trouble for whom,
the mailman?

This is lunacy. Software vendors everywhere are recognizing that one
of their biggest assets is the support revenue stream, yet they do
everything they can to disrupt that stream by sunsetting products.
Mercedes-Benz still stocks parts for forty-year-old cars. They'll
still happily service them. Maybe they know something that our
industry doesn't.

Guess who would write a book title of
"Is Your Money Supply Expanding, or Are You Just Happy To See Me?"

"For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases." By Warren Buffett

"I draw two conclusions from this. One is that there is a huge opportunity for English speaking filmmakers without California addresses to grab a huge share of the American film industry. "

Seems this might be like the auto industry in the USA before the Japanese can in and reminded them to make cars that people want.

Out of the Frame: "Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars.

But if George Clooney was right when he said Hollywood should be proud to be out of touch, it’s got more and more to be proud of every year.

I don’t want to pay $9.00 to see a movie because somebody else thought it would be good for me. I buy entertainment from Hollywood, not moral prescriptions, and if Hollywood now thinks its job is to improve my character it can just fuck off.

the harder you try to ‘uplift’ me in either direction, the more I’ll gravitate to the simple thalamic pleasures of gratuitous nudity and big explosions.

"

Speculative claims about Australia: "Why do some countries keep all their people in a small number of large cities? A good example of the relationship between climate variability and human population size is provided by Australia. It is unique among the larger nations in consisting of either very small settlements or large cities, for the middle-sized towns that predominate elsewhere in the world are almost entirely absent. This is a consequence of the cycle of drought and flood that has characterized the land from first settlement. Small regional population centers have survived because they can batten down the hatches and endure drought, and large cities have also survived because they are integrated into the global economy. The resource networks of towns, however, are smaller than the region affected by climate variability, making them vulnerable to swings in income. Typically, what happens is that, as a drought progresses, the farm machinery dealership and and automotive dealership close down...When the drought finally breaks, these businesses do not return...instead people travel to larger centers to buy what they need, and in time end up moving there. The Australian example shows that climate variability has in fact encouraged the formation of cities: Today it is the most urbanized nation on Earth. "

Coffee Maybe Not a Health Drink!: "perbert writes 'Canadian researchers have published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that excess coffee drinking (4+ cups a day) could lead to an increased risk of heart disease if you have the wrong gene. In light of other studies linking antioxidants in coffee to a reduction in heart disease, who is right? '"

Face Recognition Comes to Bars: "BioBouncer is a face recognition system intended for bars: Its camera snaps customers entering clubs and bars, and facial recognition software compares them with stored images of previously identified troublemakers. The technology alerts club security to image matches, while innocent images are automatically flushed at the end of each night, Dussich said. Various clubs can share databases through a virtual private network, so belligerent drunks might find themselves unwelcome in all their neighborhood bars. Anyone want to guess how long that 'automatically flushed at the end of each night' will last. This data has enormous value. Insurance companies will want to know if someone was in a bar before a car accident. Employers will want to know if their employees were drinking before work -- think airplane pilots. Private investigators will want to know who walked into a bar with whom. The police will want to know all sorts of things. Lots of people will want this data -- and they'll all be willing to pay for it. And the data will be owned by the bars who collect it. They can choose to erase it, or they can choose to sell it to data aggregators like Acxiom. It's rarely the initial application that's the problem. It's the follow-on applications. It's the function creep. Before you know it, everyone knows that they are identified the moment they "

The equilibrium effects of aggressive drug enforcement: "Mark Kleiman makes an interesting point about the effect of aggressive drug enforcement (read it, really): In the long run, drug enforcement may, in fact, tend to decrease prices by creating a class of retail drug dealers with felony records who therefore can't find lawful employment. That group then bids down dealing wages. (Crack dealers, who were making $30/hr. in Washington D.C. in the late 1980s, were making less than the minimum wage in Chicago in the late 1990s.) Since retail dealers' wages are an important element of the cost structure of the illicit drug industry, falling retail wages translate into falling retail prices. This isn't the only thing that could cause prices to fall, but it's certainly an intriguing one. "

The consequences of invalidating the null window: "On occasion, you might notice that every window on the desktop flickers and repaints itself. One of the causes for this is a simple null handle bug. The InvalidateRect function is one you're probably well-familiar with. It is used to indicate to the window manager that the pixels of a particular window are no longer current and should be repainted. (You can optionally pass a rectangle that specifies a subset of the window's client area that you wish to mark invalid.) This is typically done when the state of the data underlying the window has changed and you want the window to repaint with the new data. If however you end up passing NULL as the window handle to the InvalidateRect function, this is treated as a special case for compatibility with early versions of Windows: It invalidates all the windows on the desktop and repaints them. Consequently, if you, say, try to invalidate a window but get your error checking or timing wrong and end up passing NULL by mistake, the result will be that the entire screen flickers. Even more strangely, passing NULL as the first parameter ValidateRect has the same behavior of invalidating all the windows. (Yes, it's the 'Validate' function, yet it invalidates.) This wacko behavior exists for the same compatibility reason. Yet another example of how programs rely on bugs or"

1. If you don't approach, you don't score. Okay, the "three second rule" (don't hesitate, demonstrate your confidence and Alpha maleness by approaching within three seconds of noticing the target) doesn't apply--actually it makes sense to do some research on the firm first--but the basic rule pertains.

2. Always be confident. Needy guys are losers. Entrepreneurs who don't project confidence and passion in what they are doing don't get much beyond the door.

3. "Social proof" is essential. In picking up girls, this means they'll be more interested in you if other people in the social setting respond positively to you; it means they're getting a high status male. That's the idea behind using a wingman; even if no one else is making you look good, he (or she) will. In a VC context, this can mean a lot of different things; an introduction from an entrepreneur or associate of the VC is a lot more likely to spur interest than if you business plan comes in over the transom. Similarly, a lot of the things you do are essentially designed to increase your "social proof," a sense that you're connected and have good "domain knowledge"--having an impressive board of advisors, for instance.

4. Always be closing; always be working toward the score. Don't end a phone conversation or a meeting without a follow-up; if you can't bed the chick now, try to set up another meeting, or at least get a phone number.

5. Cut your losses. If it's clear you're not getting anywhere, don't waste your time. Find another target.

6. "Let's just be friends" is the kiss of death. It means she thinks you're a "nice guy" not the alpha male of her dreams; it means they want to pick your brains, not fund your company. However, if you do get LJBF, you may be able to use her as a wingman; her friendship provides social credibility with other girls. Similarly, if a VC won't invest but seems otherwise positive, try to get them to introduce you to other potential investors.

7. Mirror the values. With a chick, try to find out what's important to her (friends, family, work, whatever), and tell anecdotes that demonstrate that these things are important to you too. With a VC, try to find out what motivates their investments (trendy theories like Web 2.0 or the Long Tail; unfair competitive advantages that lock out others; scalability; branding; whatever) and tweak your pitch to appeal to their motivations.

8. Don't let the contact get stale. If you can't score tonight, get in touch ASAP and set up a meeting--not a "date" (that's scary) but perhaps coffee. If your first pitch doesn't get you a meeting, ping them in a week or two, with "new progress," and keep doing so as long as it still looks feasible. If you can pigeonhole them at a conference, do that too; don't drop off their radar.

9. Don't buy her a drink. That makes you a supplicant, not the confident, go-getting guy of her dreams. Similarly, project that you're offering a stellar opportunity, you will raise the money regardless, and they ought to be damn grateful to have the chance to participate.

10. For God's sake, shower, shave, and dress nicely before you go out hunting.

Wising up to the equity premium: "Bryan Caplan, one of my favourite bloggers, is so convinced of the equity premium that he invests accordingly.I'm not sure this is wise. The problem is that if the equity premium is a genuine anomaly, it should disappear as investors wise up to it; there might be $10 bills on the sidewalk occasionally, but they don't stay there for long.And investors have had two decades to learn about the equity premium. It's 21 years ago this month that Mehra and Prescott published their original paper (pdf) on it. In those 21 years, US equities have returned 13% a year, against 8.2% for bonds. As a result, according to Robert Shiller's figures, the US market is now highly priced relative to history; a price-earnings ratio of 18 compared to a long-term average of 13.8 using 12 months' earnings, or a PE of 26.6 against a long-run average of 14.9 using 10-year earnings.These high prices might be a sign that investors have partially wised up to the equity premium, and have driven prices up to levels from which subsequent returns will be lower. "

VC Disruption? Part Two.: "If you can get venture capital, you'd better take it."

Like all slogans, it's oversimplified. It tries to capture one essential issue: If you're creating a business in a market that fits the VC model, one of your competitors will take the money. And use it against you.

Look at it this way: We know how you're going to make things easier for imitators: You're going to prove it's possible and remove uncertainty for a fast follower. So tell us how you're going to make life miserable for the imitator, to balance off that advantage and more. It can be a lot of things - intellectual property, brand, tying down major customers, hiring irreplaceable talent, creating a network effect of some sort. But it had better be there - we're not in the business of helping your competitors. And if you could do it, but don't take the money to make it possible, someone else may do so.

Legal Status of Israel's Border and its Defensive Barrier: Below is a list of statements of law and fact regarding Israel's border, and its right under international law to build a defensive wall. I invite commenters to advance the discussion on these issues in terms of international law. I don't claim to be an expert on the issues of international law raised below, so comments from readers with expertise would be particularly welcome. Please do not use the comments to re-argue general issues about Zionism etc.

1. In November 1947, the United Nations partitioned the British mandate of Palestine. The partition gave the Jews only territories which were already owned by Jews, or which belonged to the British crown.

2. Many Palestinians began a war against Israel as soon as the partition was announced.

3. In May 1948, Israel declared its independence. In response, five Arabs nations immediately declared war on Israel.

4. In 1949, Israel and Jordan signed an armistice which specifically stated that the armistice lines were "without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines." Jordanian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, April 3, 1949, Art. VI, sect. 9.

5. In 1967 Israel was attacked by Jordan, which at the time ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel had no obligation, under international to vacate any territories until its foes entered into a meaningful peace agreement.

6. Later in 1967, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, Notably, the resolution calls for Israel to withdraw from "territories" (not "all territories" or "the territories") as part of a peace agreement by which Arab states would end their belligerence against Israel. Today, most Arab states remain in a declared state of war against Israel.

7. Having acquired the West Bank in a defensive war, Israel later began building settlements on the West Bank. The settlements were built solely on land belonging to the Jordanian government, and not land belonging to individual Arab owners.

8. As a general rule, international law forbids the permanent annexation of territory, even after a defensive war. However, Israel's settlements did not violate this rule, because they were built in areas where no internationally-agreed international border existed. (See points 4 and 6).

9. Later, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, and renounced all claims to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan's renunciation of the West Bank necessarily included a renunciation of all claim to West Bank land which had been owned by the Jordanian government. The renunciation therefore perfected Israel's legal ownership of the former Jordanian government lands in the West Bank.

10. Even if the last sentence of point 9 is incorrect, a nation has no obligation under international law to surrender control of territory to an entity which is in a state of war with the nation. The constitution of the PLO and the Hamas charter both explicitly call for the destruction of the state of Israel. Accordingly, Israel has no international law obligation to give any territory to a government controlled by the PLO or Hamas. (Had the PLO followed through on its promises in the Oslo Accords, and actually ended its war against Israel, the legal situation might be different.)

11. Under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, nations may build defensive structures in enemy territory which the nation has captured. The defensive structures may be maintained as long as the enemy remains in a state of belligerence.

12. Israel's right to build a defensive barrier in the West Bank is clear under item 11, since the wall is being constructed while the enemy (PLO/Hamas) is in a declared and actual state of war against Israel. (A temporary truce, subject to unilateral revocation, does not end a state of war.)

13. Israel's right to build the barrier is even stronger under international law, since (pursuant to points 4 and 6 above), the barrier does not extend beyond a legal international border, because the 1949-67 armistice line is not a legal border.

14. International law forbids the permanent annexation of enemy territory, but this point is irrelevant to the defensive barrier, for the reasons listed in items 4, 6, and 13.

15. If and only if the 1949-67 armistice line were a legal border, then Israel's construction of the barrier would be illegal under international law if the purpose of the barrier were for annexation. The barrier would not be illegal if the purpose were for defense (item 11).

16. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the barrier is primarily for defense, and accordingly, legal. The International Court of Justice--in a purely advisory and non-binding opinion--stated that the barrier is for annexation, and therefore illegal. The ICJ opinion was defective as a matter of law because it did not properly consider Israel's defensive rights under the laws of war, nor did the opinion acknowledge the legal implications of Security Council 242, which refutes the notion that the 1949-67 armistice line is a permanent, legal international border.

Again, I'm not claiming expertise on the subject-matter of this post, and one major purpose of this post is find out if there are any flaws with the above reasoning, in terms of international law. In your comments, please focus on international law; this means, inter alia, don't waste time by citing UN General Assembly resolutions, statements by diplomats, or other sources which (while important from a policy sense) do not have the authority to create binding international law. Please focus on clear, relevant international law, such as treaties which have been ratified by Israel, or Security Council resolutions.

The Psychology of Password Generation: "Nothing too surprising in this study of password generation practices: The majority of participants in the current study most commonly reported password generation practices that are simplistic and hence very insecure. Particular practices reported include using lowercase letters, numbers or digits, personally meaningful words and numbers (e.g., dates). It is widely known that users typically use birthdates, anniversary dates, telephone numbers, license plate numbers, social security numbers, street addresses, apartment numbers, etc. Likewise, personally meaningful words are typically derived from predictable areas and interests in the person's life and could be guessed through basic knowledge of his or her interests. The finding that participants in the current study use such simplistic practices to develop passwords is supported by similar research by Bishop and Klein (1995) and Vu, Bhargav & Proctor (2003) who found that even with the application of password guidelines, users would tend to revert to the simplest possible strategies (Proctor et al., 2002). In the current study, nearly 60% of the respondents reported that they do not vary the complexity of their passwords depending on the nature of the site and 53% indicated that they never change their password if they are not required to do so. "

Comic for 05 Mar 2006

Money Makes Us Crazy: "A fundamental economic principle is that investors are perfectly logical. Since the beginning of time, economic theory has assumed that we process all known information, learn from our mistakes and then make the decision that will maximize 'utility'. Of course, that is a bunch of hooey. We are not robots and we don't react logically. Anyone who has actually ever invested in the stock market knows that.
How we really act and why is the realm of behavioral finance. Here is one example from The Australian:
LATE at night, in a basement laboratory at Stanford University, Brian Knutson made a startling discovery: our brains lust after money, just like they crave sex.
It was May 2004, and Knutson, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the California university, was sending student volunteers through a high-power imaging machine called an MRI.
Deep inside each subject's head, electrical currents danced through a bundle of neurons about the size and shape of a peanut. Blood was rushing to the brain's pleasure centre as students executed mock stock and bond trades. On Knutson's screen, this region of the brain, the core of human desire, flashed canary yellow.
The pleasure of orgasm, the high from cocaine, the rush of buying Google at $US450 a share - the same neural network governs all three, Knutson, 38, concluded. What's more, our primal pleasure circuits can, and often do, override our seat of reason, the brain's frontal cortex, the professor says. In other words, stocks, like sex, sometimes drive us crazy.
One of the six fundamental principles of the way I invest my own money (and the way I teach others to invest) is that emotions are our worst enemy. Emotions cause us to do the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Emotions cause us to buy when we should be selling and sell when we should be buying.
One of the keys to being a successful investor is to learn how to
1) ignore your emotional response;
2) create a rigid system that keeps you from responding emotionally; or even better
3) train yourself to act opposite to what your emotions would tell you to do.
"

It's All About Access: " In my last post I commented that getting 'access' to the star funds in Australia is no longer easy. The $1.2 billion fund raised by Pacific Equity Partners was reputedly three times over-subscribed. Access is enormously important in private equity investing. In public markets, investment returns are largely determined by asset allocation. What really matters is whether you put your money into stocks, bonds, property or cash-- not which stock you choose or which fund manager. In fact, over a decade, the spread between a top quartile bond fund's perfomance and a third quartile fund is only about 1%. For shares the spread in returns rises to about 3%. But get this, depending on which piece of research you accept, the spread between top quartile and third quartile private equity performance sits somewhere between 15% and 22%. Massive. Implication? If you can't get your money into a top-performing private equity fund you're better off staying out of the asset class. It's all about access."

Poster Child: "Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the independent-minded daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. She kept a pillow on her sofa with the following phrase embroidered on it: If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me."

Times Select and Anti-Viral Marketing: "How do you elminate viral marketing? Put a wall around your content. Times Select shows how its done. I get a monthly email from the New York Times with the ten most emailed articles. It's a very interesting list and is telling in many ways about what news is most important to readers. It used to be at least half columns penned by their top columnists like Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, etc. Well guess what? Not one of them is on the top ten list anymore. Of course. Because they are barely read online anymore because of the crazy Times Select idea. "

The single biggest barrier to success in a project is when the project team do not communicate effectively.

This cripples the project beyond repair, and people may as well just pack up and go home. Technology choice, technical difficulty are all just minor in comparison to the numbing effect of lack of communication.

Some of the key factors in this are when inexperienced, or unsure developers refuse to ask questions for fear of being seen as "dumb". Ask the questions. Ask the BA's if you don't understand the requirements. Ask the senior developers if you don't understand how to build something. Ask the project managers for advice if you think you might take longer than expected.

There's a very, very big difference between inexperience and stupidity. Most people go through the inexperienced stage at various times. It's not a problem, it's not an issue.

What is an issue is if people don't recognise that inexeperience is just a phase that we all have to go through during learning. Get over it. Move on. Ask the questions.

Posted by jon at March 1, 2006 12:24 PM Comments

i'm a new yorker

What's wrong with this picture?: " Some observations from Tim Blair: The forbidden cartoons of Mohammadness have been published more widely in Muslim countries than in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada combined. In Malaysia alone, three newspapers ran images – compared to just two newspapers in Australia. Not a single major US daily went near them."