alex.moskalyuk

Might be coincidental, but looking through the logs of a few sites I host, I noticed Cuill, a new search engine with supposedly faster indexing methods, going through quite a few pages:38.99.13.123 - - [25/Dec/2007:17:21:10 -0800] “GET /page.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 17123 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)”Looks like there are a few other folks perplexed with the intensity of Cuill indexing (it wasn’t anything to stress about in my case, but was pretty noticeable).

Here’s a great example of having wrong motivation factors in place:

1. Issue subprime loans to a variety of people.
2. Announce a government-supported plan to bailout existing debtors only if they have poor credit score.
3. Watch the rest of those guys try to decrease their credit score by missing credit card payments.
4. Have the malaises of real estate markets transfer to credit card market, previously unaffected.

Wonder if the Freakonomics blog will pick it up.

Hulu.com today expanded their userbase by sending out a bunch of invites to those who signed up for beta, which this time included me. Generally it’s pretty hard to get excited about visiting media company sites due to small video size and a bunch of DRM they put in (such as displaying video only if you use RealPlayer 9 on Windows XP Service Pack 2), but Hulu.com presently surprises - the videos work well, the site is easy to browse, the quality of videos is quite nice, and they still look reasonable when expanded fullscreen on a 24″ monitor.

The list of available network shows is available here. I watched a few episodes of Family Guy, American Dad, and Simpsons. They do not have a comprehensive collection of all the episodes, but they do have the latest stuff (including episodes that were on TV this past Sunday), and they seem to be filling up their content starting from Season 1. The site is easy to browse, has direct URLs to each episode ( such as http://www.hulu.com/watch/2991/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-helping-out). The ads are inserted on a regular schedule - before and after the episode, as well as 2 insertions for a 30 minute episode. The commercials I got were those annoying eSurance.com ads, which I tolerate on TV and can tolerate online. All the videos are pausable and viewable later.

I don’t see setting the site up to be my homepage, but as far as number of episodes of good network shows, the quality and selection is generally better than any other video sharing site out there.

I just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness by the same author, and Black Swan has a few references to his previous work. In the previous title Taleb discusses a typical human mistake of taking the result of a random outcome for skill or deserved result. In Black Swan, Taleb discusses traditional models for forecasting anything (financial markets, political scenarios, weather), and theory of chaos, which basically says that systems with high entropy cannot provide any degree of predictability.

Political analysts of the late 80s did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, financial markets of the 21st century did not predict Russian default with subsequent sweep on Asian markets, and security analysts did not predict two planes flying into the towers of World Trade Center. However, in the retrospect, we tend to exhibit surprising hindsight, stating that all those events were inevitable, due to [insert a variety of geopolitical arguments here].

Taleb insists that the human mind frequenty:

1. Overestimates the odds of success when applied to oneself. Everybody buying a lottery ticket mentally assumes a much better probability of winning than reality usually presents.
2. Attributes random events in the past as contributing to success/failure. Survivors of the shipwreck would tell the story of how they all prayed for their lives, and thus got saved. While some religious groups would tend to pick up the story as the proof of whatever agenda they’re pitching, nobody generally listens to the stories of those who prayed, but still drowned. Business journalists (with CBS MarketWatch being the worst) frequently abuse this by pitching headlines like Stocks down after Congress increasing military spending in the morning, and Stocks up as Congress approves larger military budget in the afternoon.
3. Looks for order and sequence where it doesn’t exist. Business book writers made a cottage industry out of this by surveying the life stories of prominent individuals, and then reselling those as recipes for success. The quirkier the trait, the better it suits the public. Peter Thiel wakes up early and runs in the morning - I see, so that’s a secret recipe for running a successful hedge fund.
4. Listens to the experts that don’t know any better. There’s a whole bunch of occupations, where expertise is learned, and re-learning it requires significant time investments. Mechanics, doctors, and foreign language interpreters all have such skills. Other kinds of expertise involve looking back at what happened and trying to draw the line of correlation among discordant and random events. Such experts involve financial analysts and government economists.
5. Hungs up on small things without seeing the big picture. If you have significant money in savings accounts, you’re probably busy looking for a better rate. However, the bigger picture, the Black Swan of the US banking industry, is significant asset consolidation among major banks. If one of them gets hit, all of them get hit significantly. The possibility of over-exposure to subprime loans and possible collapse of the banking industry generally escapes the model that your financial analyst presented.

The book is pretty interesting, but hardly coherent. Nevertheless, it’s full of interesting anecdotes and personal observations, that make the book somewhat witty. After reading it I went around reading some other reviews - NYT seemed to not like it, Fool.com did a pretty comprehensive review of the points presented, Slate reviewer seemed to like it. There’s also author’s interview on Colbert report.

For a highly acclaimed book, according to the number of accolades on the back cover, The Starfish and The Spider is surely repetitive, but makes for a quick read. In a nutshell, the author applies the analogy of starfish and spider anatomy to the corporate world. While spider has many legs growing from the center, cut off its head - and the whole organism falls dead. With starfish cutting off one of the legs won’t achieve any fatal scenarios - you will just get two starfish organisms, as the anatomy is completely decentralized. Apply that to the corporate world, and you have two kinds of companies - one where the head directs everything, and such organization, when made headless, turns into chaos. And a company where every employee is so autonomous, that removing the person on the top, as well as layers of management organization would damage the organizational body somewhat, but won’t be fatal.

Authors take a look at Kazaa, Skype, Alcoholics Anonymous, Craigslist, Wikipedia, eBay, Apache Indian tribes, and Toyota as examples of successful decentralized organizations. Successful in different respects - The eMule Project, covered in the book, doesn’t earn any revenues per se, but manages to sustain all sorts of attempts to exterminate it. Wikipedia is not a money-maker either, but undoubtedly successful as far as the quality of content is concerned. With the Toyota example, the authors point out GM’s Fremont, CA plant as an example of highly centralized, and unsuccessful, project management approach, and compare it to Toyota’s decentralized and highly autonomous approach, where bottom-up innovation is welcomed. The case of the auto plant was apparently covered in the movie Gung Ho, but haven’t seen the movie, I can’t really comment on that.

The authors fill some pages with interviews with Craig Newmark and Jimmy Wales. Valuable content otherwise, it doesn’t really add much to the book - we learn that Jimmy Wales doesn’t do any article editing himself anymore (so they’re even more decentralized than you might have thought), and that Craig Newmark is very user-centric and responds to customer support e-mails. The authors also make a passing remark on the cases when the centralized structure is preferred (U.S. Army, commercial airline, etc.), but don’t really expand on this point, so you’re sold on the idea that decentralized management is applicable to every single company out there.

Sometimes the authors seem to confuse decentralization with just employee empowerment. They quote Jack Welch and current GE as an excellent example of decentralization, while in reality it looks like the corporate structure is still pretty rigid - employees just got motivated to make more decisions themselves, instead of relying on management to tell them what to do.

Overall, the book exposes a good idea, but seems to be hung up on the idea of making the right number of pages to publish a book. Reading this review provides a pretty good overview on what to expect in nine chapters.