Hat Tip To The Boys In Blue
First off, congratulations are in order to my friends over at AdaptiveBlue. Not only have they surpassed the 1 million download mark this year, they’ve been recently highlighted by Richard MacManus, Founder of the the influential Read/WriteWeb blog, as one of 10 Semantic Web Apps to Watch.
Also, thanks to Fraser Kelton, Director of Business Development at AdaptiveBlue, for the gracious thank-you email I received this morning for my miniature contribution to the great work they’re doing as part of their xmas giving. It completely put me in the Christmas Spirit. I am totally psyched to receive and devour my en-route copy of Zen and The Art of Motorcyle Maintenance! Thanks so much guys!
How is it that some people can start changing the world at 26?
During a gander on TED this morning I came across something pleasantly shocking…the name of person I knew from highschool. Trust me when tell you that you really feel humbled when you suddenly discover that a person who sat behind you in some random Lit class senior year is now speaking at TED conventions on topics as controversial as the overestimation of global AIDs figures. lol. I’m going to quote liberally here just because I’m so in awe of her accomplishments. We all knew she was brilliant, but who knew she’d be changing the world at 26? Way to go Emily.
Here’s a smidge from her page on TED:
Emily Oster, a fellow at the Becker Center at the University of Chicago, has a history of rethinking conventional wisdom.
Her Harvard doctoral thesis took on famed economist Amartya Sen and his claim that 100 million women were statistically missing from the developing world. He blamed misogynist medical care and outright sex-selective abortion for the gap, but Oster pointed to data indicating that in countries where Hepetitis B infections were higher, more boys were born. Through her unorthodox analysis of medical data, she accounted for 50% of the missing girls.
She’s also investigated the role of bad weather in the rise in witchcraft trials in Medieval Europe and what drives people to play the Powerball lottery. Her latest target: busting assumptions on HIV in Africa.
“At just 26, economist Emily Oster may have the highest controversies-generated-to-years-in-academia ratio of anyone in her field.”
Esquire
Here’s the TED Post on AIDs overestimates (link below) if you’re curious to read the entire post. It’s completely fascinating.
AIDS overestimates
The New York Times reported yesterday that the UN’s agency on AIDS dramatically overestimated its count of current and new infections:
The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year.
Much of the difference comes from new reporting methods in some African countries and in India — an idea dovetailing with the work of economist Emily Oster. Oster’s 2007 TEDTalk takes a critical look at global AIDS figures — and how they drive the world’s approaches to stemming the disease.
My final thought here is that it’s interesting and incredibly ironic that I found this today, not even 48 hours after I opened the formal invitation to my high school (’98) 10 year reunion. I can’t help wondering who the movers-and-shakers are turning out to be.
Here’s Emily at TED…
Our Cell Phones, Ourselves: Jan Chipchase Waxes Intellectual About the the Emotional Bonds We Have With Our Phones and How it Relates to Survival Skills
Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase’s investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. Along the way, he’s made some unexpected discoveries: about the novel ways illiterate people interface with their cellphones, or the role the cellphone can sometimes play in commerce, or the deep emotional bonds we all seem to share with our phones. And watch for his surefire trick to keep you from misplacing your keys.
Programming Bias Into Related Content Links: Are Political Blogs Guiding Out-Bound Traffic to the Right Or Left?
I’m no politico, but, with the presidential nominee race in full swing, politics has been on my mind more than usual. My morning info-breakfast of FOX news in my hotel room in Jacksonville this week seems particularly rife with snipes at the current “front-runner” Hillary Clinton. Given that FOX news is constantly attacked for its right-wing “tilt”, I’ve been taking daily ganders into the political realm of the blogosphere to see how (if at all) the most popular political blogs have been spinning this week’s news, if for no other reason than to achieve balance in my info-diet. I was particularly surprised (and fascinated) to find yesterday that some blogging technologies being used by popular blogs and media sites (like the New York Times and GigaOm) can influence the “spin” of the related content of system generated out-bound links automatically based on programmed “left” or “right” preferences. Simply stated, this means that many blog readers are being funneled to left or right leaning sites, completely unknowingly, through auto-generated related content links. Here’s a little view into how programming bias into related content links is accomplished on the back end of a blog using a popular technology provided by a new start-up called Sphere.
What It Takes To Be A Starbucks Die-Hard
I’m a Starbucks fan, but I’m not a die hard. And that’s a subtle, but critical distinction. I realized this morning that I’ll never reach die hard status. Not many people do. It’s reserved for the truly elite - The ones that require a completely different level of all-hands-on-deck customer service that is a joy to watch from the sidelines.
Every Starbucks regular, at one point or another in their quest for 15 minutes of caffeinated heaven, has had the pleasure of witnessing a die-hard order their favorite, ultra-customized coffee cocktail and perhaps broken out in laughter. This morning’s die-hard prize for most obnoxiously detailed order goes to the “Venti Half-Caf Non-Fat Vanilla Latte Extra Hot With Two Pumps of Caramel…no water.” The entire line heard it and tuned into what was going on because the woman holding the pocket poodle had to repeat it 3 times. The poor girl taking the order had a mini meltdown, and then tried to recover by staring blankly at the cash register buttons in an attempt to try and parse all the information. It was total system overload. I had the biggest smile on my face - it was one of those moments that Julie and I would have appreciated together in gleeful silence. Until you get to the point where you’re ordering drinks that require 2 or 3 Starbucks employees to stop what they’re doing and make an assembly line, sorry, you’re just a regular.
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