Month: June 2012

The Microsoft Surface Tablet

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Microsoft, in a highly touted event last night, unveiled the Surface tablet. designed to be a challenger to the iPad, the device will run a version of Microsoft’s flagship OS, Windows 8.

The device looks impressive. Especially alluring is the detachable cover that serves as a keyboard, something I think is lacking on the iPad. There is a nice hands-on preview at The Verge.

A few remaining questions:

  1. What will the entry point price be of the Microsoft Surface? Will it be able to compete with the $399 entry point price of the iPad 2?
  2. Will the detachable keyboard be an included accessory or an optional purchase to add to the Surface?
  3. How will Microsoft’s competitors react in the short and long term?
  4. Will developers flock to the platform? Part of what makes the iPad such an incredible device is the quality and sheer number of apps that are built specifically for the iPad.

Anyway, I think this product is the best thing to come out of Redmond, WA in many years. Microsoft has certainly piqued my interest.

On Ideas and Starting a Company

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In a post that’s over three years old now, Derek Sivers muses on why you’d want to start a company of your own (hint: it’s about execution of your ideas):

When I was at CD Baby, I’d be able to play with new ideas immediately. (“What if we had a $5 sale?” “What if I could co-op card swipers?” “What if I could go multi-lingual?”) Any time I had an idea, I’d be able to test it out within days.

But now, for the first time in 10 years, since I had no company, I couldn’t test out these new ideas! All I could do was read, think, and maybe write about it. Damn!

Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas. (The word “laboratory” is defined as a room for research, experimentation or analysis. I think of it as a sandbox or playpen.)

I think Sivers downplays the boredom aspect in his post, but it’s still excellent advice. My other thought: what if you could execute on your ideas via your art rather than by founding a company? For an example of what I mean, check out what Seth Godin is doing with a Kickstarter campaign.

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(HT: Swiss Miss)

On Coin Flips and Investment Managers

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Tim Harford writes about a psychology experiment in which undergrads were recruited to make bets on coin flips:

The students were given tokens to gamble with and invited to bet on each coin-flip, with the stake to double or to disappear. The students were also invited to pay a fixed price to look inside each envelope ahead of time. After each coin-flip, the students could open the prediction for free and see whether it was correct or not.

You can appreciate that the forecasts here are transparently useless. With almost 400 students, some were bound to witness a string of correct forecasts by chance. The question is, would the students who randomly received correct predictions through sheer fluke actually start to pay for future predictions? And how long would it take for them to start buying?

The researchers answer these questions pithily: “Yes, and not long.” After witnessing a single correct forecast, students were more likely to pay to see a second forecast; this effect becomes large and statistically very significant after a second correct forecast. After witnessing four correct coin-toss forecasts, more than 40 per cent of students were willing to pay to see the fifth, although the chance of four correct predictions is a not-exactly-stunning one in 16.

The underlying message is: next time you see an investment manager touting impressive returns on a couple of funds, ask yourself how many other funds the company manages (because some funds are bound to do well simply by chance alone).

The Curious Life of R.A. Dickey

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Yesterday, the New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey became the first major leaguer player in 24 years to throw consecutive one-hitters. But it’s his life story that is worth considering. The following nuggets are taken from Wikipedia…

On his ability to throw, when he shouldn’t be able to:

After being drafted by the Rangers, Dickey was initially offered a signing bonus of $810,000, before a Rangers team physician saw Dickey’s throwing (right) arm hanging oddly in a picture. The Rangers subsequently did further evaluation of Dickey, leading to the discovery of a missing ulnar collateral ligament of elbow joint, and reduced their offer to $75,000. Dickey has been quoted as saying “Doctors look at me and say I shouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob without feeling pain,” making his ability to pitch somewhat remarkable.

On tying the record of most wild pitches in an inning, 4:

On August 17, 2008, Dickey tied the record for most wild pitches in an inning, with 4. This came against the Minnesota Twins in the 5th inning. He joins four others including Hall of Famers Walter Johnson and Phil Niekro among others who have accomplished this feat.

On being a studious reader:

One of his favorite hobbies is reading. He keeps a stack of books in his locker at all times, including a Life of Pi by Yann Martel and a collection of works by C. S. Lewis.

If Dickey wasn’t a baseball player, he wanted to be an English professor. Finally, this is the best part, perhaps. He has named his bats for literary swords:

Dickey named his bats for literary swords–Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver (from The Hobbit) and Hrunting (from Beowulf). Dickey mixed up Orcrist and Sting when explaining the origin of the name. This led to what is known to some as the BEST NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION ever.

Finally, on Dickey being an inspiration to others:

In November 2011, Dickey announced that he would risk his 2012 season salary ($4,250,000) to attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro; he credits this aspiration to his boyhood reading of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro. While climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, he set out to raise awareness of the issue of human trafficking in India. His climb was in support of an organization called “Bombay Teen Challenge” that ministers to victims of human trafficking and their children in the heart of the redlight districts. Dickey returned from this trip in January 2012 with Mets bullpen catcher Dave Racaniello and the Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Kevin Slowey, and together raised over $100,000.

The 13 Types of Players in the NBA

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Is there a term for Sabemetrics of basketball? What Muthu Alagappan, a Stanford undergrad, is doing in his spare time could qualify. His new super-nerd study suggests that there are really 13 positions in basketball—not just five.

The first thing to know about the thirteen NBA positions—Muthu labeled them offensive ball-handler, defensive ball-handler, combo ball-handler, shooting ball-handler, role-playing ball-handler, 3-point rebounder, scoring rebounder, paint protector, scoring paint protector, role player, NBA first team, NBA second team, and one-of-a-kind—is that the idea of thirteen NBA positions is a misnomer. Anyone who’s ever watched basketball knows that there are more than thirteen positions, and not even Isaiah Thomas would put together a team based solely on five positions. Indeed, the best basketball players are like soccer midfielders: They can function anywhere on the court, they make their teams better, and they’re not defined by position. But Muthu’s positions weren’t all that rigid. Tony Parker is an offensive ball-handler, which separates him from John Wall, considered a combo ball-handler, not based on anything stylistic but solely because of their statistics. Tyson Chandler, the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, is a paint protector who specializes on one side of the floor. Kevin Love and Blake Griffin are actually scoring paint protectors. Some players are in a league of their own: Kevin Durant and LeBron James, for example, are NBA first-teamers. Derrick Rose and Dwight Howard are one-of-a-kinders whose statistical combinations make them NBA outliers.

The graphic representation of the 13 players looks like something out of a molecular biology textbook:

The thirteen types of players in the NBA

Read the rest of the piece here.

David Sedaris on Socialized Medicine

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Funny man David Sedaris writes about his experience with socialized medicine in this New Yorker piece. The bulk of the focus is his interaction with his dentist and periodontists, but it was the below exchange with his doctor in France that had me laughing out loud:

The last time I went, I had a red thunderbolt bisecting my left eyeball.

The doctor looked at it for a moment, and then took a seat behind his desk. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” he said. “A thing like that, it should be gone in a day or two.”

“Well, where did it come from?” I asked. “How did I get it?”

“How do we get most things?” he answered.

“We buy them?”

The time before that, I was lying in bed and found a lump on my right side, just below my rib cage. It was like a devilled egg tucked beneath my skin. Cancer, I thought. A phone call and twenty minutes later, I was stretched out on the examining table with my shirt raised.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” the doctor said. “A little fatty tumor. Dogs get them all the time.”

I thought of other things dogs have that I don’t want: Dewclaws, for example. Hookworms. “Can I have it removed?”

“I guess you could, but why would you want to?”

He made me feel vain and frivolous for even thinking about it. “You’re right,” I told him. “I’ll just pull my bathing suit up a little higher.”

When I asked if the tumor would get any bigger, the doctor gave it a gentle squeeze. “Bigger? Sure, probably.”

“Will it get a lot bigger?”

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked.

And he said, sounding suddenly weary, “I don’t know. Why don’t trees touch the sky?”

Hilarious.

If you’ve never read Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, get yourself a copy immediately.

How the Mexican Drug Cartel Operates

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Patrick Keefe’s New York Times Magazine piece on the Mexican cartel is one of the best things I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the best things I’ve read this month. He goes in depth on the operations of the Mexican drug cartel, its relationship with clients, suppliers, politicians, and law enforcement personnel. I couldn’t stop reading it…

On the Sinaloa cartel and its distribution:

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

On the drug war in Mexico and the cartel’s ability to thrive in the recession:

The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever.

On how modern technology isn’t stopping the drugs from crossing the U.S. border (the catapult bit):

Moving cocaine is a capital-intensive business, but the cartel subsidizes these investments with a ready source of easy income: marijuana. Cannabis is often described as the “cash crop” of Mexican cartels because it grows abundantly in the Sierras and requires no processing. But it’s bulkier than cocaine, and smellier, which makes it difficult to conceal. So marijuana tends to cross the border far from official ports of entry. The cartel makes sandbag bridges to ford the Colorado River and sends buggies loaded with weed bouncing over the Imperial Sand Dunes into California. Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. “They erect this fence,” he said, “only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they’re flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side.” He paused and looked at me for a second. “A catapult,” he repeated. “We’ve got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”

A wise reminder:

There’s a reason coke and heroin cost so much more on the street than at the farm gate: you’re not paying for the drugs; you’re compensating everyone along the distribution chain for the risks they assumed in getting them to you.

And:

Smugglers often negotiate, in actuarial detail, about who will be held liable in the event of lost inventory. After a bust, arrested traffickers have been known to demand a receipt from authorities, so that they can prove the loss was not because of their own negligence (which would mean they might have to pay for it) or their own thievery (which would mean they might have to die). Some Colombian cartels have actually offered insurance policies on narcotics, as a safeguard against loss or seizure.

On corruption being king:

The surest way to stay out of trouble in the drug business is to dole out bribes, and promiscuously. Drug cartels don’t pay corporate taxes, but a colossus like Sinaloa makes regular payments to the federal, state and municipal authorities that may well rival the effective tax rate in Mexico. When the D.E.A. conducted an internal survey of its top 50 operatives and informants several years ago and asked them to name the most important factor for running a drug business, they replied, overwhelmingly, corruption…The cartel bribes mayors and prosecutors and governors, state police and federal police, the army, the navy and a host of senior officials at the national level.

An anecdote of one man’s accumulation of cash while working for the cartel:

In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce.

There is so much more in the piece. Set aside half an hour and read the whole thing.

The Pizza Vending Machine

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Don’t have enough pizza in your life? Then get ready for Let’s Pizza, a pizza vending machine that promises to deliver a piping hot pizza pie made from scratch in less than three minutes, coming to a shopping mall near you. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The brainchild of Italian entrepreneur Claudio Torghel, the machine will be distributed by A1 Concepts, based out of the Netherlands. It’s expected to hit our shores later this year, according to the industry website Pizza Marketplace. The company is expected to set up its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta.

What is remarkable about the new machine is that it truly makes pizzas to order, including kneading and rolling out the dough. (The above video says the leavening takes place in a blistering hot infra-red oven.) There are more than 200 toppings from which to choose. The machine can even  accommodate a variety of dietary restrictions, such as those for vegetarian and Kosher diets.

A ten inch pizza will sell for about $6. This doesn’t sound bad at all. I am certainly willing to try it out, especially after reading the rave reviews coming from Europe.

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(via Carpe Diem)

Where Coca-Cola Doesn’t Sell

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I knew Coca-Cola had a worldwide presence, but I didn’t know that it was so widespread. Bloomberg reports that after getting into the Myanmar market (after a sixty year absence), only two countries will not have access to the world’s most popular soft drink: Cuba and North Korea:

Coca-Cola has grown from selling nine drinks a day in a single country in 1886 to distributing 1.8 billion beverages in more than 200 nations, according to data posted on its website. Myanmar, Cuba and North Korea are the only countries where Coca- Cola doesn’t operate, the company said yesterday. Coca-Cola says the 1971-vintage advertisement entitled “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” remains one of its most popular.

There’s also this:

PepsiCo Inc. (PEP), the world’s second-largest soft-drink maker, pulled out of Myanmar in 1997 after shareholder groups and activists urged the company to sever ties with the military dictatorship because of human-rights violations. Heineken NV, the world’s third-biggest brewer, withdrew in 1996.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this month warned investors against “reckless optimism” in the country’s move toward democracy. In a speech in Bangkok, her first outside Myanmar in 24 years, Suu Kyi called job creation her top priority and called for “healthy skepticism” of Myanmar’s reform process.

Also of interest: a Coke executive, Todd Putnam, who claimed the “share of stomach” paradigm at the company:

We weren’t trying to get share of market. We weren’t about trying to beat Pepsi or Mountain Dew. We were about trying to beat everything.

Your Typing Style as a Password

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Paul-Jean Letourneau, Lead Developer for Wolfram Alpha, recently read a New York Times article which detailed how in the future we may be able to bypass the password simply by typing a user name (or some string). The takeaway is that the way you type the characters will be a unique identifier for you and only you.

Using Mathematica, Letourneau then decided to analyze his own typing signature by seeing the difference in keystrokes as he typed “wolfram.”  He details everything in this blog post.

Using this fun little typing interface, I feel like I actually learned something about the way my colleagues and I type. The time to type two letters with the same finger on the same hand takes twice as long as with different fingers. The faster you type, the more your typing speed will fluctuate. The more your typing speed fluctuates, the harder it will be to distinguish you from another person based on your typing style. Of course we’ve really just scratched the surface of what’s possible and what would actually be necessary in order to build a keystroke-based authentication system. But we’ve uncovered some trends in typing behavior that would help in building such a system.

Quite fascinating to put the research and practical together. You can even test your own typing profile by installing a CDF (computable data format) in your browser. Very cool!