Being Mark Cohen

I spent a long time out in the back yard with my boy tonight watching the lunar eclipse. It is impressive. One can only wonder just how freaked out an uneducated tribesman hundreds or thousands of years ago would have been to see the moon turn orange-red.especially with the stars staying clear.

We are marginally more educated, and we had our telescope from the Australian Geographic shop, all set up. I also took my camera out as he wanted photos. The trick to getting pics of the moon is a wide aperture, iso 400, focus set to infinity, exposure at about two seconds for this pic. If you try take on automatic you’ll get flat orange discs. This is cropped from a fully oomed photo with a 300 mm lens.

Just read this story on MSNBC, the Chinese government has achieved what at first glance looks to me like the single most absurd piece of beaurocratic crap I have ever heard of:

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue – In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country.

Seth Godin has a great post today titled The 80:1 Freakonomics Paradox. The principle could be extended to say that in a small ecosystem the dominant player gets bigger and stronger. This is just as evident in the online world. In a (relatively) small community this often plays out quickly. Consider myhome.com.au’s failure to penetrate the Australian online real estate market. Realestate.com.au have most of the agents in Australia, and they claim over three million UB’s a month – and continue to grow. They go from strength to strength. Same applies to Seek in the job market. Same applied to CarSales in the car classifieds market. Same applies to eBay in the online auctions market.

The essence of what Seth is saying is that being a “me too” is almost always going to offer diminishing returns for each successive “me too”. So how can someone succeed in the same market? Assume you can’t. Then what do you do? Go somewhere else. Or better still, change the market. Disrupt it. Change the boundaries. Be an opposite, as Seth touched on yesterday. Polarize your market. Excite some people, upset some people. Avoid mediocrity. As my (soon to be ex) boss told me in my performance review, Change the Game.

An article ran on news.com.au on 14 August 07, titled “Why Bosses hate Gen Y“. It leads in by saying

THE jury is in on Generation Y and the verdict isn’t good. Employers say Gen-Ys are short on skills, demanding, impatient and far from loyal, according to a survey.

The article goes on to describe a “deep ambivalence” held by SME employers towards Gen Y’s. Almost 70 percent of the surveyed small to medium enterprises surveyed reported dissatisfaction with their Gen Y employees’ behaviour in the corporate environment and poor spelling and grammar. One cannot help wonder if the latter is due to having grown up with spell checkers to mop up semi-automatically (and semi-accurately). The corporate behaviour quip alludes to a deeper problem, related to attitudes and expectations.

The article quotes Jo Nagle, CEO ofLet’s Launch, as saying

“They think it’s their right to have what they want, they’re brash and naive and they can really be like spoilt kids who say ‘I want a pony now, I’ve got four ponies at home but I want another one and I want it now’. You don’t want that at work.”

Cutting to the chase now On the upside, she also says

…It might sound like a lot of effort but Ms Nagle insists it is worth it to harness the energy, creativity and charisma that Gen-Ys bring to her business.

It’s a good article, I suggest reading it.

Putting wasted human cycles to work.  That was the idea I read about in Wired magazine a few issues ago.  von Anh, the inventor of the Captcha test is doing work to put wasted human computation cycles to work.  You could think of his work as the Seti @ Home Project applied to humans.

I had cause to remember this today as I was trying t figure out what hole in my Wordpress installation was allowing thousands and thousands of comment spam into this blog (being caught by akismet, but still annoying to me ).  I tried turning just about everything on or off, eventually deciding to try upgrade my Captcha test.

The new test, which you can see by clicking on the comments link below shows a reCAPTCHA test.  These tests take advantage of the humans involved in captcha scenarios and get them to read and punch in two words.  One is known to the computer and one has failed OCR and is unknown.

The reCAPTCHA website says:

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers. Learn more.

The OCR that has failed is part of the digitising of old books,  and if even one percent of the captcha tests on the web were reCAPTCHA tests that would resolve over half a million words a day.
Wow. Now there’s a wordpress plugin worth installing.

I was talking with Seth today about The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Some Business Schools teach this in game theory, using a simple game. Two people play, without being able to see each other. In class they would face each away from each other, and the teacher would be the “referee”. They each have a red card and a green card. The rules are a variation of what follows:

There will be ten turns in a game.

Each player has to maximize their own points

So the strategy here would be to agree with your opponent that you would both agree to hold up the green card for every turn. Then you’d both score well through the game. Only at the last possible turn you hold up the red card, knowing that your opponent will most likely hold up green. He’s out of turns to do it back to you, and so you gamble the last 5 points on a reasonably sure 45 point return with no consequences. This game is an illustration of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. From Wikipedia:

In game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma (sometimes abbreviated PD) is a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players may each “cooperate” with or “defect” (i.e. betray) the other player. In this game, as in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player (”prisoner”) is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player’s payoff. In the classic form of this game, cooperating is strictly dominated by defecting, so that the only possible equilibrium for the game is for all players to defect. In simpler terms, no matter what the other player does, one player will always gain a greater payoff by playing defect. Since in any situation playing defect is more beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect.

The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution—that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect even though each player’s individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperate. In equilibrium, each prisoner chooses to defect even though both would be better off by cooperating, hence the dilemma.

Let me repeat: Rational choice leads the two players to both play defect even though each player’s individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperate.

’nuff said.