September 16, 2007
Levitt and Dubner takes a look at why nuclear power only accounts for 20% of electricity production in the US, and playfully blames Jane Fonda. It’s a cute narrative, but Levitt and Dubner ignore a number of economic aspects of the energy sector in their column, which is interesting since, *ahem*, Levitt is a brilliant economist.
If you haven’t read Freakonomics yet, you really should. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner do a marvelous job of applying critical thinking (or as they term it, “economics”) to some non-typical problems and arrive at some thought-provoking conclusions. E.g., crime rates don’t drop because of “get tough on crime”; the only statistically significant factors are (a) the number of cops and (b) legalization of abortion; and backyard pools are more dangerous than guns.
Ok, that’s enough of a plug for their book and my own affiliate kick-back.
The Freakonomics blog is an extension of the book, and continues Levitt’s tradition of revisiting old topics with a fresh, critical eye. And eyebrows were raised over the weekend as he took aim at Hollywood. In an expanded article in today’s New York Times Magazine, Levitt argues that Hollywood, with “The China Syndrome”, which coincided with the Three Mile Island incident, helped derail US exploitation of nuclear power, and so playfully blames Jane Fonda for global warming.
A wonderful headline, to be sure. But this is a troublesome perspective, for a number of reasons.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
September 14, 2007
The best way to migrate your Outlook contacts to the Macintosh Address Book is by way of the Mozilla Thunderbird installation wizard on the Windows side; Thunderbird will then export to LDIF, which Address Book can import. And you’re done. This tip took me a while to find amongst all the options, and with an increasing number of friends and acquaintances switching from Windows to Mac these days, I thought I would share it.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
September 4, 2007
The international reporting on the KILM report mostly rehashed the original Reuters report, and failed to emphasize the most interesting tidbit: that of the three economic activities - farming, industry, and services - farming is no longer the largest global employer.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
August 24, 2007
I’ve been enjoying hanging around at GetSatisfaction lately, and for some reason decided to research the issue of what to do when you spill liquids on your electronics. This isn’t the usual heady strategic stuff that I prefer to write, but odds are this is actually more useful. I haven’t really found a good general online guide for this, which is bizarre since this is really something that basically every modern adult should know. If you’re anything like me, then it’s not a question of if you’re going to spill something on your laptop or mobo, but when. I suspect if you know me and my blog you probably know this stuff, but odds are you have friends and family that don’t.
Well this advice may be too late, but this is an area that is broadly misunderstood, so this might be of general interest. I learned the bulk of this stuff years ago, but after freshening up with some online guides, here’s the dope on liquids and electronics:
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
July 25, 2007
After the most highly anticipated consumer product roll-out in recent memory, I suspect I had a lot of company dialing into Apple’s earnings call today. A lot of speculation about iPhone sales figures would finally meet up with some real data - at least that’s what we hoped.
And we did get some data. The numbers look pretty bleak, and the online world immediately erupted into a passionate defense of Apple.
So with a few hours of contemplation in hand, let’s see what we now know.
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4 Comments | apple, iphone, macintosh | Permalink
Posted by Peter S Magnusson
July 10, 2007
Well I’m humbled and proud that both Biz 2.0 and CSM picked up on my iPhone blog; two of my favorite publications. Biz 2.0’s editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt found my post ‘long and thoughtful’. (Yes, finally when I write columns I have all the space I want!) And the Christian Science Monitor invited me to write an oped piece to summarize my blog; it’s on their web site and (as I understood it) will be in the print run tomorrow.
The iPhone posting also invited a lot of commentary, check them out. There are some interesting observations. Some criticisms, but, by and large, after all the commentary and further thinking, I pretty much stand by my story. So an opportunity to write an 800-word version was nice. Check it out.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
July 6, 2007
A (now increasingly rare) return to network news reminds me of a key driver for crowdsourcing in news: quality. What on earth makes Katie Couric think that the best authority to interview on the significance of the number “7″ (apropos the 7/7/7 date) is a “numerologist”? Why not a historian, or an astronomer, or a mathematician? Even I know more about the number 7 than the “expert” on CBS.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
July 1, 2007
The reviews are in, hundreds of thousands of proud iPhone owners are playing with their brand new toys over the July 4th weekend. The hype has been (very) high, but the wonderful internet resources of today - digg.com, google, mac forums, youtube, etc - have responded with expediency in weighing the pros and cons of Apple’s foray into mobile platforms. This in addition of course to more traditional reviews and commentary such as those by Walt Mossberg at WSJ, David Pogue and John Markoff at NYT, and Steven Levy at Newsweek.
So we know the industrial design is solid from PC World’s harsh testing, the guys over at ifixit.com have taken it apart, over at macrumors.com literally hundreds of reviews are looking at the device from all angles, and several wikis have been started (at least five by my latest count). Smash has documented the 10 things that suck, we now know that it wasn’t a sellout (except at the poor smaller AT&T stores), and that the poorly recessed headphone plug doesn’t work with most 3rd party headsets. The inevitable mobile phone pundits have compared it with the N95, Blackjack, Curve 830, and Treo, AT&T accumulated some bad press with all the activation issues, and predictably all manner of opinion abounds about the lack of a tactile keyboard.
People have even dissected precisely how the design of the iPhone has changed since Jobs presented it at MacWorld in January. Not to mention sites that assemble a COMPLETE gallery of every single user interface aspect (I’m not even linking to that).
Steve Jobs is positioning the iPhone as the third leg of their strategy chair. He is saying that the iPhone will reinvent the notion of a cell phone in the way that the Macintosh reinvented the notion of a computer.
I disagree. I don’t think the iPhone fundamentally innovates over and above the existing offerings, in the manner that the iPod, the Macintosh, and the Apple II all did in their day.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
June 29, 2007
Yeah, it’s sad, but I’ve actually allocated the day to get myself an iPhone.
I’m also running the twitter channel for SF Bay iPhone “line tracking”. If you’re bay area and want updates, sign up to twitter and then send “follow ipSFBay” to 40404. See you in line!
Oh, yeah, I might actually even write an iPhone review. How about that for originality!
1 Comment | apple, iphone | Permalink
Posted by Peter S Magnusson
June 22, 2007
Well it has been an excellent day, I’ve really enjoyed the panels, and the organizers did an excellent job in getting key people to participate. It’s always nice to attend “early day” summits before 75% of the participants are there to learn the basics (e.g. Web 2.0 this year) as opposed to being actual movers and shakers in a nascent segment (and they were very much in evidence here). Again, kudos to the organizers.
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Posted by Peter S Magnusson
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