A hundred million mistakes: Microsoft’s Bing search engine - Good Experience
A hundred million mistakes: Microsoft’s Bing search engine - Good Experience
Everything Microsoft has tried recently hasn’t worked. They tried the “I’m a PC” ads, a knockoff of the Mac ads - didn’t work. Tried the Zune, a knockoff of the iPod - didn’t work. Tried redoing MSN Search again and again, as a knockoff of Google - didn’t work. What’s the world coming to, when Microsoft can’t build a monopoly around a knockoff?It’s those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.
The solar revolution: Power plastic / Solar tower plants
Google develops algorithm to stem talent loss
Google develops algorithm to stem talent loss
Google, concerned by the recent departures of several top executives, has developed an algorithm to try to identify which employees are likely to quit, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
I guess the first version is just a keyword analysis tool applied to performance reviews, looking for particular keywords (”demotivated”, “concern”) and statistical analysis tools looking at data like last date of promotion, ongoing training, denied requests for raises, etc…
It is not particularly difficult to do, companies don’t have to be Google to do the same thing!
My Personal Credit Crisis - NYTimes.com - Expertise is overrated
We are supposed to feel sorry for this individual…yet The fact that he was advising others on financial matters through such
a prominent newspaper and earning 120k/year tells us a lot on why we
are where we are, and how much the “experts” know or can be relied on.
He knew much better than
most people all the way (wrote articles about it!), he fell for it, he
continued spending (Christmas, vacation…), didn’t sell the
house…and on top of that he writes this article mentioning names and
making himself and his employer look even more incompetent
that you would ever guessed they could be.
I wouldn’t be
surprised if he soon loses his job and his wife.
My Personal Credit Crisis - NYTimes.com
If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
15 Recession Proof Job Markets
15 Recession Proof Job Markets
The recession has led to massive layoffs and downsizing. But not every job field is in trouble. Some professions are expected to see faster than average employment growth over the next few years. Here are 15 job markets thought to be recession proof.
Touching or imagining touch sensations leads to more sales
Want to Save Some Money? Shop Without Touching - TIME
To test this hypothesis, the authors added an extra layer to the experiment. After the students either touched or didn’t touch the Slinky and coffee mug, they asked about half of them to imagine picking up the products and bringing them home. They asked the other half to simply evaluate the products in their minds. Among those who touched the products, imagining ownership did not affect the price they’d be willing to pay for them. However, among those who didn’t touch the items — a group that shares the same hands-free experience as online shoppers — picturing ownership led to significantly higher valuations of the products.
City development, key to economic prosperity
But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.
About the wage productivity gap
t r u t h o u t | Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy
The wage-productivity gap is the gap between the real wage and labor productivity. The real wage is the purchasing power of the average salary. If productivity rises fast and the real wage rises slowly, then a wage-productivity gap develops and grows.
Expertise is overrated
Op-Ed Columnist - Learning How to Think - NYTimes.com
One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.
AIG and how the US got here
The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).
-
About Javier Marti
As an independent strategy consultant, futurist, speaker and founder of Trendirama.com Consulting, Javier is dedicated to help organizations, small businesses and individuals to optimize systems, increase profits and make better choices in business and in life. He is the author of the book "Mobile, Domains & The Future"
When not consulting for clients, Javier shares his knowledge and experience through information-packed, yet entertaining presentations in a wide range of subjects in English and Spanish.
Founder:
Trendirama.com
Trendinews.com
> More about Javier
> DOWNLOAD JAVIER'S BOOK
