Apprencticeship vs Extended Secondary Vocational Education

I believe the contemporary American view (or really, default assumption) that:

1. Higher education's purpose should be vocational
2. The optimal form of vocational training is higher education

is a big, expensive mistake. I believe apprenticeship and on-the-job training is both more economical, and more effective, for providing most types of vocational training. And the mission of higher education (it is called "higher" for a reason) should be breadth of learning, cultivation of intellectual curiosity and development of analytical thinking.

Anyway, this quote from a chef, regarding the closing of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, is right on:

Jones said with the foodie boom, demand for chefs is higher than ever. He said Le Cordon Bleu grads aren’t ready to run a kitchen.

“Kids come out of culinary school and say: ‘I want a job as a sous chef.’ And I say, ‘No, you have to start at the bottom, like anyone else!’” Jones said.

Those entry-level jobs cutting, blanching and glacéing vegetables don’t pay very well. Jones said grads can come out of two years of culinary school with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

“You learn infinitely more in a restaurant like this, than you would anywhere else, virtually,” Jones said. “The idea that anyone would want to come into this industry with debt is ludicrous.”

Assortive Mating's Contribution to Income Inequality

For a long time, I've suspected that "assortive mating"--marrying someone from a similar socioeconomic background, educational institution and/or vocation--was an important contributor to income inequality. Far from the only one, and the factors are probably multiplicative, such that if the other factors were diminished, the contribution of assortive mating would be proportionately diminished. But nevertheless significant and worth considering.

This article makes the point, and claims statistically that something like 25% of income inequality may be explained by the contribution of assortive mating.

Don't Mythologize Scott Weiland

I deplore the tendency to mythologize the suffering artist. I really liked the op-ed by the ex-wife and mother of his children of Scott Weiland, recently deceased member of Stone Temple Pilots. Best quote:

Let's choose to make this the first time we don't glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don't have to come with it. Skip the depressing T-shirt with 1967-2015 on it.

Email, Texts and Probably IMs Should All Be Treated as Members of the Same Family

I like email. Email should always be considered the default workhorse of ordinary, textual communication. Texts have their place, mainly as a signal of urgency. I want a text only if it is time-sensitive--like, read and respond within 10 minutes, or the moment is lost.

Note that urgency may coincide with priority. It just means that the topic is time-limited. Could be "hey, I'm at the grocery store, is there anything you want me to get?" Or could be "I'm at the hospital, come see me".

So a text can serve as a reasonable proxy for urgency. What about priority?--i.e., it doesn't matter if you look at this in the next few minutes, but this is really important, so don't ignore it. Users of Outlook will be familiar with the red exclamation mark that indicates priority. Generally A Useful Thing. As far as I know, there is no widely-accepted equivalent in standard email. There should be.

Which brings me to my point: the distinction between email and text should be erased. They should both just be a message. Any message can have 2 distinct attributes, one for urgency, one for priority. The recipient can control the settings on their device accordingly. E.g.:

• Most of the time, my phone would play a chime and pop up a window, for anything urgent.
• At certain times, such as important meetings, I would suppress this and only do it if both urgent and priority.
• In my case, I check email often enough, so no special settings for Priority alone--just iconic representation, a la the Outlook exclamation point.

It is not hard to imagine other refinements, such as only accepting Urgent + Priority from certain known contacts.

The last thing to consider is IM. I think that is a variation on urgency. It would be urgency, with an intention to conduct a more prolonged conversation. So if I received an IM request, but didn't feel like an extended conversation, rather than ignore it entirely, I could send a reply, but implicitly decline the IM, based on choosing to reply as standard urgent message.

I want all of these to be a subset of email, archived and searchable with all the same rules and tools that are well-established for email.

Oh, and one more thing--no proprietary forms of communications. Whatever is built into Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat should be a subset of email. The app of origin could just be an attribute (e.g., I might ignore emails from Twitter contacts).

High-Markup Peripheral: Washer Pedestals

You know those nice, modern, high-efficiency front-loading washers that have become the upper-middle-class standard in the last 5 years? Notice how big they look? It is true, they are a little beefier than their top-loading predecessors, but mainly it is because they are mounted on ~14" pedestal drawers. I think I have discovered why those pedestals are so popular--scooping all the laundry out of the capacious front-loader is unpleasant stoop labor.

The cost of those pedestal drawers though, is beyond belief. A quick, I think represetantive search on Amazon indicates $250-$350. Per drawer. If the machine costs $600 (on the cheap side compared to what some people pay, but that's what we paid for what I find to be a very nice unit), that is like 50% for a freaking drawer!!

Screaming business opportunity. Idea #1: create universal pedestals with adapters for specific makes. Idea #2: create a platform that fits both washer and dryer, with drawers underneath. Basically a pre-fab version of this kind of DIY project.

Apple TV App Idea: Photo-Sharing

The latest iteration of Apple TV will run iOS and thus apps. There has been a lot of speculation about whether and what will be the "killer apps" for the iTV.  I personally think slideshows and photo-sharing has got to be at the top of the list.

For a decade, since the advent of HDTV in my household, I have been looking for better ways to turn my TV into a photo screensaver. With the Wii, I could use SD cards. That was OK, I would do it for special occasions, but way too inconvenient, on multiple dimensions.

We got HDTV #2 about a year ago, and I have been using Chromecast for the same purpose. That works okay, but it still isn't that good, and totally doesn't lend itself to casual, ad-hoc management on the TV itself.

I'm not even completely sure what feature set I am looking for, but I am sure there is potential. (Whether there is potential to have high enough volume to make money--I have no idea. This might be a good one for Apple to build in.)

Two-Factor Authentication

Bruce Schneier, for whom I have massive respect, said 10 years ago two-factor authentication is useless for consumer internet (another post more technical, along the same lines).

I think I understand some of what they are saying--it is not a panacea, and probably will do little to deter mass thefts. But it seems to me like it is an important defense against targeted thefts:

• Targeted doxing, as happened to the CIA director, where someone who  is your personal enemy wants access to your email to embarass you.

• Acquaintance-theft. Where someone you know gets your password (watching you type it at work, etc) and wants to access your accounts. This would include domestic incidents.

• Public or shared-computer theft, via the dreaded keystroke-logger.

The second case is particularly important for financial fraud. At least if you are part of a mass-hack, you have some post-facto protection. If you are a one-off, there is a far heavier burden of proof.


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Groupon: Down 70% from Google's $6B Offer

I've always been a Groupon skeptic. Every now and then I check their Market Cap, to see how much lower it is from when they turned down Google's $6B offer. Today it is $1.7B, so down about 70% below.

Uber: & Lyft: Only Use Location if Accurate

Used Uber and Lyft for the first time. Overall, experience was excellent, exactly as advertised. However, we did have a glitch. My Mom (most senior person I know using Uber) summoned them from deep within the movie theater. Good news was--she had a data connection. Bad news was--no GPS line-of-sight. So instead of obtaining a very accurate location via GPS, the phone provided the Uber app with the extremely approximate location, provided by the nearest cell tower. Driver confusion ensued--thank heaven we had mobile phones to straighten that out.

Seems like it would be good if the Uber app would be smart enough to know whether it has an accurate location from GPS, or a questionable one from WiFi or cell tower. Not 100% sure if this is allowed in Android, let alone iOS, but I am certain it is possible. And very desirable.

Overdue Browser Features: Highlighting and Single Page Archive

When studying or researching a topic, I love being able to highlight. Which makes serious web research tedious. The common work-around is to paste into Word, and highlight there.

I can't believe highlighting hasn't been built into modern browsers. Then the key feature to go with it is the single page archive. You know, like the MHT file IE has had for a decade or so?

The other day I got tired of pasting to Word, and looked for Firefox extensions. Good ones exist for each purpose, and together they give me most of what I want.

But seriously, this should be in the browser.

Need Search Syntax Standards and Libraries

Just as Amazon represents the gold standard in eCommerce ease-of-use (no CVV codes, no Verified by Visa, no captchas), so Google for search ease-of-use.

What I have in mind are not the powerful algorithms that deliver up the results, but rather the more basic but crucial details of software craftspersonship, that help insulate us careless humans from our own limitations. Examples:

• Ignoring hyphens and their ilk. I.e., Google treats any non-alpha character as a space or wildcard. This seems like a small thing, but there are a lot of hyphens and slashes out there, waiting to mess up search results. 

• Spellchecking search Terms

• Ignoring capitalization (this one is fairly widespread in your average search implementation).

• Allowing the user to override the compensations, with the simple and generally well-known convention of enclosing search terms in quotes. An example of being smart, but not too smart.

eCommerce Ease-of-Use Notes: Amazon Sets the Standard

I buy a ton of stuff on the internet. I say that not so much to mean that I buy a ton of stuff, but that I buy a roughly typical amount of stuff, but a disproportionately large amount of it on the internet. So I see a lot of eCommerce sites.

What I find is that very few match the attention-to-detail and ease-of-use of Amazon. In some cases, no doubt that reflects Amazon's massive advantages of scale, They can afford a lot more user-experience and software development. But then again, some things are pretty basic, and easily copied.

Three things that I hate come to mind:

1. Verified by Visa. As far as I am concerned, it is awful. I have read defenses of it, so maybe there is another side to the story. But if there is--Visa and their partners have done a terrible job of telling that story. If Amazon can get along fine without it, why would a consumer expect or put up with it elsewhere? (And as noted in my post, an unforgivably poor job of implementing the VbV process during checkout. Given the subject of this post, an ironic counter-example of lack of attention to usability).

2. CVV codes. I HATE having to remember this when I check out from a website. Adding to the irritation--if you left out some other required piece of data, it rests the CVV code. Creating both irritating and often confusing behavior. E.g., I enter everything but my phone number, for example. The SUBMIT fails, prompting for my phone number. Fine. I re-submit, but it fails again, now because of missing CVV code. Irritating if I realize, confusing if I think there is some other field still missing.

3. Captchas. Oh how I loathe them. I must be especially captcha-challenged, but I often find it takes 2-3 tries to get it right.

One possibility is that Amazon's scale may somehow give them a critical advantage that smaller sites don't have. Maybe they feel they can take losses that smaller sites aren't willing to take. Or maybe they extract better terms from credit card companies. But from the consumer perspective, it hardly matters--just more factors to making Amazon the path of least resistance.

Does Voice Password Offer Unique Advantages for BIometrics?

Biometrics such as fingerprint recognition, retina recognition, voiceprint seem like appealing alternatives to the time-tested password. But one big drawback--if biometric data is compromised, as Slate says, "You Can't Change Your Fingerprints". 

But is voice different? Because a voiceprint is inherently sort of like a two-factor approach: a thing you know (your passphrase) and a thing you have (your voice). If your voiceprint is compromised, then you can just use your same voice, with a new passphrase, to create a new voiceprint. Like creating a new password.

This website seems to support my reasoning.

(Obviously no security technology is perfect. Speaking out loud has privacy implications that swiping a finger does not. Supposedly impersonation or pre-recording is not a problem, though.)

Donate Anonymously

A couple of years ago, I gave $50 to an issue-oriented charitable cause. It was a one-off donation, given as a show of support when their issue was front-and-center. I had no intention of becoming a regular supporter.

I should have donated anonymously.

Ever since, I receive 2-4 mailings per month, from this and related organizations, soliciting additional donations. Donations which most definitely will not be forthcoming. If we value the cost per mailing at $0.50, easily half of the value of my donation has been consumed, thus far, in soliciting further support.

It's sickening. Besides the junk-mail nuisance and natural resource waste, the sheer inefficiency of the process is appalling. I'm not singling out this organization, I'm pretty sure this is the dark nature of the organizing/fundraising process. Years ago, I read snarky advice, somewhat but not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that if you wanted to inflict harm on a cause you dislike, the thing to do would be to give them a small amount of money. $15, say. Then sit back and watch as they spend several times that amount in the following years, in the hopeless effort to inveigle further contributions.

I wish I had remembered that bit of wisdom.

Best Quote Ever

Jason Stanford, on the right-wing approach to (never) engaging in meaningful, measured discussion, on any policy issue whatsoever:

It's never the thing. It's always another thing that steers the conversation away from the terrifying jagged edges of modernity toward the comfort of repeating each other's confirmation bias back and forth, such that Solyndra and Benghazi are metonyms that make no sense to most people but are hugely powerful talismans of their increasingly lonely faith.

Must Customer Service Agents Constantly Re-Confirm My Email Address?

Can’t they have heuristics, like customer has had same email for 5+ years, only confirm it 1x per year thereafter?

Usubscribe for Spam

Seems like a great way to spam people would be to include an false unsubscribe link. That is the first thing I look for when I get spam.

Opportunistic Acquirers of Orphan Drugs Like Labor Unions?

This is kind of old news now, but the outage over a company that acquires rights to an orphan drug and promptly raises the price from $13 to $750 per pill is an outrage that no ideology of capitalism should attempt to defend. Most pro-capitalists would decry crippling labor strikes. rightly. Just because some damn union gets a stranglehold on a mundane, but crucial corner of the economy (trash collection, public transport, coal mining, whatever) doesn't mean they should be able to use that un-earned leverage to extort above-market wages. Well, what is right for labor is also right for capital.

Life value of defunct companies like Borland

This post on Dropbox and Evernote got me thinking about something I have always wondered about--what is the value of a lifetime investment in a once-highflying company that eventually founders and becomes defunct, through bankruptcy or acquisition? For whatever reason, Borland is the company I usually think of in this regard, but there are many others of course. Do they pay enough dividends along the way to make it still a decent, if not spectacular, investment, if one holds it from, let's say 1 month after going public, until the bitter end? 

Ann Marie Slaughter Is My Hero

(Heroine? Do we still say that, outside of discussions of pre-20th century literature?)

From Freakonomics Interview: 

SLAUGHTER: The book is about okay, we’re stuck. I mean, it’s Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, and the unfinished business is the unfinished business of the movement for full equality between men and women. And in a nutshell, what I’m arguing is that if we’re going to get to real equality between men and women, we have to focus less on women and more on elevating the value of care and expanding the choices and roles for men. And that’s sort of counterintuitive, right? Because what we’ve been doing is, we measure our progress in the women’s movement by how many women CEOs we have, women leaders of all kinds, women politicians. And I’m all for having more women in high places. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for it. We need it. But that metric and that focus is not going to get us there. Because it’s leaving a huge number of women out — all the women at the bottom — and it’s assuming that you can get to equality between men and women by changing women’s roles but not changing men’s roles.
DUBNER: Right. You also, the phrase you use is that we need to “resocialize men,” which as a man sounds vaguely threatening, but not really. But, but you write about not only adult men who are in the workforce and maybe those CEOs that we’re talking about, but also young men, boys, and how they should think about the future work world and the future family world, as well. So talk to the men for a minute. This program is probably I’m guessing now roughly 70 percent male listeners. So this is a great platform.
SLAUGHTER: Oh, that’s so interesting.
DUBNER: What were some of the kind of basic signposts that we need to rearrange, or get rid of, or maybe the new ones we need to have written?
SLAUGHTER: That’s great. So let me start by saying how I got to this realization that we have to — I think I prefer, “expand choices and roles” to “resocialize,” which does sound vaguely Orwellian. So here’s what I realized: I have two sons, and I looked at my sons and I thought, “You know, if I’d had a daughter we’d be raising her 100 percent differently than the way my mother was raised, and even differently than I was raised,” although my father was very progressive and he raised me to have a career. But if I looked at my sons, I thought, “I’m raising my sons pretty much exactly the way my father was raised.” I mean, we’re raising them to have a more active role as fathers. My father never changed a diaper. Certainly my husband changed plenty. And I expect my sons to. But we’re still saying to men, “Your worth in society is a function of your breadwinning. It’s a function of how much money you can make and how high you can rise in your career.” And that is a very limited set of choices. It’s the flip side of saying to women, when my mother was raised you know, “Your worth in society depends on can you get married and can you have children.” And my point is all of us should have access to both.  As a woman I absolutely want to be able to compete. I want to have a career. That’s been fabulous. But I sure don’t want to do that at the expense of also being a mother and a wife and a sister and a daughter. And so, what I now say to my sons is, “If you believe in equality and you marry a woman or a man, whatever, and you believe that you’re going to support that woman’s career, then it may require you being the lead parent and your spouse to be the lead breadwinner.” And that’s been the situation in our marriage. And they understand that I couldn’t have a big career unless Andy played that role. So that’s the place where I’m really saying to men, if you believe in equality, it can’t be, “Okay, I believe in equality but I’m going to take every promotion I get, and if you get a promotion, I’m not going to move for you.”

Some Startups Choosing LA over SV

Los Angeles is really not the alternative location I had in mind when I wished for more startup activity outside of Silicon Valley!

Verizon More Expensive Than Ever

The good news: Verizon is following T-Mobile's lead in eliminating the hated 2-year phone contract, with its opaque, bundled handset subsidy pricing. And their pricing scheme is stick-simple--per-Subscriber, no family plans. The bad news: for families, this makes Verizon more expensive than ever.

T-Mobile Basic 1 Gb Plan
$50 for first Subscriber
$30 for second
$10 each for Subscribers 3-10.

Verizon Basic 1 Gb Plan
$50 per Subscriber

So for a family of 4, Tmo is $100, Verizon is $200. For bigger families, or combined families (we have our 5 plus my Mom plus a friend on our Tmo plan), the difference, at the extreme, is $160 vs a whopping $500.

Beverage Chiller: High-End Fridge Feature

This Rapid Chiller gets good functional reviews on Amazon. 1 minute to chill to 42 degrees F, 5 minutes to 34 F. The downsides seem to be convenience--it uses a lot of ice and water.

So what if it where built into a fridge? The water could be pre-cooled and re-used. Would be a pretty cool differentiator, for high-end appliances. Would certainly appeal to me. Less need to keep a wide selection of pre-chilled drinks.

PSA: Don't Use Graphite (or WD-40) to Lubricate Door Locks and Especially not Hinges

I've bought a couple of houses where the prior homeowner used graphite to lubricate door locks, and even worse, the hinges. Graphite does have valid dry lubricating properties, but is a messy black powder that gets over everything. Think pencil shavings, except all lead, no wood, or ground up charcoal. Like was toilet seat rings, this seems to be a home maintenance practice that everybody learns when young, and never un-learns. It's horrible.

I did a little research on alternatives. Unlike toilet seat rings, the alternative is not so obvious, but I think they exist. For hinges, some kind of viscous, lithium or teflon grease is probably best. For locks, there is a lot of debate, but probably the same.

In any case, DO NOT use WD-40! In fact, here is a bonus PSA: ratchet back your WD-40 use in general. It is not primarily a lubricant, it is primarily a solvent. It has short-term lubricating properties as a secondary effect, but there are many better choices, as this comprehensive article in Popular Mechanics shows. Talk about a habit that nobody un-learns!

Silicon Valley Isn't the Only Town in the Game

UPDATE: 03/05/16 This WSJ article says SV is experiencing loss of residents.

It has long seemed ridiculous to me that infotech is so over-concentrated in Silicon Valley - San Francisco. Those areas have gone from outrageously expensive to insanely expensive. Terrible places, even for elite tech workers, to try to afford to raise a family. And lots of drawbacks for employers--high rents, high salaries, job-hopping. I know, I know, there are the crucial benefits of concentration and proximity to venture capital. Still.

So I was heartened by this NPR report, featuring an ex-SVer, saying similar things:

"[Jerry Davis'] advice for young people: Forget the Bay Area.

'You spend a whole lot of your time on freeways. It's expensive, it's annoying. The weather is beautiful, but basically the Bay Area has turned into Los Angeles,' Davis says. 'All the things that people hate about LA are now true of the Bay Area.' "

And the home prices are worse. The median price in Silicon Valley now tops $1 million. In Detroit, it's $38,000.

That's appealing to Aaron Mason, a 36-year-old San Franciscan. "Having a yard, having a garden, starting a family, those kinds of things," says Mason, imagining a possible move to Michigan.

Davis praises Detroit as an alternative. Myself, I like Minneapolis-St. Paul and Bloomington, IN. But most important is for the idea of other locations for infotech innovation to take hold.

Media: Nix the Glitz

Opening theme songs in TV and radio shows are such a tiresome waste of time. Now that I consume all such content via DVR or Podcast, I always skip over them. I suspect most people do the same, or would like to but just not quite enough to go to the effort of fiddling with the controls on their device. Why does anyone think this empty content is a good use of time?

I even use a compression setting on Podcast Addict to compress the time between NPR stories. I really don't care who the reporter is, where they are reporting from, and I have always hated the precious interlude music.

The most extreme version of this is all the inane pre-game hype before sporting events. From a purely commercial perspective, this form of empty content does make better sense than the useless intro filler. But I don't really understand why viewers would tolerate it, most particularly in the DVR age. If you are a superfan who wants lots of backstory, etc, , fine, but superfans aren't going to learn anything useful from the hype-rich, content-deficient pregame garbage. The internet is what they need.

So although I called out NPR in my extreme example, they actually score pretty high in this regard. The NPR ethos in general is to find important and fascinating stories, ply their master storyteller skills, and let the story tell and sell itself. No hype required.

Wax Toilet Rings Should Be Banned

We recently had our bathroom floors tiled, which of course entails removal and re-seating of the toilet bowl. This is a tedious but relatively low-skill job, so it was irritating, though unsurprising, that the Home Depot tiling subcontractor would not do it, as an add-on service.

So anyway, I found myself undertaking this chore for the first time since I was 16 and helped my Dad do it. Although I hadn't done it myself, I had talked with others who had done it, so I was aware that the standard for sealing the seat to the sewer pipe remained the wax ring. The messy, sloppy, unforgiving wax ring, loathed by millions of happless homeowners for at least a century.

The wax ring has major disadvantages:

• Messy to put on
• Infinitely messier to replace
• Necessary to replace, every time you remove the toilet
• Unforgiving, so if you in any way goof up, you have to: A) clean up the wax, again; B) go out and buy another wax ring; C) repeat.
• Can be a problem if the height difference of the new floor is too great.

It has two advantages

• Cheap
• Well-known, so easy default

So while buying supplies at Home Depot, I tossed 2 wax rings in my cart, mentally cursing them for their poxiness. Then I stopped. I thought "there has just got to have been some improvement in the last 30 years." And Lo, down the aisle I found this.

Twice the cost, but so much better. In addition to alleviating the mess, it has more advantages, which I think ultimately pay for the difference:

• Holds the bolts nicely in place.
• That, plus the fact that it is forgiving, means that you may be able to do the job without a helper. 
• Re-usable means if you have to move the toilet in the future, you don't have to buy a new seal.
• The ease of the remove-replace cycle brings another, subtle advantage. Most homeowners avoid removing the toilet, if possible. That means the tedious, aesthetically imperfect technique of painting around it. No longer necessary, if moving it is quick, easy and neat.

I really think wax seals should be banned by code.

Prius Acceleration Is Adequate

Prius actually does have adequate power, but you really have to stomp on pedal to get it. So they discourage hard acceleration, thereby encouraging better fuel economy. But you can get it when you really want it. And that is without putting it in "Power" mode!

State Insurance Exchanges Are The Wrong Idea

(Disclaimer: I work in IT for a large healthcare company. These opinions are entirely my own, however.)

The Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare) envisioned each state setting up its own insurance exchange. There was surprise when many states declined to do so. In the states that did so, the path to full administrative functionality is sometimes slow in the making. There's a really obvious question to be asked, and it feels like nobody is asking it. That question is--Why? Why would anyone ever think it makes sense for each state create its own Exchange??

Each state Exchange entails specifying, designing, coding testing and maintaining a major, complex, integrated information system. Why do the same thing 50 separate times? This is exactly the opposite of the logic that drives many corporate mergers, where the goal is to gain operational efficiencies by eliminating redundant, back-office functions. So why for the love of Pete is the blueprint for ACA that each state should do its own thing?!

There is an answer, and it lies in politics and the misguided perception that conditions vary so widely from state to state that each state that will be much better able to serve its local peculiarities (see previous post for more on this notion). In a modern, connected, transient homogeneous country, this is hogwash.

I really wish some of the national press would start asking this question. The business press, in particular, should be all over it.

UPDATE: This King vs Burwell article from NYT hints at it.

Hating on the IRS

I don't want to to spoil anybody's fun, but hating on the IRS is as morally suspect as reviling returning Viet Nam soldiers. The IRS is a civil-service function that tries to do the job assigned to it, with the resources allotted. Slashing IRS funding out of vindictive or ideological motives is a terrible idea. Do we want to become Greece, where most taxes go uncollected?

Web App Idea: Preference-Based Approach to Coordinating Across Time Zones

My daughter is going on an international trip, and needed to coordinate a time to Skype with people in multiple time zones. By multiple, we're not talking U.S Easter, Central and Pacific. Or even a European time zone. We are talking, U.S., Europe, Australia. There is going to be zero overlap of normal working hours.

Obviously the ideal solution involves a web-app to coordinate reasonable times. Reasonable here being defined as anytime during a given party's normal waking hours.

I found a number of websites that do this to an extent. This one seems as good as any. The 4-color scheme requires some mental math, but then I realized, instead of trying to track the three colors that represented waking time, I just needed to eliminate the 1 color (red) that represents sleeping time.

The enhancement I would like to see is personalization. Instead of default typical hours, I would like the ability for each of the participants to enter times that conform to their personal schedule.

For extra credit, there could be two tiers: preferred, and can-make-it-work. Results would be returned, in sort order, using a two-stage algorithm. First stage would maximize the number of participants who can attend. E.g., if a time slot meets 100% of can-work but 0% of preferred, it will make the cut, whereas 90% preferred and 0% can-work won't make the cut. Then within first cut, sorting would be a points system. Say 2 points for each preferred and 1 point for each can-work.

Opscan Forms Best of Both Worlds for Voting?

For years over a decade I have frequently heard about security concerns, and outright flaws, with various kinds of electronic voting machines. For the same decade, I have lived and voted in Washington County, MN, where they use "opscan" forms. That's shore for "optical-scan"--the same sort of bubble forms that are used for standardized tests.

I have always thought that opscan offers the best of both worlds. Fast, machine-based counting, but a very solid paper trail. Cheap, proven technology, too. And a big bonus, the machine isn't a real-time bottleneck.

After hearing an NPR story, today, I decided to take a few minutes to research it. Though my research is far from exhaustive, and may suffer slightly from unintentional "confirmation bias" in the search phrase formulation, the results seem to validate this. Here are a couple of links.

Gun Control and Pro-Vaccination Movements Need "Poster Child" Tactic

The gun control movement in the United States is losing massively to the gun lobby. I am amazed they don't adopt a poster-child tactic. There are so many school shootings and similar gun-driven bloodbaths, I am statistically certain that among the tragically bereaved families, there are bound to be some (instantly, former) rabidly pro-NRA acolytes.

So why not try to identify these people, and carefully select from them a few "poster child" individuals, who would sincerely and heartbreakingly explain how wrong they were to oppose reasonable gun control.

It seems like such an obvious tactic, but I have not seen it applied.

Exactly the same reasoning applies to the pro-vaccination argument.

****************
Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

Eighth Habit of Highly Successful: Look It Up

The internet is a miracle of knowledge and opportunity for self-education. The mobile, wireless internet just takes it to the next level. For those occasions where you find yourself wondering "is this true?" or "how does that work?", etc--train yourself to take the extra few moments to look it up.

This also makes a great, easy-to-keep New Year's Resolution.

Pro tip: sometimes the explanations will be too long to read in the moment. Read-later apps, such as Pocket, are perfect for capturing those articles for later digestion.

Choking on California

For years I've bemoaned the fact that that the IT industry is so concentrated in Silicon Valley. Always surprised at the irony--the very industry that makes "virtual" possible is so stubbornly invested in physical co-location, despite extremely high costs to that arrangement. Happy to see another writer making this point.