Thoughts of the Day

“四处望，皆唯图温饱之辈，胸无大志，如此何取天下?”

" I have not been wined and dined to my satisfaction" - Plato, The Republic, Book I

Why Things Cost $19.95

Pretty good read on the psychology behind pricing at Scientific American:

That is, if we see a $20 toaster, we might wonder whether it is worth $19 or $18 or $21; we are thinking in round numbers. But if the starting point is $19.95, the mental measuring stick would look different. We might still think it is wrongly priced, but in our minds we are thinking about nickels and dimes instead of dollars, so a fair comeback might be $19.75 or $19.50.

leading to :

they found that sellers who listed their homes more precisely—say $494,500 as opposed to $500,000—consistently got closer to their asking price.

[from : Scientific American]

Flat World Knowledge - Democratised Learning

Finally, a solution to the recurring issues of expensive college textbooks ....

We set out to solve problems – the silly cost and inflexible nature of textbooks, the lack of choice for students, and others. We did not set out to create problems. Making it hard to use our stuff would create a problem. Making you change your life in any significant way would be create a problem. So we didn’t.

EDUCATORS

+ Find & Review a Flat World Textbook
+ Adopt It
+ Make It Your Own (if you want)
+ Get The Supplements

LEARNERS
+ Find the Free Book For Your Class
+ Exercise Your Freedom To Choose
+ Participate in the Learning Network
+ Manage Your Stuff

Free knowledge for all!

[ more: Flat World Knowledge ]

Designing Data and Meaning to Become Information?

Briefly read the book Social Life of Information over the last week an one notion that stuck me was the idea of attaching meaning to data. Basically, data without meaning is not information and hence to a certain extent not useful.

What is meaning then? For most part it depends on context -- who is the subject, what conditions was the data produced in, and when that happened amongst many other things.

The contention here is that while we have gotten terribly good at the technical issues of indexing and retriving massive amounts of data at ever faster speeds, we have thus far not been as good at creating personal contexts in which the data can be interpreted at a personal level.

As a case in point, a very common example of data which can hold a wide variance of value depending on who reads it are scientific papers. Simply put, as most people thumb their way though journal articles and such, there is tremendous difficulty comprehension sometimes, much less expectation to relate to most of the concepts and ideas. In the hands of a professor of that field, little snippets of details about the paper add contextual meaning to it on top of the actual writing. Who the author(s) are, when the paper was written and other factors help a professor grapse the added level of meaning of it.

Back to the person in the street, we have to confess that the chances to pick up and read a scientific paper is extraordinarily low. But, what about common daily information that he/she has to interact with. Would added context help bring more meaning across? Would it help people better piece information together and get a better picture? Something which psychologically, humans are bad at is working with massive (or for that matter, even moderate) amounts of data and making some sense or detecting patterns in it.

Which begs the point, shouldn't we then be thinking of intelligent ways of structuring the way we work with data as well as the interfaces we rely on to help cover our cognitive blind-side?

Carmine Gallo on learning from Steve Jobs

Carmine Gallo on learning from Steve Jobs, highlighting the steps you can take to improve your own presentation:







[more : Carmine Gallo's Website]

[via: PresentationZen]

How to block RedNano.sg Ads in Firefox

I think there may be some potential in RedNano.sg to search for ST material if not for they way they prioritize their sponsored ads on top of all search results. This may get annoying in the future when they display too many advertisements and spoil the whole idea of search. Google understood this and that's why you don't get sponsored listings in their searches.

Anyway, just need to fire up good ol' AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox and add in this Element hiding rule -- "#div(sponsoredlink)" and you're back to ad-free goodness.....

Enjoy ~

Creative Technology just an iPod Accessory Maker?

As one of the brightest enterprises of yesterday, Creative used to be recognized as a leading soundcard manufacturer globally.

After losing focus and somewhat diversifying into the music player industry and now testing the water for the video conferencing market, one can't help but think that they are facing tough times when Bloomberg just prefers to label them simply as an iPod Accessory Maker in a news report about their loss forecast (double whammy):

March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Creative Technology Ltd., which makes accessories for Apple Inc.'s iPod, forecast the lowest sales in almost five years and said it will lose money on operations in the current third quarter.

Doesn't exactly help that they are going after people trying to help provide drivers for their sound cards for Vista either.

This should be a subtle(?) wake-up call for them...

[from : Bloomberg Asia]

Mocca and ST701 Web Traffic Hovering around Mediocrity

There's only so much annoying ads and throwing marketing dollars away can do for you...

The RedNano Difference

Just having some fun plunking searches into RedNano.


"st701" - descriptive first hit + full page of st701 sub-sections


"mocca" - first hit is official one but no descriptions?



Maye I'll try other searches for fun later ....

Meanwhile, think I'll be sticking to Google for more serious searching.

Thought of the Day

It's both amusing and awkward to see scripted jokes in presentations backfire from being too mechanically delivered.

At least it works to divert attention from the font-size 4 itsy stuff on the 60-slide presentation. And all that irrelevant transitions and clip art.

For [insert arbitrary deity here]'s sake, someone tell them about Presentation Zen already.

The Pirate's Dilemma

| View | Upload your own

Kinda has similiar thoughts before

[via: BoingBoing ]

The 20 Biggest Cross-Border SWF Deals Since 2005

An very illustrative infographic by New York Times :







[via : Tomorrow.sg]

NUS ranks Lowest in Customer Satisfaction Among 3 Local Universities

According to the statistics buried inside the executive summary PDF from SMU's Institute of Service Excellence (Ises):

Universities (70.9)

• NTU (70.8)
  
• NUS (70.6)
  
• SMU (72.2)
  

Almost neck-to-neck with NTU but SMU is way ahead? I'm kinda keen on seeing the full report so anyone keen on donating a thousand bucks for me to purchase it?

Interestingly, SMU is also sticking to the "we only have 3 universities in Singapore" viewpoint.

Probably not something which is going to appear in NUS Press Releases

[read more here: Today Online / SMU Press Release ]

11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft

Pretty interesting read on how the developers at WoW handle and make the best of various factors to boost innovation. The list reads :

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own product
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics bolster experience
9. Demand excellence or you'll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

Looking at the list, one can easily tell that it is more or less applicable to any creative / innovation-driven business.

[ read it at : OC Register ]

Squanderville versus Thriftville - Warren Buffett warns against US Trade Deficit (5 years ago!)

This was an 2003 article from Fortune where Warren Buffett warned against the U.S. trade deficit and also suggested a remedy for the problem.

Excerpt:

In the late 1970s the trade situation reversed, producing deficits that initially ran about 1 percent of GDP. That was hardly serious, particularly because net investment income remained positive. Indeed, with the power of compound interest working for us, our net ownership balance hit its high in 1980 at $360 billion.

Since then, however, it's been all downhill, with the pace of decline rapidly accelerating in the past five years. Our annual trade deficit now exceeds 4 percent of GDP. Equally ominous, the rest of the world owns a staggering $2.5 trillion more of the U.S. than we own of other countries. Some of this $2.5 trillion is invested in claim checks -- U.S. bonds, both governmental and private -- and some in such assets as property and equity securities.

In effect, our country has been behaving like an extraordinarily rich family that possesses an immense farm. In order to consume 4 percent more than we produce -- that's the trade deficit -- we have, day by day, been both selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own.

Read the rest : TradeReform