Windows Phone 7 handsets not taking worldby storm

UK reseller: Windows Phone ‘07 handsets are not selling
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Windows Phone 7 has got off to a sluggish start as far as our customers are concerned, accounting for just 3% of smartphone sales and a little under 2% of overall sales through MobilesPlease.co.uk and our network of partner sites that share our data feed,” Ben Pusey reports via the Mobilesplease blog. “Symbian 3 handsets outsold Windows 7 Phones by 3 to 1.”

[More]

I would hope half a billion dollars in marketing would get more than 3%. Android sales are 15 times higher than Windows Phone 7.

It is still early but MS is facing an uphill struggle for market share. It’s old system, Windows Mobile 6, sold 10 times better in the last quarter of its life. Not a lot of pent-up demand when your new system is selling slower than the old system.

The numbers may not be totally accurate but not many retailers were enthusiastic about sales. Not much jumping up and down.

Perhaps the path we should have taken

How Germany Got It Right on the Economy
[Via Daring Fireball]

Harold Meyerson:

It’s quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.

Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports). Nor have German firms been slashing wages and off-shoring — the American way of keeping competitive — to maintain profits.

[More]

Interesting that Germany knew what to do. One was not listening to the financial sector on how to run the economy. The other was holding onto its manufacturing sector.

Google TV going down?

It’s official: Google TV is a flop
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google TV might be in a bit of a pickle if a Best Buy and Sony sale is any indication,” Matt Burns reports for TechCrunch. “The platform launched a few weeks ago with the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV. Both are loaded with the same system and so both are suffering the fate of Big Media’s blockade.”

[More]

Little or no content does not make a nice system, especially since this costs several hundred dollars more than Apple TV. So now it does not cost as much as it used to. There still is a big roadblock happening here.

Apple sold over 250,000 Apple TV in the first 6 weeks. I don;t think Sony sold anywhere near that many of any of their Android-based devices.The Apple TV Black Friday special sold out.

I’m in the wrong business

Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege
[Via Making Light]

Thesis: The primary way most Americans make money is the salary their job pays.

The primary mechanism of privilege in most Americans’ lives is that it enables those who have it to get jobs that are better and more lucrative than they could get on merit alone.

That said, here’s an utterly fascinating article by “Ed Dante” in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story. It begins with Jonathan Barkat’s editorial note:

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

That is: it’s real. The author does what he says he does. Onward.

“Ed Dante” now:

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

It truly was no problem. In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. …

[More]

He may make about $66,000 this year. And he is very, very good at what he does.

The company that supports this gets the other $1000. And during the busiest parts of the year, there are about 50 writers involved.

I wonder how this will be cured?

Best audio equiment review ever!

“We live underground. We speak with our hands.”
[Via Making Light]

Hilariously expensive speaker cables. ($6,800 “& eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.” Not a misprint–as the manufacturer assures us, “Dielectric Bias System (DBS) (US patent 7,126,055): Greatly improved performance is made possible by a constant 72 volt charge on all K2′s insulation. Similar to how the earth’s magnetic field makes all compasses point north, the AQ DBS system creates an electrostatic field which causes the molecules of the insulation to all point in the same direction. This minimizes the multiple nonlinear time-delays. Sound appears from a surprisingly black background with unexpected detail and dynamic contrast.” Uh, right.)

Inevitably: multiple brilliant Amazon reviews. Most recently, a concise work of short SF:

Somewhere in our brave new century, somebody actually pays nearly $1,000 a foot for speaker cable. And somewhere else, people toil anonymously to write things like that review. One can see the rough emerging outlines of Eloi and Morlocks–but not which is which.

(Thanks to Olga Nunes on Twitter.)

[More]

I don’t usually include the whole post but this one needs to be.

I imagine groups of people writing all sorts of short science fiction tales amongst the reviews at Amazon. This one is really imaginative and very evocative.

And it convinced me not to but the cables.

Some things to ponder regarding the TSA scanners

by jurvetson

Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners
[Via Boing Boing]

Jason Bell, “a molecular biologist and biophysicist… a Ph.D. candidate in Steve Kowalczykowski’s lab at UC Davis,” has posted a detailed critique of the research on the safety of airport backscatter radiation scanners. His specialty is the “molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer,” and he’s posted a detailed, lay-friendly explanation of the scientific concerns expressed by the UCSF team that believes that they are unsafe for use.

Which brings me to how the scanner works. Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists… what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person’s eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page).

[More]

The first is that the machines might be fine in a lab setting but what about in the real world, when hundred of these are in place around the US? This letter from Jason highlights some of my concerns also. Without a much better idea of how they actually work in the real world, I’d be cautious.

The second one is the Therac 25, a machine designed for radiation therapy. Due to poor software engineering, the machine gave lethal doses of radiation to several patients. Reading about their deaths makes one very concerned about any software driven machine and the possibility of very rare but very lethal combinations of systemic operations.

The machines had worked fine for hundred of patients but then, often due to an unfortunate set of circumstances involving software and human errors, would deliver much higher doses than expected.

There were also several elements of human error that contributed. These machines are under a lot of software control to provide the right dose. What happens when a bug occurs? With the Therac 25, an unusual combination of key strokes resulted in lethal doses.

And all the time, the company told people that it was not possible for the machine to overdose people.It also appears likely that they told operators this even after the company was aware of overdosing accidents.

Has the software been independently reviewed and sustained rigorous beta-testing to make sure lethal bugs are gone? Every piece of complex software has bugs. If these machines malfunctioned, what would the largest possible dosage a person could receive?

And what about training? The Therac 25 would display a malfunction warning when it was improperly used and the operators would just override the warning. And these were medical technicians with a lot of training. What sort of training does the TSA have?

The final thing is to remember that the TSA scanners use Windows XP for their operating system. Are there bugs associated with that OS that could cause a problem? These machines may be networked. Can someone hack into the system and disrupt the exposure control?

I’d like to know more about the development of the software being used. In my opinion, this software should be opened up for all to examine. The safety of American travelers should not be in the hands of proprietary software.

Let me end with a quote from an article about the Therac-25 accidents (my bold):

With information for this article taken from publicly available documents, we present a detailed accident investigation of the factors involved in the overdoses and the attempts by the users, manufacturers, and the US and Canadian governments to deal with them. Our goal is to help others learn from this experience, not to criticize the equipment’s manufacturer or anyone else. The mistakes that were made are not unique to this manufacturer but are, unfortunately, fairly common in other safety-critical systems. As Frank Houston of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, “A significant amount of software for life-critical systems comes from small firms, especially in the medical device industry; firms that fit the profile of those resistant to or uninformed of the principles of either system safety or software engineering.”[2]

Furthermore, these problems are not limited to the medical industry. It is still a common belief that any good engineer can build software, regardless of whether he or she is trained in state-of-the-art software-engineering procedures. Many companies building safety-critical software are not using proper procedures from a software-engineering and safety-engineering perspective.

Most accidents are system accidents; that is, they stem from complex interactions between various components and activities. To attribute a single cause to an accident is usually a serious mistake. In this article, we hope to demonstrate the complex nature of accidents and the need to investigate all aspects of system development and operation to understand what has happened and to prevent future accidents.

The TSA scanners are part of a complex system comprising commercial entities and government bureaucracies overseeing underpaid workers operating potentially dangerous machines. I’d want a lot more information regarding many elements of this complex system than I have gotten so far.

Lots of things happen when new niches open up

Mammals Grew 1,000 Times Larger After the Demise of the Dinosaurs
[Via NSF News]

Researchers have demonstrated that the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago paved the way for mammals to get bigger, about a thousand times larger than they had been when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The study, released today in the journal Science, is the first to quantitatively document the patterns of body size of mammals after the existence of dinosaurs.

The research, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant, led …

[More]

Conditions that permit large herbivores and carnivores were still around. There were just no more dinosaurs that filled that niche. Now mammals could fill them.

Darwin used the metaphor of a piece of wood to represent the ecosystem. Wedges, representing animals, were driven into the wood. In a complex, diverse ecosystem, there was little room between wedges and all of the wood was occupied.

Following a mass extinction, the wood had many bare spots where there were no wedges. Other wedges – animals – could then move in and fill those spaces.

Why we have security theater

TSA’s Failure Based On The Myth Of Perfect Security
[Via Techdirt]

As the complaints against the TSA ratchet up, various people are finally starting to point out why the whole concept of security theater is a farce. The entire setup is based on the idea that you can have “perfect security.” But, if you wanted perfect security, the only way to do that is to not let anyone fly, ever. As James Fallows notes it doesn’t make much sense to “spend limitlessly toward the impossible end of reducing the risk to zero.” As he notes:

Every society accepts some risks as part of its overall social contract. People die when they drive cars, they die when they drink, they die from crime, they die when planes go down, they die on bikes. The only way to eliminate the risks would be to eliminate the activities — no driving, no drinking, no weapons of any kind, no planes or bikes. While risk/reward tradeoffs vary between, say, Sweden and China, no nation accepts the total social controls that would be necessary to eliminate risk altogether.

Yet when it comes to dealing with terrorism, politicians know that they will not be judged on the basis of an “acceptable level of risk.” They know that they can’t even use that term when discussing the issue. (“Senator Flaccid thinks it’s ‘acceptable’ for terrorists to blow up planes. On Election Day, show him that politicians who give in to terror are ‘unacceptable’ to us.”) And they know for certain that if — when — a plane blows up with Americans aboard, then cable news, their political opponents, Congressional investigators, and everyone else will hunt down any person who ever said that any security measure should be relaxed.

This is the political tragedy of “security theater.”

Along those lines, the Unqualified Offerings blog (via Julian Sanchez) does a nice job explaining how the incentives line up to create this ridiculous situation. Basically, he notes that a terrorist attack on an airplane will happen. Some day. No matter what we do to try to prevent it. But once that happens, the response is going to be obvious: those who pushed hard for more ridiculous security theater that wasn’t implemented will keep their jobs and retain power. Those who pushed for more reasonable solutions will be vilified.

[More]

And it will get worse. There is no sign that this one-way ratchet will ever be released. It simply leads to more power for some and weaker rights for the rest of us.

We have done much worse in our past when we were afraid.

We banned an entire group of people from our West coast to prevent attacks that never happened. 80,000 American citizens were simply banned. Carted off to internment camps for three years. The Supreme Court said that this exclusion was legal.

Ay some point in this forever war, we will see the call to ban certain people from American life. When The Siege first came out, I thought it was over the top and just wrong regarding internment of muslims or the torture of captives. Not any more. It could happen.

As long as we have people who are afraid and childishly want to be absolutely safe. And leaders who pander to that fear for their own aggrandizement.

Why the Peter Principle does not destroy organizations

I happened to run across a link to this paper – The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study.

The Peter Principle describes how people are promoted from one level to another, not based on how well they do at the new level but how they did at the old level. Thus, the conclusion would be that people would be promoted to their level of incompetence and then stop.

These researchers created a simulation to look at this. As their abstract states, “not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.”

But a reduction in a corporation’s efficiency would seem to be a large deterrent for success or survival. So the researchers ran other simulations to see if there was a successful strategy and they found one – random promotions.

A company where people are promoted randomly will be more efficient under more scenarios than one where people are promted based on previous competence. Promoting the most competent can be better under some circumstances but be horrendous under others. Promoting randomly provides the best average efficiency over all the scenarios.

This explains so much. all of us have seen how so many promotions seem to be random with little regard to actual competency.

Any organization that has been around for a while will have internalized this approach. It would have to in order to be competitive at all. People get promoted for random reasons that are then rationalized to be based on something reasonable.

Getting rid of the gender gap

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
[Via Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.

This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves. In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance. In the university’s physics course, men typically do better than women but Miyake’s study shows that this has nothing to do with innate ability. With nothing but his fifteen-minute exercise, performed twice at the beginning of the year, he virtually abolished the gender divide and allowed the female physicists to challenge their male peers.

The exercise is designed to affirm a person’s values, boosting their sense of self-worth and integrity, and reinforcing their belief in themselves. For people who suffer from negative stereotypes, this can make all the difference between success and failure.

Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields. On top of the challenging nature of their subject, they also have to deal with the dispiriting nature of the stereotype, and the fear that they might live up to it. This problem of “stereotype threat” is well known. It catches people in a vicious cycle, where poor performance leads to greater stress, which leads to poorer performance and even greater stress, and so on. Miyake’s exercise is designed to break that cycle.

[More]

A really interesting exercise. The data indicate it is quite an effective tool. And it seems pretty easy to implement. I’d like to see more attempts.

Adaptive Lighting Could Slash Electricity Bills

Adaptive Lighting Could Slash Electricity Bills
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

A business card-size device monitors available light and makes adjusts as needed.

According to

A new development from MIT could slash a home’s energy budget in half

. Researchers Matthew Aldrich and Nan Zhao built a system that’s able to monitor available light and adjust it automatically. The setup was made using LEDs, the most efficient form of lights that are commercially available. Unlike compact fluorescent bulbs, LEDs can be adjusted to any level of lighting intensity.
[More]

LED lighting lasts for perhaps 50,000 hours and can be dimmed, something compact fluorescents can not be. Now adding in a smart sensor and the lighting can be more efficiently distributed.

This could have a huge effect on energy usage, particularly in commercial settings. According to the original research <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/adaptive-lighting-1119.html>, they can also use multiple LEDs of different colors to modify the color balance depending on the need.

The researchers found that they could see massive reductions in light usage, up to 90 percent. Since LEDs themselves already have one of the best light output to watt used ratios, the overall reduction could be enormous.

And I loved this quote – my bold:

Jeffrey Cassis, the CEO of Philips Color Kinetics, a leading manufacturer of LED lights, says that the team doing this work “is world-class — they are working on a hard problem and a quality, cost-effective solution has great potential.” He says that it is important to use a systems approach, as this team is doing, looking at the whole lighting system rather than just individual components. But he adds that the cost of the finished system, as well as how easily it can be used to retrofit existing lighting systems, will be crucial factors in determining its adoption.

Animals Getting Fatter Too

by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden

Animals Getting Fatter Too
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

Before you worry too much about putting on those holiday pounds, consider this: We’re not the only species with weight issues.

[More]

This is a real intriguing observation that will open up some really interesting research. A lot of animals are gaining weight at rates not seen in past years. Even lab animals whose diet is controlled and well-known.

While there may be many different reasons, it is possible that there is a major one, perhaps the same one that has produced obesity in humans.

Perhaps it is due to endocrine disruptors such as Bisphenol A, something I wrote about before.Maybe it is something else.

So watch out as this observation is examined by many, many other researchers.

Math jokes. I smiled.

I found this at reddit. The submitter wrote As a Redditor, I *really* wanted to give this student credit. As a Math teacher, I just couldn’t…

The student should at least get extra credit.

Wow. The Macbook Air effect

Firms say that consumers want iPads, MacBooks for the holidays
[Via Infinite Loop]

According to the latest ChangeWave survey on consumer electronics spending, people plan to spend more during this year’s holiday shopping season than the past couple years. That increased spending will be particularly focused on computers and mobile gadgets, with one of the biggest beneficiaries being Apple. With demand for its notebooks and iPads at an all-time high, the company is predicted to have a “monster” holiday season this year.

Demand is strong for new laptops, with 10 percent of those surveyed planning to buy a new one in the next three months. That’s up slightly from last month, and more than a third of those shopping for a laptop—36 percent—plan to buy one made by Apple.

[More]

Nice and steady numbers until November 2010. What big difference happened? The Macbook Air was announced October 20.

And that one announcement increased laptop enthusiasm for Apple by 10%. Not too bad.

Nothing specia about Microsoft store

LA Times Feature on Microsoft’s Retail Stores
[Via Daring Fireball]

BmNathan Olivarez-Giles reporting for the Los Angeles Times:

John Smits of San Clemente bought a laptop at the Mission Viejo store, lured by a discount he found out about on Facebook. But he said the Microsoft Store lacked the exclusivity that draws consumers to the Apple Store.

“Everything sold here can be bought somewhere else, likely for a lower price,” Smits said. “There is no exclusive product here to pull me in. But at the Apple Store, there’s all kinds of stuff I can’t get anywhere else.”

Interesting consumer perspective. It gets to the heart of the problem with Microsoft’s copycat retail strategy: they’ve created Apple-like stores but have almost no Apple-like products of their own. Just Xbox.

[More]

If your store has nothing special in it, why will people visit. Simply because Apple has a store does not mean Microsoft has to have one.

Thing is, Apple had a store from the beginning that was like no other. You could play with the Apple hardware to your heart’s content, talk with knowledgeable people and walk out with hardware and software no available in other stores.

And Apple’s physical store went hand in hand with its online store. All geared to bring people in. What does MS have to bring people in?

I kind of visualize the MS store like the old one from Saturday Night Live – the Scotch Boutique.