I was at SES today and I randomly ended up having lunch with Ron Faith of Insightful. Ron works on this:

Text mining and fact discovery | Insightful InFact
In today’s data-driven world, the rising tide of information threatens to overwhelm our ability to make informed decisions. Faced with the exponential expansion of information and information sources-reports, research, emails, blogs, news stories, documents, and much more-how can anyone know with certainty that they have reviewed all available relevant information? Or uncovered the facts and relationships critical to sound decision-making?

It was a very interest conversation, covering topics such as cultural changes at Microsoft, to too much VC money chasing money (recurring meme!), to search algorithms that are not PageRank, to organic/dynamic taxonomies/ontologies. Very fascinating stuff. What struck me the most was how excited he was about the work that Insightful is doing. Indeed – this is a very interesting problem space and the strategies they are using have a very good moat. Check out the link above to learn more.

I’ll have to keep my eye out on this firm. If only I had a data mining tool to do so.

collision detection: Study: Positive-feedback-loop explains why beautiful people are paid more

Physical beauty produces a virtuous feedback loop. People constantly give you the sense that you’re better than everyone else, so you begin to believe it yourself — which just means that everyone is more likely to pick up on your radiant self-aura, and assess you even more highly. This, of course, falls squarely into the “yeah, I pretty much knew that already” camp of social-science research. But it’s always nice have new data confirming one’s grim opinion of humanity. It tracks nicely with recent findings that parents are more likely to be violent and neglectful with ugly children than with cute ones. Or the recent study finding that tall people make more than shorter ones — an extra $789 in annual pay per inch, in fact.

Pretty interesting. Perhaps instead of college for everyone, plastic surgery may be in order. Hm!

Also goes to show how buggy our human brains continue to be.

AA FA stop pax demands to see passport

Contrary to popular perception, embassies are still the sovereign territory of the country in which they are located, not of the country whose diplomatic mission is housed there. That is why an office building can host an embassy on some floors and, say, a bank on others.

The reason for the perception is that the Vienna Conventions mean that the local government foreswears the right to enter an embassy. However, it does not change sovereign territory.

Say, for example, that a baby is born in the U.S. Embassy to Ickystan. That child does not gain U.S. citizenship by virtue of birth in the U.S.- it was born in Ickystan.

I did not know that.

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog ? I’m certainly not James Bond…

This is my new 2006 Aston Martin V8 Vantage, in Mercury Silver with two-tone Obsidian Black and Chancellor Red leather interior. Here are some pics of it alongside my 2004 Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG which is now for sale:

Buyer should probably be in Dubai.

Amazon.com: The Logic of Failure: Books

D?rner identifies four habits of mind and characteristics of thought that account for the frequency of our failures:
1. The slowness of our thinking-We streamline the process of problem solving to save time and energy.
2. Our wish to feel confident and competent in our problem solving abilities-We try to repeat past successes.
3. Our inability to absorb quickly and retain large amounts of information-We prefer unmoving mental models, which cannot capture a dynamic, ever-changing process.
4. Our tendency to focus on immediately pressing problems-We ignore the problems our solutions will create.

Successful problem solving is so complex that there are no hard-and-fast rules that work all the time. The best take-away from the book (and this is my favorite quote): “An individual’s reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong, and one would do well to keep that probability in mind.” The book is 199 easy-to-read pages, and D?rner gives lots of interesting examples from lab tests illustrating people’s actual behavior in problem-solving situations.

This sounds pretty interesting. The human mind seems to have a lot of bugs! I hope to be able to find time to read this some day. Have you read it?

This plane suffered a crippling failure that was 1 in a billion. That’s bad luck.

The Crash of United Flight 232 by Capt. Al Haynes

Thank you, thank you very much. “Land” is a rather loose term for that. Anyone who has seen this video seems to have this one question in their mind, and that is: how did anyone survive an accident of that magnitude? I think there are five factors that contribute to the degree of success that we had at Sioux City: that is, luck, communications, preparation, execution, and cooperation. And I would like to talk about those five things today.

This is an amazing story of making the best out of a bad situation. Give it a read.

YouTube – Lazy Sunday – SNL Digital Short

Lazy Sunday – SNL Digital Short

Oh my… this video clip is hysterical.

Chronic-WHAT-cles of Narnia! Watch them drop those Hamiltons!

Totally SFW. Not SFB (Safe for Beverages)

Back by popular demand: this is a guide to conducting a
White Elephant Gift Exchange. It is divided into two parts, for the Host, and
for the Players. A flow chart follows to help document this process:

Host

Step 0: Even before the party, the host should
set expectations that this is a White Elephant Gift Exchange, that
use-challenged gifts should be expected, and to set a boundary for maximum
price.

Step 1: The host should give each guest a random
unique number. The usual pick a number from the bowl should suffice.

Step 2: The host should ensure that all the
presents for this White Elephant Gift Exchange are in one location.

Step 3: The game begins, and the host should call
the numbers sequentially.

Players

Players for this White Elephant Gift Exchange should follow this flow chart: