Tuesday, March 24, 2015

My friend just told me that I do not have leadership qualities. How can I know if I have them or not?



First, it is my belief that the vast majority of people can be good leaders.  So you likely can too. 

But second, if you don't think you have leadership qualities, then you probably don't.  To be a leader, people must follow you.  And your very first follower must be yourself.  You must believe in yourself so intensely that others will suspend gravity to be in your corner. 

Dave Carvajal mentioned that humility is underrated and he's right.  But not at the expense of not believing intensely in yourself.  Humility is about understanding your strengths and weaknesses.  But if you don't appreciate at least some of your strengths, it will be extremely hard for others to do so.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Why are so many people content with just earning a salary and working 9-6 their entire adult life?




I worked the same job for 38 years.  Got to do something different all the time.   Had lots of vacation, sick leave , holidays and home every night.  Not a huge salary but enough to have a nice home, car and truck, no debt and a great retirement.  Been retired 11 years and get to do anything I want or go anywhere.
I've had the same wife for 50 years.  Our health is very good.
Now how could I possibly have improved on that?

Friday, March 20, 2015

Does Wikipedia use artificial intelligence to generate any of its articles?



There are bots that write articles, but usually they are using data from a database to fill in templates. For example, rambot created 30,000 articles for US towns and cities based on US census data. Here's an example from Palo Alto, CA:

The 2010 United States Census reported that Palo Alto had a population of 64,403. The population density was 2,497.5 people per square mile (964.3/km²). The racial makeup of Palo Alto was 41,359 (64.2%) White, 17,461 (27.1%) Asian, 1,197 (1.9%) African American, 121 (0.2%) Native American, 142 (0.2%) Pacific Islander, 1,426 (2.2%) from other races, and 2,697 (4.2%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 3,974 persons (6.2%).

Most people wouldn't call this AI, and I don't think AI is used to generate any articles. It is used to help maintain articles, though. For example, User:ClueBot NG uses machine learning to detect and automatically revert vandalism. It's trained on a dataset of edits that were reverted by human editors.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Should I wear a seat belt when driving?



This is my car following an accident where I was hit by another driver which caused my car to roll 3 times and finally skid to a halt on its roof. I was wearing my seat belt and while it bruised my chest pretty badly, I'm convinced that it kept me from being ejected from the vehicle while it was rolling. If that had happened, I would have been thrown out into the middle of heavy interstate traffic and likely killed by either hitting the ground or being run over by another vehicle.

I always wore my seat belt before the accident and I continue to do so afterwards. It likely saved my life.

Why don't people get upset by clearly deceptive marketing strategies like set a price $9.99 instead of $10?


There's this urban legend that companies price things as £9.99 to trick people into thinking that they are £9.

Big retailers do an awful lot of research about this, not just practical (what works) but psychological (why.)

When I was a senior manager at one of Europe's biggest retailers, I had a briefing about this. (I was in IT, not Store Operations.)

The "£9.99 makes people think it's £9" thing is an urban legend that seems to have been invented by people OUTSIDE the industry who speculated on why we price this way.

It's more subtle than that.

Pricing at a non-round number has one measurable effect. It reduces complaints about "why don't you price it lower" by ENOUGH to outweighs the extra hassle of keeping small change, AND the decrease in margin.

If you price at £10, a surprising number of people think "this should be £8.50, you're rounding up the price."

If you price at £9.99, everyone thinks "that's £10", but it seems to stop them speculating on how much lower a non-rounded price would be!

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Warm Milk


In a convent in Ireland , the 98-year-old Mother Superior lay dying. The
nuns gathered around her bed trying to make her last journey comfortable.

They tried giving her warm milk to drink but she refused it.
One of the nuns took the glass back to the kitchen. Then, remembering a
bottle of Irish Whiskey that had been received as a gift the previous
Christmas, she opened it and poured a generous amount into the warm milk.

Back at Mother Superior's bed, they held the glass to her lips. The frail
nun drank a little, then a little more and before they knew it, she had
finished the whole glass down to the last drop.

As her eyes brightened, the nuns thought it would be a good opportunity to
have one last talk with their spiritual leader...

"Mother," the nuns asked earnestly,
"Please give us some of your wisdom before you leave us."

She raised herself up in bed on one elbow,
looked at them and said: "

 
(scroll down)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
"DON'T SELL THAT COW."