Murder Data

The Murder Accountability Project is worth a look. It’s a reminder that gathering good data is hard, but once you have the data you can do interesting things – like identify serial killings. The site says 220,000 unsolved homicides in the US since 1980. A big number, but not big data – doesn’t always take […]

Odds and Ends To Think About

Got this in morning email from Khan Academy. Not sure if I agree that we all can learn anything, but I love the video anyway because the best lesson to learn is that learning takes time, effort, and stumbles. I watch my own kids struggle with this, and think how long it took me to […]

Detecting Fake Reviews

I saw this write up about Cornell coming up with a way to detect fake online reviews with about 90% accuracy. It seems like a simpler problem than detecting spam, though I don’t know if that is true or not. It’s worth opening up the link to see a simple test, two reviews, read them […]

Looking Back at 2010

I’m writing this the day before Xmas, trying to finish up a bunch of odd tasks before the holiday weekend begins. As I look back at my goals and experiences for the year, it’s mixed emotions for me. I ended up sacrificing some goals to make others happen, a decision which seemed right then and […]

Guest Editorial on SSC – Selling Used Cars/Experience Requires Repetition

I’ve been experimenting with stories in the editorial, experiences of my own that are amusing and have some kind of interesting lesson embedded. Stories can be interesting, uplifting, even tiresome, not sure at all where the boundary is yet, or if it can even be defined that way. The good part about stories (and life […]

Rules to Live By: Be Worthy of Trust

I struggled with the title for this one. One of the thoughts I had was that I believe in being a man of my word. If I can say I’m going to do something, I most likely will, and if I shake hands on it, for me that’s as binding as any contract I’ll ever […]

Rules to Live By – The Intro

Most of us have some general rules we live by, and I’ve often thought it would be a lot easier to get along with people if we had them printed and shared with everyone we met! I think we could do worse than to just live by the Golden Rule, but in real life it’s […]

Pride of Idea Ownership

I’ve had this on my list to write about for a while, just didn’t have a great example until this week. It took me a while to learn, but a key lesson for me is that I’ve never had an idea that wasn’t made better by involving other people that wanted to make the idea […]