Monday, April 30, 2007

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


William Shakespeare

Thursday, April 26, 2007

quotes for the week

"I have taken all knowledge to be my province." (Sir Francis Bacon)

We all grumble about the weather, but" (dramatic pause) "--but--but nothing is done about it." (Mark Twain)

And mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. (Mark Twain)


Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
- quoted by Rudyard Kipling in From Sea to Shining Sea

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. Mark Twain

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. – Einstein

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else – Ogden Nash

Saturday, April 14, 2007

John Stuart Mill's canons form a systematic heuristic for debugging a problem


  1. Method of agreement: If a single common factor exists in all cases where a phenomenon occurs, then we can attribute the phenomenon to that factor.
  2. Method of difference: If one set of circumstances leads to a given phenomenon, and another set of circumstances does not, and the sets differ only in a single factor that is present in the first set but not in the second, then the phenomenon can be attributed to that factor.
  3. Method of agreement and difference: Also called simply the "joint method of agreement and difference", this principle simply represents the application of the methods of agreement and difference.
  4. Method of residues: If a range of factors are believed to cause a range of phenomena, and we have matched all the factors, except one, with all the phenomena, except one, then the remaining phenomenon can be attributed to the remaining factor: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." — Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  5. Method of concomitant variations: If across a range of circumstances leading to a phenomenon, some property of the phenomenon varies in tandem with some factor existing in the circumstances, then the phenomenon can be attributed to that factor. For instance, suppose that various samples of water, each containing both salt and lead, were found to be toxic. If the level of toxicity varied in tandem with the level of lead, one could attribute the toxicity to the presence of lead.

Friday, April 13, 2007

The Undercover Economist by Tim Halford

The Undercover Economist

Suggests three key categories to analyze by:

  • Scarcity Power (uniqueness and optionally)
  • Externalities
  • Imperfect or Asymmetrical information

Examples

· Scarcity Power- Cappuccino café – who makes a profit – mostly the landlord (and coffee company if it has a brand that enable coffee sales at a premium)

· Starbuck usings its different products to test and learn product elasticity

· Supermarket pricing

· Externalities like the cost of pollution not included in the cost of the gasoline or the cost of the roads. Congestion charges are good. But use it for the externalities directly and base it on the cost of these.


Increased Efficiency is when something improves for one person without getting any worse for any others.


Pricing is a critical tool for communicating information

Fairness is important but not an capitalist principle

Sales Taxes reduce business and people don’t buy who might have at the price less the sales tax and so no tax is raised also. Ideally taxes should not change behavior. Lump sum taxation often does this although is impractical to implement

Looking at Healthcare (UK vs US)

  • US govenerment sames more per person than UK government, but in the UK you get free healthcare. Obviously Bad. UK and US system have similar outcomes
  • Looking at the 3 categories

Lack of information about Quality has key impact on the market

  • Read the Lemons the second had car market

Conclusion

Overall very interesting book. On doing some Web research it appears that few of the thoughts and examples are new.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Tacit Knowledge

The tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified, but can be transmitted via training or gained through personal experience.

Egs - Making Bread, riding a bike, Bessemer process (perhaps), skiing........


Knowledge that is easy to communicate is called explicit knowledge. The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is known as codification or articulation this is only sometimes possible and sometimes only to a degree.

Tacit knowledge is perhaps the icing on the explicit knowledge, giving it meaning.