Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 03
So... what does it means when I look in my junkmail and see an email from my CEO?
Does it mean that the junk filter is monitoring my performance, and that I'm not opening e-mails from CEOs? Or maybe just from this one? I know that the data-driven world obliterates the org-chart. But isn't this taking it a little too far?
In case you're wondering, I've given our CEO an esteemed place on my white list. So, when that big promotion comes through, I'll get the message.
Posted by: Heather Green on July 02
After I got back from Paris, I couldn't stop talking about how much I LOVE Velib', the low-cost municipal bike system in Paris.
(This is definitely off topic, but I see Fred Wilson also has fallen in love and it reminded me of a story I read recently. I'm cross posting something I did on BW's Green Business)
Well, Velib' is about to celebrate its first anniversary in Paris with a little parade on the Champs Elysees ahead of the Tour de France bike riders. Parisians love it, a survey found that 98% were pleased with the program.
It's a massive success from a popularity standpoint, but it also sounds like the system is expensive to keep up. Le Figaro reports that in Paris, 3,000 bikes have been stolen and nearly as many put out of service, or around 30% of the entire number of bikes. Meantime, to make the bikes sturdier, JCDecaux, the company running the program, has had to make adjustments like adding a thicker bike lock and adding more soldering for the basket. The result is that the cost per bike jumped to 2,500 Euros from 1,000.
Le Figaro also reports that in Lyon, which first initiated the bike program in France, the JCDecaux, wants to renegotiate its contract, which it says is losing 3 million Euros annually.
Nothing in the story about how this is affecting the Parisian program, which links together a contract allowing JCDecaux to run billboards in the city.
Still, as more countries and cities start looking to Velib' as a way to handle emissions and traffic (car traffic fell 5% in Paris after the launch of Velib'), it's the kind of things to keep track of.
Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 01
Sandia National Lab chief technology officer Richard Stulen just visited. A few highlights:
* Network analysts at Sandia studied the patterns of the e-mails in the last months of Enron Corp. They located a betting pool within the company. (Makes sense, considering that Enron's entire business was based on gambling, both mathematical and legal.)
* Sandia researchers working with GM have designed a next-gen engine that could cut fuel consumption in half. It will take years before GM has those engines in its cars and trucks, though. He estimates that hydrogen engines are 15-20 years away, and adds: "We'd like someone to get aggressive with plug-in hybrid diesels."
* Proctor & Gamble uses supercomputers to maximize diaper manufacturing. They have to simulate the racing lines of diapers, moving them ever faster while tweaking them to change the aerodynamics--and keep the diapers from taking flight.
Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 30
Just getting around to reading Chris Anderson's End of Science story in Wired. It's certainly provocative and worth reading, as are posts arguing his thesis, by Matthew Hurst and John Timmer.
One argument is whether mathematicians and computer scientists burrowing through massive databases can bypass starting assumptions and models, and simply use statistical methods to unearth breakthroughs. Lots of researchers I talk to believe this. Jack Einhorn, whom I quoted in a math cover story, predicted that the next Jonas Salk would be a mathematician.
The counterargument is that statistical researchers will be inundated by such quantities of data that they'll be hard pressed to detect meaningful patterns in oceans of so-called noise. But there's even disagreement on this. While researching my book (which is all about data, but more about how it's used to understand us), I talked to William Pulleyblank, a longtime research chief at IBM. His point is that the traditional garbage-in, garbage-out thinking is obsolete. Why? If you spend time sorting out the garbage, you'll move too slowly and the "clean" data you study will be out-of-date.
Posted by: Heather Green on June 27
We decode RIM's earnings and discusses the promise of wind power and Yahoo's reorganization.
