I just ran across an interesting new site: Ask500People. The idea is extremely simple: ask a question and up to 500 people will answer it. You can also vote which questions should appear on their homepage.
Here’s a question I just created myself:
If you can’t see the poll, you can also vote here.
For anyone who knows Shannon Hughes, she appeared in the most recent episode of NOVA along with her research group at Princeton. Her group’s research has been in using digital image analysis techniques to detect art forgeries (really interesting stuff, actually!), and NOVA highlighted their work in helping the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam differentiate between real and fake paintings.
Shannon is featured as unnamed female grad-student in Ingrid Daubechies’ group on the Princeton team (starting about 3/4 of the way through the video). For those of you familiar with Shannon’s “unique” laugh, you can hear it near the very end of the video if you listen carefully.
Billionaire corporate curmudgeon Carl Icahn has started his very own blog called The Icahn Report. Icahn is best known for his money making strategy of buying up shares of a struggling company, forcing his way onto the board, and then demanding changes that suit him before he dumps his shares at a premium. Most recently he has been trying to salvage the Microsoft/Yahoo! implosion by threatening Yahoo! with all kinds of holy hell if they don’t sell.
His blog is certainly full of some good rants. Alternatively, if you’re interested in Carl in some of his funnier moments, Silicon Alley Insider has some videos of him telling humorous stories from his past days. They’re kind of long, but not bad for 72-year-old-corporate-raider-humor.
On the other hand, if you’re interested in Carl at his most terrifying, you can read here about how he made enormous sums of money by shredding TWA into tiny bits and then toying with the floundering remnants of the airline for nearly another decade.
I love classic photos, and I’m a huge fan of the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. So imagine my joy when I found this Flickr set: Classics in Lego. I think my favorite is the recreation of Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier (original here).
One Random Link for everyone: PSDTuts is a remarkable site filled with Photoshop tutorials. Each tutorial is very readable and helps you go from start to finish in creating a professional looking graphic. The site is designed for people who have intermediate Photoshop expertise (can create layers, choose colors, find tools, adjust settings, use filters, etc), but who need help creating more interesting effects or designs. If you’ve ever asked “how did they draw that?” this is the place to find out. Good example: creating Transparent Glass Lettering.
So rather than make this all political with my opinions and such, I thought I would just throw out some good links on the upcoming Democratic primaries in Texas. As big a state as this is, it tends to stay under the national radar when it’s not having its vast ranch lands cleared by a vacationing George Bush. Yet when something does happen, the inevitable deluge of articles begins trying to reason out just how this state manages to exist when everything is so…big.
The New York Times is first up with its article titled Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle - an article that’s amusing enough simply for betraying Northerners’ utter confusion about the Lone Star State. The rest of the world seems to be coming to terms with what locals have known for quite some time: Texas is weird. Quote:
In a 1968 essay, Larry McMurtry wrote that Texas was divided but “not yet fragmented to a degree that would raise difficulties for the novelist.” Forty years later, you could sympathize with the writer, but you should feel really sorry for the presidential candidate, trying to make sense of a state as large as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina combined, and probably even more diverse.
Next up is a great article from everyone’s favorite computer-scientist-turned-pundit election website, Electoral-Vote.com. In the news posting from today, Mr. Tanenbaum makes a few good points on the Texas primary system and how absolutely confusing it really is. He starts by writing that because of the way Texas divides its delegates for the voting portion of its election, it’s unlikely either candidate will pick up a substantial lead. He thinks we will see at most a 15 delegate spread.
Beyond his concerns about the delegate spread, he also thinks that very few people will actually attend the caucus portion of the election. I think his point about the caucuses is the most interesting, in large part because so few Texans understand their own primary system. This may have much to do with the fact that Texas has voted mostly Republican for so long that people have simply forgotten about how the Democratic primaries work. Most likely, however, only the die-hard voters will attend the caucuses on the evening of the 4th. For those who do attend, 90% of them will be attending for the first and almost certainly the last time for quite a few elections to come.
Last up is an article from the Houston Chronicle titled In Democratic primary, expect a GOP turnout that confirms what a lot of people from around here already know but what for some reason seems to be a complete surprise to people elsewhere: Republicans really hate Hillary Clinton. What’s more, a good chunk of them may be voting for Obama in the Democratic primary simply because they absolutely don’t want Hillary to even possibly think about winning the election. How many Republicans? As many as 15 percent of them! That’s an awful lot of Republican voters, and a good chunk of them will vote for McCain in November.
Two random links for your enjoyment:
Right after writing my own article about legalese standing in the way of good marketing, Seth Godin writes on the same subject with a post titled After the Lawyers. The conclusion is exactly the same: align your legal needs with your messaging. The two should align and never conflict. Every lawyer should learn this and every manager should know this.
“Because you’ve only used like $75 worth of Photoshop and this is going to open you up to like $250 worth of Photoshop.”
Sit back, take a Prozac, and let someone with more problems than you show you why you suck at Photoshop.
This is probably not 100% safe for work. Or marriages.
Here’s Part 1:
I haven’t done many random links lately, but I did want to highlight trendwatching.com. The site features a mix of paid and free content about various trends in the consumer and technology sectors, including a selection of free briefings. Their most recent article on the Expectation Economy is a great guide to how consumers are more frequently embracing brands that better fulfill all of their expectations while scorning ones that are merely adequate. Specifically:
“The EXPECTATION ECONOMY is an economy inhabited by experienced, well-informed consumers from Canada to South Korea who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every good, service and experience on offer.
Their expectations are based on years of self-training in hyperconsumption, and on the biblical flood of new-style, readily available information sources, curators and BS filters. Which all help them track down and expect not just basic standards of quality, but the ‘best of the best’.”
Also, check out their article on tips for spotting trends yourself.
Outstanding website!
