http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/ Entrepreneurship, science, technology. en http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/feedlogo.gif http://pbwiki.com/ PBwiki 1.3.8 support@pbwiki.com http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Adapt+Technologies%27+Board+of+Directors email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Adapt Technologies' Board of Directors]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:53:14 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Adapt+Technologies%27+Board+of+Directors email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Adapt Technologies' Board of Directors]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:52:40 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Adapt+Technologies%27+Board+of+Directors email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Adapt Technologies' Board of Directors]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:51:41 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Adapt+Technologies%27+Board+of+Directors email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Adapt Technologies' Board of Directors Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
--Martin Luther King
SamJadallah, BillEricson, RandyStrahan, JasonGreen, CraigJohnson, Paul Schulz, Tom Mitchell, FelixRacca, RobertFisher, Michael Harris (CEO), and myself (AlexBäcker). I'd be happy to provide references on my experience as an entrepreneur with each of them; you may contact me at alexcaltech.edu .
]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:50:17 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/The+Expectations+Game email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited The Expectations Game --George Bernard Shaw
The cover of the Business section of today's L.A. Times boasts an article on the game played by studio executives and filmmakers to play down expectations on their films' opening weekend grosses, given that their success is judged not by whether their films make money or not, and not on whether filmgoers like their movie or not, but rather on whether the opening weekend grosses beat financial forecasts or not. This causes films with much larger grosses than others to be considered 'failures' while lower-performing ones are considered successes just because analysts' predictions were lower than reality.
is that the analyst is that, in these, the role of the analyst is played by the same actor as that of the filmmaker. Every quarter, CEOs across America try to beat the profit and revenue plans that, uhm, they themselves had set for the company. What ensues is rather predictable: CEOs dramatically underplay expectations and dramatically overemphasize risks. One consequence]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:32:20 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Entrepreneurship email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Entrepreneurship Zero to 1 billion in 4 years or less
On the valuation of private company securities
It helps to get engineers who can hold a conversation
I come from a family of scientists and entrepreneurs. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Hayum Moos, was Albert Einstein's great-great-grandfather. My grandfather, Ernst Moos, had to quit medical school in Berlin due to Nazi oppression and fled to Argentina, where he started two small companies as a penniless Jewish refugee. My uncle RonBaecker is the founder of several companies, and Professor of Computer Science, Bell Universities Laboratories Chair in Human-Computer Interaction, and founder and Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto, was named a Pioneer of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH, has been elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and has been given the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. My mother, Silvia Moos, is the founder of Centralab, Argentina's mo]]> Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:24:10 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy Although the voting system has complications that are not present in the WWW, in some sense to believe that this would work better than our current democracy is no more revolutionary than believing that Google's PageRank works better at finding good webpages than a simple link count.
Obviously, both of these proposals would be easier to implement with electronic voting.
of voters. voters. One place to start for the local voting principle is to test whether approval ratings are higher at end of office for very small electorates (e.g. towns with less than 500 people) than in large ones. But there might be all sorts of reasons why smaller towns might be more or less content, so that's not a great measurement.
Any charitable foundation willing to put the money to put this to a test? Surely improving on our centuries-old system of elections is worth an attempt...
--Alex Backer
]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:34:02 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy Obviously, both of these proposals would be easier to implement with electronic voting.
How would one test whether the proposed systems work better than our current flavor of democracy? One way is to implement them in some scale, say as an application on a social network, compute the candidates that the system would elect for a set of elections, and then compare the approval ratings at the end of office for candidates elected who would also have been elected by the new system, with ratings for candidates elected who would also have been elected through ordinary democracy by the same subset of voters.
an attempt at improving... attempt...
--Alex Backer
The above ideas are excerpted from a conversation between Alex Backer and Eric Slimko on 7/31/2008.
]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:32:03 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy The second proposal is less certain to work. It is based on the principle that people have better local knowledge than global knowledge. In other words, they know the people they interact with better than those they don't. In this system, called the local representative system, each person casts two votes: one for a candidate in the election, and another for his representative. The representative cannot be a candidate, but needs to be someone the voter knows personally. Although this seems hard to enforce today, digital social networks are becoming pervasive enough that there will be soon enough digital information to find out who the N individuals most connected to any person are. The network of votes for representatives is used to compute the PageRank of each representative. The vote for a candidate by each representative is then weighed by the representative's PageRank, which is a measure of the representative's representativeness. The idea here is that, while people may be ignorant about candidates, they ]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:14:31 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy The second proposal is less certain to work. It is based on the principle that people have better local knowledge than global knowledge. In other words, they know the people they interact with better than those they don't. In this system, called the local representative system, each person casts two votes: one for a candidate in the election, and another for his representative. The representative cannot be a candidate, but needs to be someone the voter knows personally. Although this seems hard to enforce today, digital social networks are becoming pervasive enough that there will be soon enough digital information to find out who the N individuals most connected to any person are. The network of votes for representatives is used to compute the PageRank of each representative. The vote for a candidate by each representative is then weighed by the representative's PageRank, which is a measure of the representative's representativeness. The idea here is that, while people may be ignorant about candidates, they ]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:05:57 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy EverybodyLet us start from the premise that every person's desires are equally important. Yet everybody knows the flavors of democracy implemented in the last few centuries can produce terrible outcomes. You For that, you don't need to agree that the election of Bush was terrible for that; it a less than optimal outcome --something that the majority of the American public now seems to believe. It suffices to believe that the election of the Nazi party to become the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) was a bad idea. The harder question is, is there any better system?
To address that, we need to understand the shortcomings of democracy. Let us start from the premise that every person's desires are equally important to everyone else's. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming is that people who are ignorant about the consequences of voting for any given candidate, and who thus vote against their own inter]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:03:42 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited A Better Democracy How would one test whether the proposed systems work better than our current flavor of democracy? One way is to implement them in some scale, say as an application on a social network, compute the candidates that the system would elect for a set of elections, and then compare the approval ratings at the end of office for candidates elected who would also have been elected by the new system, with ratings for candidates elected who would also have been elected through ordinary democracy by the same subset of voters.
Any charitable foundation willing to put the money to put this to a test? Surely improving on our centuries-old system of elections is worth an attempt at improving...
--Alex Backer
The above ideas are excerpted from a conversation between Alex Backer and Eric Slimko on 7/31/2008.
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]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:57:41 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/A+Better+Democracy email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. added A Better Democracy Everybody knows democracy can produce terrible outcomes. You don\'t need to agree that the election of Bush was terrible for that; it suffices to believe that the election of the Nazi party to become the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) was a bad idea. The harder question is, is there any better system?

To address that, we need to understand the shortcomings of democracy. Let us start from the premise that every person\'s desires are equally important to everyone else\'s. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming is that people who are ignorant about the consequences of voting for any given candidate, and who thus vote against their own interests, get to vote too, and their vote counts just as much as that of those who know exactly what they are getting into.

A better system needs to ferret out the ignorance in the system. Below, I propose two alternatives to our current system that may do the job.

The first proposal squeezes the ignorance out of the system by administering a set of multiple]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:57:17 +0000 add http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Proposals+for+Government email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Proposals for Government Dollar Democracy
Using Free Markets To Provide Public Goods, or the original version, Self-organizing Government
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The Honest Billing Law
Election reform
]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:52:38 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/It+helps+to+get+engineers+who+can+hold+a+conversation email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited It helps to get engineers who can hold a conversation I asked what's asked: "Wat's the hard part your company does? The matching algorithm? Why do companies hire your company to serve their ads?" At that point he went nonlinear. He said 'This is annoying. I gotta be somewhere. And I told you i can't tell you what I'm doing'. I said, 'I told you I don't want to know anything secret, and was asking about the public product to see if my company should become a customer of yours. But if you gotta be somewhere, you should have started there. Because it's annoying to have you say it's annoying for me to chat w/you.' End of that conversation.
I understand people who spend their days in front of a computer (a sin I am guilty of) don't get to hone their conversational skills much, but is some common courtesy too much to ask from an engineer these days?
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]]> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:13:13 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/How+to+convert+MXF+files+from+a+P2+card+to+AVI+using+AVID email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. added How to convert MXF files from a P2 card to AVI using AVID If you ever try to convert MXF files from the P2 card to AVI or something usable, here are instructions using AVID:

To convert .MXF files into AVI:
1. Create a directory called Avid Mediafiles in the root directory of a drive.
2. Create an MXF directory within it.
3. Create a directory called 1 within it.
4. Move or copy the .MXF video and audio files into it.
5. Open AVID.
6. File-->Mount All.
7. File --> Load media database.
8. Tools --> Media tool
(9. Tools --> Timeline)
If bin is not open, open a bin from the project window.
Drag filename from Media Tool to Bin.
Drag files from bin to timeline.
Select timeline.
File --> Export
Options
Select WMV format (or format desired).
Save.
OK to export.



]]> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:10:18 +0000 add http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Technology email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Technology How to convert MXF files from a P2 card to AVI using AVID
Steve Jobs got one UI wrong
In the age of self-updating software, Microsoft leads the way into the Stone Age
]]> Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:09:46 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Steve+Jobs+got+one+UI+wrong email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. edited Steve Jobs got one UI wrong is known as a genius when it comes to user interfaces. interfaces --never mind TellingaPersonfromTrash:AMacintoshComputer'sPsychologicalProblem. But with the iPhone, he got a couple of things wrong:
1st, there is no search functionality. functionality for emails.
2nd, if you go into Settings --> Sound, there is an option called Silent. That says Vibrate. Turns out the switch has nothing to do with vibrating. If you turn that off, it rings. You turn it on, it does not. Maybe relabel it "Ring"?
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]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:19:41 +0000 mod http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com/Steve+Jobs+got+one+UI+wrong email.hidden@example.com (Alex Backer, Ph.D.) Alex Backer, Ph.D. added Steve Jobs got one UI wrong Steve Jobs is a genius when it comes to user interfaces. But with the iPhone, he got a couple of things wrong:

1st, there is no search functionality.
2nd, if you go into Settings --> Sound, there is an option called Silent. That says Vibrate. Turns out the switch has nothing to do with vibrating. If you turn that off, it rings. You turn it on, it does not. Maybe relabel it \"Ring\"?



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