Author Archives: Chris

Weekly (Biweekly?) Digest – October 23, 2016

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Weekly Digest – October 9, 2016

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Thought for the Day – October 7, 2016

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Suppose a candidate for high office stood up and said “We face many difficult collective action problems. Here’s how I suggest we address them…” Suppose he was a Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.  He’d get looked at like he had three heads.  He’d get called a communist and worse.  Until there’s widespread acknowledgement that we face collective action problems we’re unlikely to make much progress towards resolving them. We’ve been subject to decades of propaganda that there’s no such thing as a collective action problem. Just getting to acknowledgement that there are is a major challenge.

Weekly Digest – October 2, 2016

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So what DO you do?

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So this morning in my LinkedIn feed there’s someone, a VC, going on about a company that just went public, Nutanix.  I don’t really get what the company does from his piece but I’m curious so I go to the “What We Do” section Nutanix’s of website.  It reads:

Nutanix delivers solutions that elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform natively converges compute, virtualization and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The world’s most advanced enterprise datacenters rely on Nutanix technology and solutions to power their most demanding workloads at any scale.

The last sentence seems straightforward enough and first is vague but I think I get the gist of it.  The middle though?  What the @#$% is that?   “Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Enterprise Datacenters” is what exactly?  How do I use it?  (Whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s worth a lot of money.)

Contrast Nutanix’s statement with Heilmeier’s Catechism for evaluating a research project:

  1. What are you trying to do? (Articulate your objectives quantitatively, using absolutely no jargon)
  2. How is it done today and what are the limits of current practice?
  3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
  4. Who cares? If it is successful, what difference will it make?
  5. How will you commercialize or transition the technology to the users?  What resources or strategic partners will you need?
  6. What are the risks in implementing your approach and how will you address them in your project?
  7. How much will it cost to reach your ultimate objective? How long will it take?
  8. What are the intermediate and final milestones that will demonstrate success?

If you’ve already got a product, as Nutanix does, then just speak to the first four.   Never mind research, the eight questions above are a good frame for just about anything you set out to do.

Thought for Debate Night

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Food for thought from Matt Taibbi, Stop Whining About ‘False Balance’:

News media outlets are increasingly coming under fire for the sin of “false balance” or “false equivalency.” The New York Times, one of the outlets most often accused of this offense, recently defined the term:

“The practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.”

The crime of The Times, according to some of its readers, has been its coverage of the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation stories. As one Times reader put it, “There’s too much at stake in this election for the media to stoke the belief that Hillary’s mistakes (which she has definitely made) are even close to par with Trump’s.”

When Times public editor Liz Spayd essentially told readers that her paper was just doing its job and that readers should just suck it up and deal, she was hit with a torrent of criticism.

A pack of pundits – one might call them the false-equivalency priesthood – lashed out through pieces like “Why the Media Is Botching the Election,” “Media Should Stop Treating Trump and Clinton as Equals,” “Does the New York Times Have a False Balance Problem?” and countless others.

It’s getting ridiculous. Two quick thoughts:

1) The people complaining about “false balance” usually seem confident in having discovered the truth of things for themselves, despite the media’s supposed incompetence. They’re quite sure of whom to vote for and why. Their complaints are really about the impact that “false balance” coverage might have on other, lesser humans, with weaker minds than theirs. Which is not just snobbish, but laughably snobbish. So, shut up.

2) One of the main reasons the news media has been dumbed down over the years is because audiences have consistently rejected smart, responsible journalism in favor of clickbait stupidities like “Five Things You Didn’t Know About John McCain’s Penis” and “Woman Strips Naked in Front of Police Officers. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” The Bachelor and Toddlers and Tiaras crush Frontline. And people wonder why Donald Trump gets a lot of coverage?

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