As I have studied voting methods over the years, I have come to favor cardinal (or evaluative) methods, where voters give each candidate a grade on some grading scale.
Justin Fox (Bloomberg View) tells us that economists favor property taxes (specifically land taxes). There are two main reasons for this.
First, a tax tends to distort activity, causing people to avoid the thing being taxed. An income tax causes people to work less. A sales tax causes people to …
read moreI've recently realized that my digital life is only as secure as my Google account. Every account I have can be reset through Gmail. And many websites now implement two-factor authentication by sending me a text message or calling on the phone, which goes through Google Voice.
I love Google …
read moreDear Graduate,
If you're here, you're probably wondering why I sent you money with PayPal when you don't even have a PayPal account.
The answer is that it's my way of encouraging you to get one. This way my graduation gift to you is not just money, but also the …
read moreLet's talk about backups. Hardly anyone has adequate backup of their important files. Even IT professionals, who know better than anyone that backup is important and who should know how to do it, don't backup their systems appropriately.
A related, but somewhat different, problem is synchronizing your important files across …
read moreIn part 1, I gave an overview of the prisoners' dilemma problem and how it applies to the internet sales tax issue that the US is facing.
Conditional Cooperation
One way to solve the prisoners' dilemma problem is by introducing conditional cooperation. (I will be using the terms cooperating and …
read moreI've created a preliminary video for my Knight-Mozilla final project:
The elaboration that I mentioned at the end of the video, well, I'm still working on that. That is not in this blog post, but will come at a later date. What I want to do today, since this week's …
read moreThis week was week two of the Knight Mozilla learning lab. The lectures were by Christian Heilmann and John Resig.
John Resig is the programmer who created jQuery. There was lots of good advice in his lecture, even for people who aren't creating a programming API.
In the field of game theory, where we study strategic behavior, the prisoners' dilemma is a classic problem. It goes like this: Imagine you and a friend committed a crime together. You are both caught, put in separate rooms, and given the chance to confess and testify against each other …
read moreAs an idea person, sometimes I find it difficult to take that first step and start implementing something I have envisioned. This week, as part of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, I attended two online lectures which gave me some new motivation for getting started and some concrete advice for the …
read moreSince I posted yesterday that Google+ sharing is not revolutionary, I've seen several other comments on the internet expressing similar ideas. The main problem is that Google+ still doesn't give us a way to broadcast publicly to anyone who is interested without also spamming our circles, which include people we …
read moreMany people are crowing about how Google+ has revolutionized social communication and sharing. But I don't see it.
One thing Google+ does well: privacy
Google+ does allow you to keep something private if you want to. Something like "I'm so glad to be on vacation this week," is a very …
read moreEver since cameras were invented, photographers have been asked, "Can you get me a copy of that picture you're taking?" In the days of film photography, there was the rare picture-taker who was kind enough (and mindful enough) to make extra copies of his prints and distribute them, but usually …
read moreSometimes I worry that all my emails are stored on Google's servers and if they ever lost them, then I would be hurting in a bad way. And it would only be my own fault because I had never backed them up anywhere.
So I wrote a simple Python script …
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