I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees. Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Musing, Silly, tagged alliance, gaming, guild, management, morale, multiplayer, team-building, World of Warcraft, WoW on April 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Wouldn’t it be a good morale-boosting strategy for corporations to encourage the development of in-company gaming groups? For example, could mean formal all-company-member World of Warcraft guilds, Team Fortress sides split up by department, or giant free-for-alls in any old multiplayer game.
Certainly seems more entertaining and lower-hassle than the old-fashioned notion of corporate softball leagues. [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, tagged autos, cars, driving, estimation, Geography, mapping, Maps, mashup, meteorology, Quantification, weather on March 28, 2008 | No Comments »
The weather affects how long it takes to travel from one place to the next, but I’m not aware of any mapping application that incorporates this fact. From what I can tell from a brief overview, the standard mapping applications seem to rely on relatively static estimations of expected speed limits and traffic for a [...]
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They say that history is written by the victors. Furthermore, I’d like to add that in the business world, history ends up being written primarily about the victors. For every 10 new books about Google coming out, you’d be hard pressed to find a single memorial to Altavista. To me, this seems to be a [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, Society & Politics, tagged Business, citizen, democracy, law, legal, Money, parse, Semantic Web, transparency on March 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Combing through legal documents can be a pain. General business contracts, policy documents, laws, you name it, they’re a pain. Lawyers in the crowd, you should rightly feel good about your skill with these arcane tools of modern society.
I’d like to make a simple system for speed-anotating legal documents to highlight the key points for [...]
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Three inspiring semi-quotes. “People hear what they see.” “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” “The person makes the message.”
Why don’t presentations involve more people, then? Right now, even the better speakers I see, those who use Powerpoint/Keynote to deliver critical pointers and information visualizations without overwhelming the audience with glitz, rarely [...]
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I love popcorn as much as the next guy, but about nine centimeters into a three-liter bucket of buttery kernels, the magic starts to disappear. The boredom comes from one of two paradoxical feelings — an increased tolerance to the popcorn’s flavor or an overdose on the simple components of the flavor. Whether you need [...]
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Posted in Business, tagged Business, Cats, Dogs, Hotel, Pets on March 5, 2008 | No Comments »
How about a hotel chain that caters specifically to pet lovers? It could do this in two ways — first by providing accommodations for pets traveling with their owners, and second by maintaining a “staff” of friendly animals who can provide temporary companionship for pet-less human travelers.
To do this properly, the hotel would have to [...]
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Certain types of infrasound have been blamed for inducing chilling unease, hallucinations, and general discomfort among people. Some experts have even gone so far as to stick infrasound with the blame for ghost-sightings and mass hysteria. Some of this is probably hype, but given the broad number of possible sources of infrasound, especially in urban [...]
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As mentioned in an earlier post, I think that having some sort of personal inventory application would be the bee’s knees. One way to make such software more applicable to “real life” would be to introduce information feedback from offline purchases. Virtual receipts for real products.
This would be relevant any for purchase [...]
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Would it be possible to get a pseudo-randomly generated patent application through the U.S. Patent System? How about a bunch of patents with the same parameters, but different random seeds? I’m sure that the success of such an experiment would depend closely on the initial parameters chosen.
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