Netflix tests everything. They're very proud that they A/B test interactions, offerings, pricing, everything. It's almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success.
Except they didn't test the model of renting DVDs by mail for a monthly fee.
And they didn't test the model of having an innovative corporate culture.
And they didn't test the idea of betting the company on a switch to online delivery.
The three biggest assets of the company weren't tested, because they couldn't be.
Sure, go ahead and test what's testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.
Phi Beta Iota: If your Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E) process is non-existent or replete with flagrant fraud, ignore this Blog Wisdom–both testing and leaps of faith require absolute integrity to be all they can be.
EXTRACT: As in the recent so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran, there was clearly lots wrong with Tunisia before Julian Assange ever got hold of the diplomatic cables. Rather, WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistle-blower site.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a good time to bring up the Davies J-Curve again. Wikileaks is a precipitant of revolution; the preconditions exist in most places outside the Nordic region and a few other special countries. The preconditions assuredly exist in the USA but in our view, the precipitant is most likely to be some really outrageous US Government action, such as federalizing all state and local police forces and then start trying to confiscate personal weapons. However, if the two party system continues to think that changing its “tone” matters, while it does nothing about the substance of poverty, economy, education, health and so on, then we will see a mix of widespread poverty and apathy with pockets of extreme violence and random attacks on elected officials and perhaps uniformed law enforcement professionals. America is, in our view, very volatile right now. 2011-2012 are not going to be subject to the usual pre-election “damping down.” The situation is now “out of control.” Nothing less than a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of the larger public will do, if we are to avoid a cascade of socio-economic and ideo-cultural uprisings and individual “random” acts of violence in the next two years.
by Charles Ornstein , Tracy Weber and Dan Nguyen
ProPublica, Dec. 22, 2010, 1:36 p.m.
Today we’ve added another $13 million in payments to our Dollars for Docs database of drug-company spending on doctors and other health professionals. That brings the total to nearly $295 million.
ProPublica launched Dollars for Docs in October, creating the most accessible accounting yet of pharmaceutical payments to doctors for speaking, consulting and other duties. It includes disclosures from Eli Lilly & Co., AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Pfizer and Cephalon for various periods of 2009 and 2010.
The new payments were made by Glaxo and Ortho-McNeil, a division of Johnson & Johnson, in the third quarter of this year. Other Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries have yet to update spending totals beyond the first quarter.
Interestingly, Glaxo’s spending on speaking and consulting dropped markedly in the third quarter compared to its average in prior quarters. In the past, the company paid large amounts to doctors to promote its diabetes drug Avandia. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration severely restricted the drug’s use in September amid concerns about its heart attack risks.
The Obama administration's $78 billion cut to US defense spending is a mere “pin-prick” to a behemoth military-industrial complex that must drastically shrink for the good of the republic, a former Reagan administration budget director recently told Raw Story.
. . . . . . .
The ‘Ponzi scheme' of ‘artificial prosperity'
Stockman, who described himself as a libertarian during a recent interview with Reason.tv, told Raw Story that the economy got into this mess because of the public and private sectors' addiction to “guns and butter Keynesianism,” an economic policy that amounts to a Ponzi scheme that has ballooned since 1990.
“If we see what's going on carefully, we've reached the final unmasking of the Keynesian illusion, that Keynesianism is really nothing but borrowing, stealing from the future to induce consumption today,” he said. “There are no multipliers. Every one of these programs we've had from ‘cash for clunkers' to housing purchase credits have disappeared as soon as they expired and simple shifted activities in time by a few months.”
Stockman explained that before 1980, it took about $1.50 of new borrowing — public or private — to generate $1 of GDP growth. By the mid-1990s, it was $2.50 or $3 of borrowing for a $1 of GDP growth. By 2007, before the big collapse and meltdown finally came, $7 of public and private debt was added to the national balance sheet in order to get $1 of GDP growth.
“When you get to the point of $7 of borrowing to get $1 of income, you're obviously on an unsustainable path and pretty close to hitting the wall, which more or less we have,” he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Drawing down the military-industrial complex will immediately produce two highly undesireable masses of unrest: pissed off unemployed veterans who own a gun and know how to use it; and pissed off pasty-faced short fat bald white guys with no marketable skills who either own a gun or know where to buy one. We agree that the military budget needs to be cut by $200 billion or more–however, it must be done strategically, with clear-cut plan for both assuring every veteran of a job, with priority to amputees, and for redirecting our energies into homeland development before we spent another dollar on foreign development. We've blown it for nearly three-quarters of a century. This is now about strategic design–do it, or lose what's left of the Republic.
A new feature built into Google Translate for Android, Conversation Mode is a little rough around the edges, but it's basically your own personal Babel Fish. It does what Wordlens does but in real-time speech, translating English and Spanish.
Phi Beta Iota: A new book is about to come out on Google's last few years' investment in R&D. Rumor has it–we've heard the book summarized but not read the book itself–they have very little to show for the money in comparison with Chinese and other options that are emerging. One down, 182 to go…
Among the first security issues of the year is the release of information about China’s military capabilities and the recent release of the U.S. defense budget request, which is not coincidental . Each year, when key decisions are made about the coming annual DOD budget, we see media reports about China’s new potential and physical military ambitions and weapons programs. They arise from statements by U.S. military commanders, anonymous Pentagon sources and conservative think tank pundits. The intent is to create a “boogeyman,” to depict the Chinese as nine feet tall and America as a “Lilliputian.”
I remember this same bizarre scenario took place during the Cold War. At that time, I had a bit of responsibility from time to time looking at these issues and especially the bureaucratic warfare between the military establishment and the intelligence community analysts who had to provide assessments about how far the Soviets were ahead of America and who in reality were behind us. The interagency fights were often fierce with billions of dollars at stake along with real command over new resources, programs and especially planes and ships – whether needed or not. There was the prospect of a nice rich job in the defense industry if your program won out.
Today, the kabuki is not much different but the reality of today’s security challenges is dramatically different in substantive ways.
In a recent trip to China, I discovered something of the direction of the national policy of that country towards the development of the Internet. In a speech in Wuxi, the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao spoke of the drive to build the “internet of things” and provided the interesting equation:
Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth
The parallels between this statement of policy and the GeoWeb are striking. The GeoWeb has been viewed from a vareity of perspectives, a few of these are:
As the integration of all business processes that deal with the physical world, i.e. that deal with our understanding of, and action in/on, the physical world.
As a Web of interconnected documents that describe the physical world.
As a Web of systems by which we control and manage our actions and interact with the physical world.
As a planetary accounting system that helps us all understand the “state of things” at the local, regional, and global level – whether that be the state of arctic polar bear habitat, or that of crowding in the city of Mumbai.
As a sort of Digital Nervous System for the planet that alerts us to changes in the state of our world.
Thursday, January 13, 2011 – 6:17 PM
