Disqus - Latest Comments for trond

Re: Cat hater seeks cat ban

Trond — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:14:26 -0000

Just failing to replace cats will have little effect. Cats are more than capable of living in the wild, and do so throughout New Zealand.

As for the damage they occur, the Stephen's Island Wren makes for a sad, if spectacular story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... is more a case of excluding cats from certain areas and dealing with wild cats. For a much more balanced approach to understanding the scope of the problem and controlling cat predation, there's a LandCare research article worth a look. http://www.envirolink.govt....

Re: 3D High Frame Rate film

Trond — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:50:47 -0000

Yeah, I know they were meant to move quickly, but it was something about their movements when they weren't running that looked jerky and odd. It may have been intentional (as rabbits on speed would probably look jerky and odd), but it seemed out of place at the time. We'll see how I feel when I watch it again :)

Re: Agenda 21

Trond — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 06:21:30 -0000

Love the art droid..

Re: Academic Misconduct on the Rise

Trond — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:15:21 -0000

Seems that while I was writing this, I was missing out on a town hall style meeting on the peer review process in the CHI community..

http://chi2012.acm.org/prog...

Re: On Patronage as a Funding Model for Creative Works

Trond — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:29:47 -0000

Are you talking about wanting instant gratification, or wanting no uncertainty in what you buy?

The former is a problem, but one that is, I think, surmountable. Depending on the purchaser, the desire for instant gratification can sometimes be sated with 'contributor gifts'. That is, give now and get something from the back-catalogue, or maybe something that's already made. I've come to realize that for me, it's the having of the thing that satisfies my need for instant gratification, not the the actual consumption of the thing. So, I often buy books that I don't get around to reading for quite some time. Funding projects where I know I'll get a copy in the mail at the some point when I'm done is about the same thing - it's not on my bookshelf, but it's already mine in a sense.

The latter is harder to overcome - some people like to trial everything first, whereas others like risks. More realistically, though, I think it depends on the type of good. I'm willing to take risks on authors provided they've been credentialed in certain ways (that is, won awards, or been praised by someone whose taste I trust), but maybe not on clothes (I'd never buy clothes without trying them on first). I think most people are willing to take risks in some things, just not everything.

As for the problem of scammers, there's definitely legal and fiscal structures that can address the problem, by disbursing money over time, contingent on results, or maybe allowing contributors to sue if a certain set of pre-stated criteria are not met. The other key thing, I think, is reputation - patronage is heavily based on reputation. I'll give money to people who've created before, but new creators might need to do prior work on their own or on a smaller scale before they can be trusted with significant sums of money.

Re: Another test post..

Trond — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:13:39 -0000

Test

Re: New Zealand Elections – FPP vs MMP in graphs

Trond — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:59:13 -0000

Effectively, yeah. It's basically just the difference between the votes received by each party and the seats awarded - effectively, it's the % of the voting electorate whose votes were effectively ignored.

My assertion about Supplementary Member being worse than FPP are currently unproven - it seems that they could be worse, but it's not clear how frequent that would be. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to do some modeling using the results of elections 1996-2008, and we'll see what we get..

Re: New Zealand Elections – FPP vs MMP in graphs

Trond — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:41:56 -0000

OK - interesting. I'll do one up of the Gallagher Index tomorrow or the next day. It's not hard to calculate.

I think I'll keep the percentage error ones up, though, as they're a little more intuitive, which I think is valuable. If they're inaccurate or misleading, I'm keen to be corrected.

I'm going to follow some of the references on the wikipedia page for interest..

Re: How should designers best take advantage of the current design shortage?

Trond — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:33:54 -0000

Cool. Looking forward to it.

What about for individuals? Do you think consulting / contracting is a good approach for individuals engaged in design? It seems like a good way to go if you're in a situation where you're working with a company that doesn't want to pay for a fulltime staff of several designers over the long term, but could use a team of people during the ideation phase of the project. A sort of hybrid approach, I guess.

You mention having skin in the game - I completely agree with that, so maybe another approach for designers might be to make precisely that argument - instead of arguing for money, how about arguing for equity? It seems like that would be a particularly good idea for designers in the small company situation where a full design team is impractical.

Re: How should designers best take advantage of the current design shortage?

Trond — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:40:03 -0000

I'm very interested to hear how the Product Design Guild works out - it sounds like it'd be fun to try, though I can think of a few practical issues that might be hard to surmount.. You're going to report on how your prototype turns out, right?

As for your argument above, I'm curious to hear your take on designers using this not as an opportunity to improve the design ecosystem in their current company or to simply make more money, but to use the flexibility implied by the current market to shift companies (that is, rewarding ones who value design more), or start consulting and/or private design house companies to do design work by contract. It seems that shifting companies rewards companies who 'get' design much more reliably than fighting internal politics to achieve the same end, but I think it probably depends on the individual situations. More interesting to me, though, is using it as an opportunity to build one's own company doing design on a consulting or contractual basis. What do you think are the pros and cons of this approach? Does this serve the individual designers, do you think, and what do you think the implications are for the design ecosystem as you describe it?

Keen to hear more..

Re: Facebook Places & Keeping up with the Joneses

Trond — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:39:19 -0000

I see this in reverse - it gives me a nice cover for being nerdy and paranoid about privacy. I can claim that I'm not using it in order to maintain some sort of mystery about my social activities - that I'm not using it to provide myself with the social cover you mention at the beginning. That seems a much more accessible as an explanation than trying to argue privacy policy with people who think I'm just being quaint.

My friends already know I don't go out that often - maybe this works for people who are faking it and telegraphing that fact, but not if you've not already been bothering to fake it.

Re: Why “Why women don’t understand friendship”?

Trond — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:18:42 -0000

Well, I definitely applaud the re-examination of heresies. But, really, that one's not new, nor was there anything much in there that's not already been hashed out in depth by men's rights activists on the one hand, and alpha male dating advisors on the other.

Sorry, that _was_ a bad argument. It'd be interesting to hear a more nuanced and detailed discussion on the topic, but that wasn't it. Sure, 'heresies must be aired out', but if that's the best showing there is for this particular one, then self-editing is in order. Next time, pare away the easy criticisms first before showing it to people, and you might get more discussion of the sort you're looking for.

Re: Women Don’t Understand Friendship

Trond — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:26:04 -0000

I'll pick the low hanging fruit.

So, you say women can't have friendships, only acquaintances. You don't substantiate the difference well, nor do you provide evidence for this claim.

You argue women don't have an adequate definition of friendship, without clearly offering your own definition, or providing any evidence suggesting it's anything other that your own arbitrary claim.

You make some dramatic claims about male and female behaviour (sabotage, dating behavior) that firstly, don't seem at all universal, and secondly, seem particularly misogynistic. Certainly, if I knew for certain who you were, I'd now have a strong motivation for sabotaging your attempts to interact with women I know.

Overall, you're just ranting. There's nothing here that counts as evidence beyond personal anecdote, and obviously, that doesn't cut it. You make a bunch of categorical claims, never once providing evidence for them. Your last sentence, for example - I can think of 20 men who'd probably disagree.

Basically, you're just making a lot of this shit up. Sounds like you have a very poor opinion of women, either because you've had no success, or you've had too much success in manipulative ways.

This reads to me like "I'm special. I have a special relationship with people I like. Women aren't special, so they can't have special relationships, just a pale approximation of them".

Hang - I your open guest policy just lost you 80-90% of your blog's credibility.

Re: On Procrastination, the iPhone, and Grinding.be

Trond — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:48:42 -0000

Yeah, I do. It is a bad thing.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to have money to do the things you want, but greed's a step beyond that. It's accumulation for accumulation's sake, with no care for effects on others. The meme that greed is virtuous is peculiarly western and wrong, IMGO. It's important, though, to note that I'm talking about the extreme, not the moderate sort of desire for money. Capitalism works wonderfully as a means for distributing wealth efficiently, but it fails when a greedy minority manipulate the vulnerabilities of the technological and sociological context in which it operates in order to concentrate that wealth in their own hands.

As for the designers motivated by money and other people supported by instituations derived from incentivized innovation, I think you missed my point in the first paragraph about there being a balance. Economic incentives definitely spur innovation, and that is a good thing, for the reasons you list, and more. I'm not talking about that - I'm talking about abusive corporatism, which is distinctly different from capitalism. Incidentally, an open marketplace is far more competitive and offers far more diverse opportunities than a closed one, so if you agree that innovation is a good thing, you're either automatically agreeing with the open position or doubting one of the premisses.

It sounds like you're misreading me as a hippie of some kind, which I'm definitely not :)

Re: System Dynamics Conf. – VI – The Rest

Trond — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:38:04 -0000

Nope, just a grad student..

Re: Usability Bitchings: Chrome & Ctrl+K

Trond — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:28:44 -0000

It's probably because CTRL-K is the normal search key combo on Firefox. You're looking for CTRL-L, which takes you to the location bar, highlights the current URL, and lets you type in a new one. Or, as someone else said, ALT-D

I actually kinda like that they have the two different key combos, despite using only a single text entry box.

Re: System Dynamics Conf. – I – Overview

Trond — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:07:20 -0000

You're quite welcome. Out of curiosity, how did you find my blog?

Re: Writing exchange

Trond — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:39:32 -0000

Yeah, pretty much - coherent and compelling fashion.

I'm actually thinking of coding up a web tool for this sort of thing. To make it easier to coordinate, get people's comments, and so on.

Will keep you posted..

Re: Writing exchange

Trond — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:00:18 -0000

Both, I guess. Not fiction so much, but more reflective / non-fiction type stuff. Academic writing, journalistic writing, and so on.

I've got a few people who've signed up to mutually critique, though, which is great..

Re: Life Lesson – Don’t screw up the little things

Trond — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:07:22 -0000

I guess I'm just talking about money as a thing that, when wasted, makes me kick myself and feel stupid. So, it's just another possible cost of small screwups..

Re: Political response..

Trond — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:44:34 -0000

NB - I've been away from the net for a week, so apologies for the slow approvals.. I'll definitely try to send National a letter about this (though I'm not so sure on what stage things are at at the moment)..

Re: I’m Back

Trond — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:14:36 -0000

Congratulations!

Re: Running videos in the background on an iPhone

Trond — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:25:46 -0000

I use a little piece of software called WinFF for this - you just queue up a bunch of video files in it, and it rapidly spits out a bunch of MP3s. Since it tends to take me a while to get from downloading something to looking at it, I tend to do them in batches, which makes it nice and practical..

I've never been good at listening to things during game playing, though - though I guess it depends on the type of game I'm playing..

Re: Nov 10th (day 28): The crisis in economics

Trond — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:38:03 -0000

Interesting - it seems trivially obvious, now having read your post, that the Kuhnian idea of changing scientific paradigms is applicable to economics like this, but I've never really thought of it that way.

I wonder - economics, because it's so widely practiced and laced into our political lives, seems to have more of a 'folk' or social component than other sciences. I'm not sure that this will affect paradigm shift in academic economics, but I wonder how long it will take for main-stream uptake of those changing ideas.. That is, how much longer will folk economists take to change, and what effect does that delay have?

Either way, thought provoking.

Re: Oct 30th (day 18): Further thoughts on the existance of god

Trond — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:27:15 -0000

"Atheists don’t have an argumentation problem, they have a communication problem."

Agreed.

But, I'm not convinced that improved communication would actually solve the problem, partly for the reason you outline in your last paragraph - argument itself (you know, marshaling evidence & logic) is the thing that's troubling for a lot of people - it leaves out the privileged role they afford their own emotions (not to mention they find it insulting and condescending). It's not that atheists fail to argue well (though some do), or even communicate well (though some do), but that arguing atheists fail to affect those people who aren't willing to allow argument to undermine their identity and emotional beliefs.

That willingness to question oneself and accept that one's own beliefs and perceptions might be wrong isn't universal, and might even be detrimental to some people's happiness. And, that willingness can't be changed by argument (because of itself) , so it seems to me that, before atheistic arguments can work, that person must make the first few steps on their own.

So, I don't usually bother arguing atheism with true believers, but only with doubters, atheists, and philosophers who are interested - otherwise I'm just irritating people. That said, I do take a guilty pleasure in asking difficult questions when opportunity knocks..

As regards your previous post - you framed your point as an argument of proof, which it wasn't. The logic geek in me seethes every time I leave such things alone. It seemed a bit weird to me that you were claiming it as such, but, well, you said it anyway :)

It seems to me that there's no practical difference between philosophical agnostics (who assign a probability of almost zero to God), and soft atheists (who accept the overwhelming evidence as tantamount to proof). It's like calculus - my belief in god(s) tends towards zero, yours is zero - a difference only worth talking about with mathematicians or philosophers. Given that, then, it amuses me that some atheists spend a lot of time bashing agnostics, and, possibly vice versa..