Hat Tip to Ken Huber

"If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati, because it's always twenty years behind the times."

- Mark Twain

Dealing Drugs

Clark informs us that in 1989 there were 585 coffee houses in America. Now there are more than 24,000. Fifty-seven percent of these are what Clark calls “mom and pops.” “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the surest way to boost sales at your mom-and-pop cafe may be to have a Starbucks move in next door.”

-- from the NYT

Good Quote from "The Humane Interface"

Interface designers have tried various approaches to accommodate the premise that users can be separated into beginners and experts. Because this premise is false, the approaches have failed. Adaptive systems that shift automatically from beginner mode to expert mode when they judge that your competence has reached a certain level are a good example. If you are using such a system in beginner mode and it suddenly shifts into expert mode, you will find yourself on unfamiliar ground, at least with regard to a portion of the system. A system that shifts piecemeal, feature by feature, is no better. It will feel unstable and unsettling, because the habits that you were developing as a novice yesterday become useless when the feature shifts into expert mode today.

One web-based program I studied promoted you to expert status after you had used it once successfully. The program put you back into beginner mode when you had not used it for six months. Any such arbitrary schedule may not accord with a user's personal rate of learning and memory decay. If a program that promoted you switches to beginner mode after too short a time, you will feel annoyed at being forced to use the tedious beginner method. If the program does not switch back to beginner mode in time, you will be faced with features that you have forgotten how to use.

-- Jef Raskin

Como chupar menos a hablando en español

A point of Spanglish grammar possibly lost on my fellow Cincinnatians - when Spanish-speakers in the U.S. are making up new Spanish words from English ones, they add the suffix -ear to make verbs, not the more common -ar.

I am interested in constructing a detailed new language, "Cincinnati Spanish". You simply construct a grammatical English sentence and translate the words one for one into Spanish. You are still obligated to conjugate verbs, and whenever possible you should use extremely simple sentences.

Linguistic disputes in Cincinnati Spanish will be resolved by Señor Teets.

Stranger Than Fiction

A chat bot that convinces you to give it your credit card number.

Oh the promise of artificial intelligence. But I would be fascinated to see its logs.

Those Who Sacrifice Bandwith For Security Deserve Neither

Interesting distributed interview of Bruce Schneier, computer security expert extraordinaire.

In particular, he doesn't encrypt his home wireless connection, and you shouldn't either.

(Stupid Blogger thinks I have misspelled 'extraordinaire'. Why do I feel like I can do hash table lookup better than a hash table? Also kind of cool that we adopt the foreign adjective placement along with the word itself.)

How to raise smart kids

According to Scientific American.

Perhaps the article is really more on how to raise successful kids rather than how to raise smart ones.

It's hard for me to agree, since I always prided myself on acing classes with little work, and this sort of attitude seems to be the enemy of this article's authors.

Here's how they describe the two types of children.

"The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change."

"The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else."

I don't really think childrens' efforts are determined by their theory of intelligence. Rather than an accurate understanding of why other people are smart, it seems more useful to have, say, a stubborn insistence on being right all the time and winning everything.

;-)

But it's an interesting article.