Taylor Ansley (dot) com
June 2010
46 posts
Review: Apple iPad →
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Mental Floss: How to Win Friends and Inoculate People: The Navy’s Strategy for Saving the World →
mentalfloss.com
Really interesting piece on the Navy’s hospital ships. The scale of these things is amazing:
The Navy’s two largest hospital ships, the Comfort and the Mercy, are 900-ft.-long modified oil tankers with triage bays, surgical wards, and 1,000 patient beds. To give you an idea of how big that is, each ship is nearly on par with Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in scale. In fact, during its “Operation Continuing Promise” mission to Latin America in 2008 the Comfort treated more than 100,000 patients.
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Teaching poor children effectively is difficult. But at least one effective model seems to exist. It requires human capital resources that most schools don’t have and it’s not entirely clear how much of those resources can be obtained. But it’s genuinely not clear[…]
How big can this [KIPP model] go at the end of the day? I have no idea. But there’s no reason to respond to this track record with pre-emptive pessimism.
” —Matt Yglesias: Scaling KIPP Up
The immediate reaction to promising models for education reform that require extraordinary commitments from teachers, parents, and students (like KIPP) is “Yeah, but can it scale? Probably not.”
Yglesias makes a crucial point here: who knows? And with evidence that KIPP really is improving outcomes for students, why not give it a shot?
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Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups:
A. “Repetitive now”
B. “Bored now”
C. “Urgent now”
The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.
The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.
The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.
” —InformationWeek: Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy
Via Kottke.
ReadWriteWeb: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from OK Go →
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All great points, and an excuse to watch the OK Go videos in the name of “business planning.”
Lifehacker: YourNextRead Tells You What Book You Should Read Next →
lifehacker.com
I perused this site a bit this afternoon:
Tell YourNextRead what book you just finished—and enjoyed!—and it will generate a web of eight related books. You can click on any of the books to learn more about it which will, in turn, generate a new web that’s based on that book.
It shows some promise, and I like the visual “suggestion web” sort of interface leading you from one book to another. What I really miss, however, is integration of my GoodReads ratings. How powerful would that be—the Pandora of book selection, based on what I’ve liked and what I’ve hated. YourNextRead already has very limited GoodReads integration, but here’s hoping they bulk that up big time.
Derek Sivers: How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen →
sivers.org
Here’s a great, quick, step-by-step for hiring technical help to execute on an idea. Based on this premise:
Do you have an idea for a website, online business, or application, but need a programmer to turn that idea into reality? Many of my friends have been in the same position, so here’s my best advice..
“Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.”
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Atul Gawande’s comencement address to the Stanford School of Medicine | The New Yorker
Hat tip to Ezra Klein.
Collateral Search and the Decline of Intention →
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John Battelle has famously described search engines and their collection of search queries as a database of intentions:
This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the…
WebUrbanist: To Go, Please: 12 Coolest Food Carts and Mobile Eateries →
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It’s hard not to love the growing popularity of food carts. Here’s a sampling of 12 from around the country (and Canada!).
