smritiweb.com

Meetings make us dumber, study shows

People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.

See full article on MSNBC.

Don’t spend too much effort on incoming links

Problogger has an interesting article on the dangers of spending too much time on trying to build incoming links to your website. He points out:

Give it some attention by all means - but keep things in balance and realize that of all the factors that make up a successful blog - incoming links is at best midway through the list.

In general, the danger is that if you spend too much time and effort on incoming links you might end up neglecting your content.

I managed to increase the numbers of links to my blogs over time. In the process here’s what else happened:

• My posting frequency dropped
• Readers became frustrated with my content (which was obviously linkbait)
• I lost some of my passion for blogging and my topic
• I sold out content wise (started picking topics to write about that didn’t really add value to my blog)
• I started watching my metrics more than the news in my industry
• Frustration crept into my blogging when the links didn’t come
• My Page Rank increased - but my actual SERPs (the position of my blog in search engines) dropped

See full article.

The Indian Economy Blog » A Brand New Model?

The Indian Economy Blog is reporting on very interesting observation:

not once in world history has a large-sized country gone into rapid industrialization mode, while also guaranteeing universal franchise or a vote for all of its citizens. When you think about it, this claim is probably true. Forget China, think about the U.S., Soviet Union, the U.K., France, Germany etc. Not one of those countries actually industrialized while everyone had the vote.

To me, this appears more to be coincidence than anything else. But there’s no denying the fact that India is one of the largest, growing economy in the developing world that has a working democracy.

All numbers are interesting

This is a great site which lists the “interesting” properties of a whole bunch of number from 0 to 9999. Here are the first few entries:
0 is the additive identity.
1 is the multiplicative identity.
2 is the only even prime.
3 is the number of spatial dimensions we live in.
4 is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps.
5 is the number of Platonic solids.
6 is the smallest perfect number.
7 is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that is not constructible by straightedge and compass.
8 is the largest cube in the Fibonacci sequence.
9 is the maximum number of cubes that are needed to sum to any positive integer.
10 is the base of our number system.
11 is the largest known multiplicative persistence.

Another (better?) study on disk reliability?

Slashdot has a new article which says:

Google’s wasn’t the best storage paper at FAST ‘07.
Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from
100,000 disk drives got the ‘Best Paper’ award. Bianca Schroeder, of
CMU’s Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about
disks such as vendor MTBF validity, ‘consumer’ vs. ‘enterprise’ drive
reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions.
StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper’s key points.

See full article and interesting comments.

Google releases paper on disk reliability

Slashdot is reporting on a just published a paper out of Google on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population.

Excerpts:
Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: ‘Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive’s self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.’

See full article.

How to Earn a Six Figure Income from Blogging in Two Easy Steps (Engtech)

Harold is a Robot #3 - How to Earn a Six Figure Income From Blogging in Two Easy Steps

Virtualization for BPOs?

LiveOps is a very interesting start-up which is essentially virtualizing call centers. This is the description of LiveOps from Techcrunch:

Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers. Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. I like seeing the web make work more interesting and perhaps services like this will help decrease the drudgery of call-center work. At the very least, it will likely make the business more efficient.

Which web-directory should I submit my site to

This site gives a listing of the most important web-directories. They are ranked according to their influence - in terms of ability to send in-bound traffic to your site.

You probably want to submit your website to these directories. Start at the top of the list and work your way down…

Bruce Eckel: Why Java lost, AJAX won and Flash will ultimately take over the web

Bruce Eckel has an in-depth article on the language/platform of choice for RIAs (rich internet applications). Although Java (with applets) was arguably the first-mover in this space, it lost out because of a bunch of issues (difficult to install, parts not well thought out, etc) which he has dissected. He contrasts this with JavaScript and AJAX which is clearly the winner right now.

However, he goes on to say that AJAX is essentially a hack that has reached its limits and is unlikely to go much further. It will run out of steam and the technology likely to take over is Flash (with Flex as the tool for creating rich Flash apps).

Very interesting reading even if you don’t agree with him.