en-us http://www.intensedebate.com/users/94023 Comments by sigmawaite http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/08/entrepreneurial-density.html#IDComment94993492 "I’m curious if anyone out there has a real way to calculate this." Sure: Your equation is just ED = ((entrepreneurial_emps + students) / adults) where presumably 'ED' abbreviates 'entrepreneurial density'. So you are just trying to estimate a 'population proportion'. So, get something that is approximately a 'simple random sample' of the denominator and ask them one or a few questions to see if they are in numerator. It's an exercise in Stat 101 to say how big a sample you need to get a 'confidence interval' on your estimate as small as you want. If getting the sample is really expensive, then might want to do that exercise. Else, ballpark, ask 500 people and call the result exact or close enough. For how to get a simple random or representative sample in Boulder and how to ask the question, ask some marketing or political polling firms. Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:01:59 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/08/entrepreneurial-density.html#IDComment94993492 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/07/cecelia-feld-exhibiting-at-splash-on-7710-at-the-st-julien.html#IDComment85153746 I already know I like your mom's paintings! Saint Julien? With "food and wine"? Uh, that would be the Haut Médoc with Saint Julien, Saint Estèphe, Pauillac, and Margaux? Ah, heck: I know that the Haut Médoc is tasty, but I prefer Volney, Pommard, Beaune, Corton, Nuit Saint Georges, Echezeaux, Romanée-Conti, La Tâche, Richebourg, Clos de Vougeot, Morey Saint Denis, ..., Chambertin! You may remember Nuit Saint Georges and Meursault from the first 'The Parent Trap'! At this point, of those, I have one Corton waiting for my Series A to close and a Meursault with too much dust on it. Ah, should replace the old Meursault with a Montrachet! Uh, don't tell the customers that Mâcon Blanc is Chardonnay! Naw, should write a few more Web pages! Tue, 6 Jul 2010 16:41:53 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/07/cecelia-feld-exhibiting-at-splash-on-7710-at-the-st-julien.html#IDComment85153746 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/the-power-of-why.html#IDComment75052882 For what he observed, there are better explanations just using well known 'causes': Cause: As in E. Fromm, people are highly motivated to join groups. The people who lined up to buy the latest shiny Apple product and the 250,000 who went to the Mall and heard King's speech were joining groups. The "I believe" part made the groups sound authentic. The groups can be from the lunch table in 'Mean Girls' to the dinner table in 'Titanic' and political organizations up to cults. From a group, a person seeks membership, acceptance, praise, and approval. In some groups people in the group can reinforce their status via gossip. With a shiny, new Apple product, can assert membership in the Apple cult and use the product for more gossip! Related is the common motivation to join groups to save X for X one of the whales, the oceans, the rivers, some bird, some fish, the rain forests, the poor schools, the poor children, the planet. So, maybe a company can assert that they "believe" that their 'inspired goal' is saving X. A Web 2.0 company can ask if their company wants to be seen as leading a group of some kind, up to maybe a cult: Some people are eager to join such groups, and some people are eager not to. For that decision, measure twice and saw once. So, apparently according to Sinek, the CEO needs to be obsessed not with just the product but also with building a cult about the product! So we have one more entry on the long list of candidates for the number one thing the CEO must focus on! We might test Sinek's idea: What is the "I believe" part of the success of Intel, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Toyota, BMW, Exxon, Wal-Mart, FedEx, HP, Dell, Rupert Murdoch, McDonald's, the Ford F-150, Pratt and Whitney, Boeing, Applied Materials? Wed, 12 May 2010 12:36:17 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/the-power-of-why.html#IDComment75052882 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/the-bullshit-of-government-statistics.html#IDComment73980874 Brad, SUCH language, bovine scatology, indeed! Yup, again, now that you've described your mother's accomplishments and shown her picture, no one's going to blame your language on her! My language would be much worse than yours. But, of course! Every business needs a 'business model, and the media has BS! They REALLY like it, and that's what they do: Everything at the 4th grade level except sex at the 10th grade level except anything having to do with numbers at the 2nd grade level or lower. Some of the Fed stats may actually be okay, but the newsies are grotesquely incompetent at reporting them and don't know and don't care. So, for "The first clause says 'U. S. Economy Adds 290,000 Jobs in April.' This means to me that a bunch of people found new jobs in April. A bunch. Yay! Good economy." Well the clause more likely means that in April the number of people hired was H and the number of people fired was F and H - F = 290,000. So, if F > 0, and I have to believe it is much greater than 0, then nicely H is much greater than 290,000. So, the number of people who "found jobs" is greater than 290,000. But any such details are way, WAY beyond the 2nd grade and, hence, also the newsies. In particular they just will NOT give definitions of their terms or quantities. And we don't know how the measurements are done. We don't get graphs of the quantities over time or in comparison with related quantities. Net, we get BS. The failings of the media go on and on. Yup, a nice solution is possible. And the solution solves this problem and many more. Working on it. Need to type in some more Web pages! Sat, 8 May 2010 03:20:21 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/the-bullshit-of-government-statistics.html#IDComment73980874 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/give-your-vcs-assignments.html#IDComment73113146 Brad, you blew it: Showing your mother's accomplishments and picture, no one's going to blame her! For what a CEO is supposed to do, let's see the ten top tasks, each of which should be at least 90% of the CEO's job: (10) At the board meeting, have a good answer to the question, "You have $1.5 million in the bank. Now what are you going to do to make money?" (9) "When you're out of money, you're out of business" -- make sure don't run out of money. (8) Do well hiring people smarter than he is. (7) Do well at the work unique to the company and also at 'the vision thing' for the future. (6) Lead and motivate the workers. (5) Do well at CEO Job One -- fund raising. (4) ABC -- always be selling. (3) Prepare the board meeting info stack and get it to the board members at least a week before the meeting. (2) Be obsessed with the product. And for the number one task of the CEO: (1) Give the board members assignments and give grades at the next board meeting. Gee, how 'bout just make money? Is it enough to make, say, a lot of money? For the assignments, how 'bout the board members helping with important work the board meeting was interrupting, uh, making money, e.g., selling ads, or if not that, then helping with the product, e.g., writing software? Uh, do board members write software? A server running SQL Server quit: Repair it, get the data current, get it back online? Shop for dirt cheap commercial space with electric power from two grids and 10 GbE? Plug together servers from stacks of motherboards, processors, memory sticks, disk drives, power supplies, CD readers, and mid-tower cases? Can't write software? Okay: How 'bout holding board meetings via Twitter? Lacking that, how 'bout board meetings starting at about 11 PM in a private dining room in the back of a bar, with lots of beer and Victoria's Secret models? SI Swimsuit models? With voting by the board on the better collection of models? Or, with just pictures but extra beer? Or have the board vote on who's prettier, your mother or Sarah Palin? With still more beer! Thu, 6 May 2010 05:28:29 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/05/give-your-vcs-assignments.html#IDComment73113146 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/03/sawyer-on-the-notion-of-willful-infringement.html#IDComment65120391 Nice review. I wondered about some of that. Okay, for one step more detail, suppose Brilliant Joe, fresh from 24 hours of hard coding, sitting on his porcelain rest chair, has a brilliant idea for a new do everything super fast algorithm and patents it. Now Hacker Tom is bringing up a Web site, and on his server uses Brilliant Joe's algorithm: Tom reinvented it, saw it in someone else's code, read about it in an article and reinvented the rest himself, saw the patent itself, downloaded it from a Russian hacker site, or whatever. But, the algorithm, all 200 lines of it, definitely is buried somewhere in Tom's 75 KLOC confidential server side code. Now, how can Brilliant Joe (1) detect Tom's usage of Joe's algorithm or (2) get evidence of infringement? That is, it looks like Tom is free to bury Joe's algorithm inside his server farm without risk. Thu, 1 Apr 2010 03:41:01 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/03/sawyer-on-the-notion-of-willful-infringement.html#IDComment65120391 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/annual-escalating-patent-fee-proposal.html#IDComment58282373 Theater of the Absurd: JPEG. MPEG. So, there should be patents on everything Fourier, all low pass filters, all Hilbert space projections (would you believe Banach space projections?), the bass tone control on old hi-fi sets, principle components, all idempotent transformations, all transformations, 2 + 2 = 4? Software Patents: The whole situation is a FUBAR SNAFU, legal mud wrestling illuminated by burning money. Entrepreneurial Resolution: Try to bob, weave, stay out of the view of the other guys' lawyers. If they can't see you, then they can't target you. Hope that somehow software patents get tossed into the dumpster. Remember: Don't have to outrun the bear; just have to outrun enough other people trying to outrun the bear. Short Term Approach: Turn the whole subject into a new river of lawyer jokes. I don't have any just now; don't feel like laughing. General Situation: Can't expect everything to be tidy; history shows that big things were done, and everything tidy was at best fantasy. Should still be able to do big things. Ironic Retaliation: All software people should file patents on everything having to do low temperature, air-tight, controlled temperature, water-bath cooking as in posts of user nathanm at eGullet.org! Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:59:06 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/annual-escalating-patent-fee-proposal.html#IDComment58282373 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/patents-are-a-weak-measure-of-innovation-activity.html#IDComment57537798 Okay, I read the Myhrvold NYT piece and the HBR article, etc. He's putting lipstick on his pig. He writes a lot that he should know is nonsense about research, applied research, patents, and business. E.g., "Invention’s stepchild status is reflected in the way it’s typically funded, which I call the charity model. The entities that provide the vast majority of research funding to U.S. universities -- mostly government agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense, along with private donors -- do so without any expectation of a financial return. In other words, research grants are gifts, not investments." Nonsense: It's NOT "charity": Most of the funding is for US national security, and there Congress is getting what they want -- a solid base of research and labor for US national security. The 'applied' part is in layers of additional, large RDT&E organizations, FFRDCs, Lockheed, etc. The NIH funding is, uh, for responding to voters who want progress on major diseases, etc.? E.g., "The shrinking handful of corporations that still fund long-range research have the same mind-set. Their leaders rarely run research as a business in its own right; instead, they fund it as an act of faith that the ideas produced will somehow create value as they percolate through the product organization." Nonsense: If they do much research, then it is for "business", mostly as in the current legal patent battles. Also the "act of faith" is mostly nonsense: The business typically severely blocks any contact with the "product organization" because they want to protect their existing, successful lines of business from any 'disruption'. His goal, more useful, applied research to make strong businesses and improve the world is fine. But he wants too many chefs in the kitchen: He wants separate groups for research, applied research, products, money making businesses and with 'markets' with patents and lawyers in the middle. Nonsense. There is NOTHING to stop just one team, or even just one person, from the steps: (1) see market need, (2) do some research to meet the need building on past research, (3) build product, (4) start business, (5) make money. To improve this, he is correct: Better funding would help. Computing is a grand exception since now a $1000 computer can do so much, but otherwise funding is usually just crucial. Here's the real funding bottleneck: With the possible exception of parts of biomedical technology, nearly no funding source is able to look at results, say, just on paper, as from NSF funded work or ready for a patent application, evaluate the business potential (for other than patent trolling), write a check, and make money doing this. Myhrvold implies that he CAN do such evaluations. Okay Nathan, then DO IT, and mostly f'get about the patent lawyers. Eat your own dog food. Uh, Nathan, QUALCOMM had Viterbi's work on coding theory, and he built a BUSINESS out of it. Your company is much different. Uh, to check out your ability to evaluate, for something I'm not working on now, here's a take-home exam: For zero-day monitoring of server farms and networks, be both multi-dimensional and distribution-free (original research) and close to the best possible Neyman-Pearson result and, thus, save money on both false alarms and missed detections and, BTW, beat the Google, Microsoft, Sun funded Patterson RAD Lab monitoring research effort at Stanford and Berkeley. Build on the Hahn decomposition from the Radon-Nikodym theorem (with von Neumann's proof); right, NOT 'computer science'. Exploit k-D trees to make the computing fast. Sell to the most important farms and networks and then exit to Microsoft (their work in monitoring sucks more), HP, IBM, EMC, etc. Can you evaluate this direction? Do you even know the Hahn decomposition? Uh, it's not physics. If you can evaluate such work, then post here and we'll talk, also about something much more valuable than zero-day monitoring. Else you are just a big legal effort, i.e., a patent troll wasting the time of the poor HBR readers, etc. Net, except for patent trolling, no one can make a 'market' on intellectual property assets outside investors can't evaluate. Indeed, part of the crucial value is the ABILITY to evaluate. Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:36:57 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/patents-are-a-weak-measure-of-innovation-activity.html#IDComment57537798 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/what-seems-like-a-fundamental-flaw-in-microsoft-outlook-social-connector.html#IDComment57514637 Yup, e-mail is a mess. I recently did some mud wrestling with Outlook and concluded: (1) Outlook can too easily get 'confused'. (2) Store everything important about e-mail outside of Outlook. E.g., 'export' your 'contacts folder' to a text file and 'import' later if necessary. (3) Outlook keeps nearly all its data in 'personal folders files' (PST), and can 'manage' those. E.g., if Outlook corrupts its 'current' PST file, then might restore one from backup, etc. Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:13:02 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/what-seems-like-a-fundamental-flaw-in-microsoft-outlook-social-connector.html#IDComment57514637 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/are-we-already-working-for-the-computers.html#IDComment56715315 Ah, if the computers were really in charge, then we wouldn't be here! :-)! You touched on two of my old ideas, both in the future, that we know we can do, and short of 'the singularity' which we don't know how to do: (1) Data Flows. Currently the data goes from a human into a computer so that later humans can get the data, or results of processing it, out of the computer. Bummer. We need mostly to have the computers getting the data from other computers and much less frequently involving humans. Or, the GUI, an easy to use interface for humans but tough for computers, is a big bottleneck. Uh, you just spent seven hours stuffing in such data and getting back out such data. I was up late last night doing that, being clear that the latest TeX YAP will no longer display a BMP file and trying to be clear on what it will display. REALLY big waste of time. (2) Hierarchy. Borrowing from society, we need people managing computers, managing computers, ..., managing computers doing the work. Common Lesson. Listen up Microsoft, applications developers: Much of the future has to be to enable your software to talk to other software, not just humans. Economic Principle. There is one big push for progress, more economic productivity. Let's consider a factor of 10: So, take a couple, both working 80 hours a week, for $10 an hour, with two children. They gross $80 K a year and spend all of it. With a factor of 10 increase in productivity, they could have one parent stay home with the kids, the other cut back to 40 hours a week, gross $200 K a year, and spend all of it. We can continue with such scenarios for a few more factors of 10. So, a factor of 10 does get us some coveted additional economic productivity. How to achieve a factor of 10? Simple: Have computers do the work; automate everything in sight, including managing computers and having computers work with other computers. Lesson. Information technology is the main means now for increases in economic productivity. Tool. How to program computers to do the work? So far we've mostly programmed computers to do work we understood, at least in principle, how to do manually. Getting past that with 'artificial intelligence' hasn't worked (I used to work in that field; it doesn't know how to make significant progress), and 'the singularity' is too far off. But there is a way that works great in selected cases: Applied math. Or, how to take this available data to get those valuable results to solve that important problem, e.g., automating something for more economic productivity? In selected cases, the 'how', the crucial, core 'secret sauce', can be some math, possibly original, possibly advanced. And, I give thanks to Moore's law, etc. Yes, cleaning up why YAP will no longer display a BMP, etc., would also be a little progress! Any questions?! :-)! Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:18:19 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/are-we-already-working-for-the-computers.html#IDComment56715315 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/be-the-ceo-of-your-job.html#IDComment55061198 "Playmakers". Nice! Tue, 2 Feb 2010 19:14:39 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/be-the-ceo-of-your-job.html#IDComment55061198 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/be-the-ceo-of-your-job.html#IDComment55054682 Cute solution! There is a long list of things that could go wrong, one of the worst being various cases of 'goal subordination'. E.g., middle managers can fight with, hold back, or retaliate against the receptionist, i.e., the employee acting as 'CEO' of their work. So, have everyone declare in public of what they are the 'CEO'! NICE! Now when a middle manager starts to cause trouble, the receptionist can stand their ground and say that they are just doing the work of which they are the accepted CEO. Of course, there could be some conflicts in the declarations! How well the receptionist's decisions work out on performance, time, effort, money, etc., many people will see. Employees who make good decisions rise. Nice! Since the phones are of interest to nearly everyone, it can help if the receptionist builds consensus for the proposed solution. Of course, might have an 'empire builder' who deliberately makes decisions to spend more money, hire more staff, get more power than necessary, use the power to throttle others, etc. For small decisions, give a person rope enough to hang themselves. For large decisions, may need some reviews. More generally, need people with a good track record of making good decisions and not building empires, etc., and developing such people, e.g., the receptionist who rose to manage the office, is part of the goal. That former receptionist built some career success with a track record, credibility, and responsibility -- praise, approval, acceptance in the desirable group, and both emotional and financial security (E. Fromm) -- and may be reluctant to blow this situation on low quality work, silly empire building, goal subordination, arrogance, etc. and, thus, be a trusted, valued employee. Nice. The CEO needs to notice this situation and provide the praise, etc. E.g., once I had a mad rush project and had to make some decisions quickly. One piece of equipment was maybe optional but seemed like a good idea; since there was no time to be sure, I guessed and got the item. Later circumstances meant that didn't need the item so returned it. Then one manager started to criticize me for getting the item to begin with. Easy answer: My project overall was very successful (for the Board and literally saved the company, now famous). I acted as 'CEO' of that work. The main issue, as 'CEO', was that the project was on time and successful for the very important goals. That little item of equipment was a nit and close to irrelevant, "straining over gnats and forgetting elephants", and the CEO needs to let it be known that such destructive, 'Monday morning' nit picking at the significant accomplishments of others is not good. As employees such as the receptionist do well, they will get attacked from above, below, and the sides, and the CEO has to anticipate, detect, and deflect such attacks and defend the employee doing well or risk having that employee not try such a project again. E.g., if the CEO hears person A is saying something bad about person B, then the CEO may conclude that there is more wrong with A than B. Tue, 2 Feb 2010 18:48:43 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/02/be-the-ceo-of-your-job.html#IDComment55054682 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment52094165 You wrote: "Do you think one of those big companies would buy you out if they could 'independently' invent the technology and take it over?" Mostly they can't "independently invent": Reasons are organizational, technical, etc. E.g., a CEO might sponsor novel work, and otherwise the management chain just will not. Even the 'research group' won't. Problem's fundamental, needs too much 'field crossing'. You wrote: "The biggest gold mine in the world is the United States Patent and Trademark Office database." I have some favorite 'gold mines' -- class notes from my favorite Ph.D. courses, etc. Patents? Never heard of anyone who got anything; 99 44/100% mud and gravel where all the gold is just 'prior art' anyway. 'Prior art'? Uh, there's a big reason the US supports math, physical science, and engineering so well in the 24 or so top research universities: Can't get ahead of it. For software, I prefer just trade secret protection: If it's on a server, then everyone else should f'get about it. If ship it, then have a license agreement not to decompile, etc. It it's visible as in a user interface, then that's not obscure enough for any legal protection. Same for 'business processes'. If someone else wants to reinvent the 'secret sauce' in my server side code, then 'go for it, guys; lots of luck -- you'll need it'. For essentially anyone in CS or 'infotech', you'll be "digging in the wrong place", way wrong place. For your devotion to the USPTO, where did you get that really strong funny stuff Legal Nonsense Magic Love Potion No. 9? Consider going cold turkey. Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:24:33 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment52094165 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment51950974 Thanks. I followed your URLs, and more. I had some ideas. Like you said, now I'm ready for a shower! Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:53:28 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment51950974 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment51729769 With regret, I better keep writing software. But, as I write, what should I watch out for? Or, I don't understand Anatomy of a Software Patent Troll Attack 101. Or when a Web site goes live, what do the trolls do? Or suppose deep inside my server side code there is code for a faster way to do operation x or some code for math y to do better at solving problem z, now, what can a troll do, force any random Web site to lift their skirts, drop their panties, submit to a pelvic exam, and print out all their code and documentation, 'secret sauce' and all? Or are the trolls just limited to attacking what they see in the user interface? If they can only attack my user interface, then I'll keep it dirt simple, keep out anything novel until there's revenue enough to fight trolls, and keep it easy to change in case of an attack. I did a keyword search on trolls and didn't see anything that looked threatening; I saw nothing like the Union Square post. I have a high end lawyer, but to get his answer in this might cost me as much as another server. Also, maybe other readers would like to know. Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:13:44 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/proposal-an-independent-inventor-defense-against-software-patents.html#IDComment51729769 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/the-lights-in-the-tunnel.html#IDComment50369075 This basic idea of machines doing all the work and people all unemployed must be really easy to think of since I've thought of it for years with this thread the most I've gotten about it from others! So, for a one inch step toward more detail, we want humans managing computers, managing computers, ..., managing computers doing the work. But we have a LONG way to go. To see some of this, let's use a scenario I worked up over 10 years ago to take a half baby step toward a little more reality: Consider a couple with both working 80 hours a week at $10 a hour with two children. So, they gross about $80 K a year and spend it all. (1) So, with machines doing so much of the work, suppose we get a factor of 10 in productivity in value per person-hour. A factor of 10 is pretty big, but done in the past, so let's assume it. Then they can have one parent stay home with the children and make a better home, have the other parent cut back to 40 hours a week, gross $200 K, and spend nearly all of it. (2) Another factor of 10, $2 M a year, and they can have a much nicer house, a vacation home, a small boat in a boat house, private schools for the children, better cars, clothes, furnishings, toys, some vacations, some savings, etc. (3) With another factor of 10, they gross $20 M a year, have still nicer housing, boats, vacations, private tutors for the kids, save a lot of money, retire relatively early. (4) Another factor of 10, $200 M a year, retire after a few years of work. (5) Another factor of 10, $2 B a year, contribute resources to art and science, e.g., exploration of the universe. So, send a lot of machines to Mars until it looks really safe there with lots of reliable resources for a return flight and then send some humans. So, that's five factors of 10, a factor of 100,000 which means that can do in 1/50 of an hour, 1 minute 12 seconds, the work that now takes 2000 hours, that is, a year at 40 hours a week. So, we have a LONG way to go and all along the way uses for the productivity. And, if a significant fraction of the population has such consumption, then there will be some natural resource 'strains' and shortages meaning that the next factor of 10 will be more difficult meaning that there is still more work to do. And there's still more to it than that! Back to work! Mon, 4 Jan 2010 20:11:12 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/the-lights-in-the-tunnel.html#IDComment50369075 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/you-dont-mean-average-you-mean-median.html#IDComment50256297 Brad, For a good essay on the situation and data, you get a A. There were lots of places you could have gotten off track but did not. Good. Generally to the readers, I would advise: When using data and statistics, be clear about what you are trying to conclude. Instead, too often people just toss out the mean, median, other percentiles, confidence intervals, etc. as if the point were to rise from sea, fall from the sky, etc. which it rarely does. In particular, yes, if have a random variable, then necessarily it has a distribution. My advice: Mostly f'get about the distribution. Certainly don't ask if it's Gaussian or log-normal. In particular, just talking about the distribution will make no useful truth rise from the sea. Yes, as in S. Gould, what you are more likely interested in is the conditional distribution given what additional, relevant data you have, and that can be much different. E.g., what is the conditional distribution of first round funding amounts given that the project was in IT instead of biotech? The distribution, expectation, percentiles are not something 'immutable' and typically change a lot given more information. E.g., in 'Wall Street', the conditional expectation of what the steel company was worth changed a lot given that Sir Raider was flying his Gulfstream to PA. Here are some cases where can talk about a distribution: (1) An 'arrival process' with 'stationary, independent' increments will be a Poisson process with independent, identically distributed (iid) times between arrivals with exponential distribution. Nice. Qualitative assumptions, often can check just intuitively, with precise quantitative consequences. See Erhan Cinlar's 'Introduction'. Possible application: What is the probability a small package cargo airplane will be too heavy? Assume number of packages does not affect the distribution of the package weights; use Poisson for the number and historical data for the weights. (2) Under mild assumptions, the average of n iid random variables converges to the mean with probability 1 -- strong law of large numbers. E.g., in betting, in the long run what you get per play is the mean. Nicest proof from the martingale convergence theorem (Leo Breiman, 'Probability'). Yes, should realize that the rate of convergence does have to do with the population of 'black swans'. (3) Under mild assumptions, the distribution of the sum of n iid random variables divided by the square root of n converges to a Gaussian distribution. Central limit theorem (check Lindeberg-Feller). Black swans are again relevant but notice the Berry-Essen bound. For answering some questions, (1)-(3) can be useful. For the VC data, some candidate questions: (1) Is the whole world of finance drying up with growth stopping and all of us going to hell? Not yet. (2) If an entrepreneur has a good project, can it still get funded? Likely. Sun, 3 Jan 2010 21:47:19 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/you-dont-mean-average-you-mean-median.html#IDComment50256297 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49946866 I just checked my math and physics books and, yup, I didn't forget; instead, "The Daily Kos" is not in there, I'm pretty sure. Hilbert space and Maxwell's equations I see, but not Kos. Should I check again? I don't think my college girlfriend (I was in college; she was 4 years younger; she understood some things not about calculus) would know either, or about Rand! No, I looked at something in Kos once, found that they made some serious error in fact, made a note, gave up, and didn't go back. Besides, they seemed to have some hot political agenda, "about what, I have no idea"! On people, I got much more from E. Fromm than E. lit. I'm out of my depth here: Below they are discussing Vonnegut, and all I know about him was from the Dangerfield movie 'Back to School'! Since I was once a prof in an MBA program, the B-school part of that movie was terrific, right on target. The Sally Kellerman's English prof's soaring ecstasy over 'writers' is part of why I was glad when required English classes were done! Fri, 1 Jan 2010 16:52:50 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49946866 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49911199 What's wrong with the beer party? Well, strictly, the most I suggested wrong was that it was "sophomoric"! I was a sophomore once! I didn't think that either the English class or the beer parties got very far and preferred making progress with mathematics, physics, and my girlfriend! If the English class had actually had any decent understanding of people, emotions, women, and love, then I would have made much faster progress with my girlfriend! I liked the interview as an exercise. There was a time when I would not have been able to have guessed just what was driving Rand (or Wallace). Of course, can't make such diagnoses from only the interview, BUT: From seeing enough in people begin to see some patterns. Then, from the interview, pick what appears to be a very likely pattern and make the diagnosis! Fri, 1 Jan 2010 07:29:48 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49911199 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49906011 Sophomoric. Belongs in an all night beer party of English majors at a liberal arts college. Rand has lots of brain cells firing, but the main cause appears to be trying obsessively and emotionally, with disastrously poor insight and judgment, to get some security from some anxieties from something scary in her background. Wallace reveals much more of his thinking than I have seen before, shows that he is an idiot, that has swallowed some super-simple Upper West Side sophomoric nonsense too common in the MSM now. Should never take seriously the 'thinking' of a newsie! Rand in some Russian romantic style uses too many terms with special and apparently obscure but omitted definitions. Both set up straw men to knock them down. Their foundations for the status quo are too extreme; can support the status quo much more simply and much less provocatively. Fri, 1 Jan 2010 06:22:57 +0000 http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/12/mike-wallace-interviews-ayn-rand-about-objectivism.html#IDComment49906011