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And it occurred to me (in my amateur, unlearned way), that there appears to be a contradiction, perhaps with interesting implications, between superstring theory, which seems to postulate an ultimate unit of length, and the assumption of calculus that space is infinitely divisible.
I sent an email to Brian Greene, mentioning this, saying taht if I were young enough to be an undergraduate, I would be sorry tempted to probe the possibility that fundamental concepts and procedures of calculus could and should be modified/refined to somehow take this new fundamental unit into account.
He as kind enough to reply, "In fact, that is just what we are working on today. The notion that the usual procedures of calculus are only relevant on length scales larger than some lower limit--we are trying to piece together the new procedures that take over." -- Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
So consider the possibility of offering expandable storage space on the roof. Instead of the roof optionally going away, as with a convertible; the roof rises, opening variable covered storage space -- up to maybe as high as 3 feet.
On the negative side, that would hurt the vehicle's aerodynamics, lowering
fuel efficiency. But I'm starting with the assumption that people need
storage occasionally, not all the time. And on the plus side, you could
eliminate the traditional trunk, making the vehicle 2-3 feet shorter (hence
lighter and easier to park), or adding more seats (if the length is important
for stability). -- Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
Regarding marketing, if you were interviewing BCG candidates -- college seniors, most of whom have never taken a course in marketing -- you could ask them as an exercise to think about making the Wharton commencement a positive, fun, and informative event, and anyone who you would seriously consider hiring would come up with half a dozen or more simple and effective ideas, impromptu, in a few minutes. You'd expect anyone coming out of the marketing program at Wharton to be able to do better than that. The event should tangibly demonstrate that that is the case.
Regarding speeches, both faculty and students need basic Dale-Carnegie-style instruction. The commencement speeches showed that Wharton graduates have developed the ability to address a large and important audience and deliver boring, pompous generallities with a straight face and no apparent embarassment -- a rather dubious skill.
Both of these problems could be easily fixed, making commencement an enjoyable experience that delivers a powerful marketing message, benefitting the school and its graduates. But this is an emperor's new clothes situation -- the problems are obvious, and, year after year, apparently, no one dares say so.
I'd propose that car companies be required to build cell phones into new cars -- embedding them in the dashboard to make them difficult to steal or disable, and including a function that would send a signal to the police if and when someone tried to remove or disable such a cell phone. In the dashboard they would be "hands-free", with voice-activated dialing.
Then the cell phones embedded in cars should be accessible by numbers that correlate with license plates. And police (and only police) should have the ability to call a car's cell phone using that number.
The main audience of that section of the paper is the elderly, who in many cases have failing eye sight. To serve that audience, newspapers should print death notices in much larger type than the rest of the paper to make them accessible by those who most need to read them.
Why?
If color is a survival factor for reptiles and birds, why not for mammals? Of all the species of mammals wouldn't you have expected at least one to take that niche?
Why not?
It's easy to use Darwinian truisms to explain the color or structure of any creature after the fact. This is for this. That is for that. But what about the gaps, the missing capabilities, the missing colors that by the same logic should exist?
Think about it...
Keep in mind that mammals presumably evolved from reptiles and many reptiles are green (presumably because of the survival value of that color in many environmental niches). It would not have taken mutations for there to be green mammals. Rather, all that was needed was for one or more species to keep the green skin color and continue benefitting from that color. I find it hard to understand why none did.
And I've never heard the question asked before, though it seems ridiculously natural.
Supposedly life began in the sea, with fish and reptiles; and some reptiles and amphibians moved onto the ground; some of those reptiles became dinosaurs; some of those dinosaurs evolved to birds; and other reptiles evolved to mammals. Or at least that's the usual high-school-level pitch. We're taught that all animals on earth share DNA/genetic code; and that mammals came after reptiles.
But there's no reason why the color of the skin of some mammals couldn't be green (as in the case of snakes and crocodiles and frogs); and they need not have hair all over their bodies (as is the case with humans).
A believer in Darwin might conclude that the absence of green mammals suggests that mammals evolved somewhere where green foliage and green grass were rare, if not non-existent. Perhaps not on Earth. Perhaps they arrived on Earth so recently that there has not been time for any of them to evolve to fill the little green mammal niche...
"Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context" contains five novels, a book
of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related
classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying
her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion,
Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek
classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin
American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works
of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne.
You can see details at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/roberta.html
or http://www.samizdat.com/kalechofskycd.html
"Appropriating Hegel by Crawford Elder in a Context of Classic Works of Philosophy" includes a monograph on Hegel by the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, together with dozens of works by such philosophers as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. You can see details at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/elder.html or http://www.samizdat.com/eldercd.html
I'd like to publish more "books in context" CDs. But I need your support. If you like this approach, please let me know by ordering these.
The current book -- Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly -- book purports to solve the mystery of Atlantis by creatively tying together myths and legends from around the world. At times it is very convincing (like The Da Vinci Code) -- enough so that it's likely to motivate you to read many other books to try to distinguish between gossip that's thousands of years old and credible science. In any case it's a fun and provocative read. (FYI -- the author ran for vice president on the Green Back ticket back in the 1880s.) If you read nothing else, check the beginning of the first chapter where the author lays out the 11 propositions that he intends to demonstrate. This book appears on our 2-CD Non-Fiction set http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/nonfictioncd.html (under Anthropology and Myths).
While many would agree that that's a strange way to spend money, many do the same kind of thing on the Web, without realizing they are. Fancy page design techniques, with animation, frames, and dynamically generated pages make it harder for search engines to index your pages. In the long run, the added expense results in fewer customers.
Another feature of the toolbar that looks interesting, turns out to be useless -- Page Ranking. You'll see a green bar under the term "PageRank". Presumably, the longer the green line, the more "important" and "useful" the site. If you leave your cursor over that bar, you'll eventually see the number that it represents, from 1 for 10. But before you give that number much credence, go to your favorite sites and see how Google ranks them. Amazon gets 0. The Gutenberg Project gets just 7. ESPN gets 8, as do eBay and anywho. Yahoo gets a 9. The only 10 I've found so far is Google itself.
I thought I had completed the transaction, but, in fact, had left the items in my shopping cart. By the time I returned to the store, wondering why my package hadn't arrived, and discovered my mistake, it was too late for the items to arrive by Christmas.
This experience made me realize that many abandoned shopping carts might result from similar mistakes. In other cases, customers may fail to complete transactions due to confusion over the process -- not realizing that they had to make a final click or enter another bit of information. Many, too, may be interrupted or distracted before they are finished (one of the hazards of shopping from your computer at home). And many, too, simply procrastinate.
I wish my online store provider (Yahoo) took this common behavior into account and had an automated process for trying to close sales with these would-be customers. For instance, it would be good to send them (when the email addresses are known) daily reminder emails, telling them what they left in their shopping carts and how to complete the transaction (what additional steps they need to finish), and perhaps even offering them incentives (coupons) to finish and/or to buy additional items.
From June 1996 to November 2003, I ran weekly chat sessions focusing on Business on the Web. I enjoyed it, made good friends from it, learned from it, and built a business on what I learned from it. But the Internet environment of November 2003 is very different from the environment when I started; and now it simply makes no sense to continue.
I started these chats at the request of folks from the old Boston Computer Society, and first held them at boston.com We soon migrated to Sudha Jamthe's Web-net (a face-to-face forum for free sharing of Internet-related business information). And later we moved to Web discussion space provided by Sitescape (at www.webworkzone.com/bootcamp)
While the subject was always Web-based business, the chats themselves were always non-commercial, with all the decisions made by me, based on what I felt was best to promote free sharing of useful information related to Web business.
Each session had a specific topic, and often had a volunteer expert guest. The average session had about half a dozen to a dozen active, knowledgeable participants. Much of the benefit came from the edited transcripts, which I posted on the Web, and which, because of the content, generated lots of traffic to my site. (The average transcript brought about 1000 visitors in the first year after being posted.)
Often, it was an exhilarating experience -- typing and thinking and responding rapidly -- generating new ideas that might never otherwise have occurred to me, and learning from others about technologies and business approaches that I had never heard of before.
But in today's environment, in which over 95% of the mail I receive is spam/scams/fraud, and in which many people have over-reacted to email pollution by use of draconian filters and other blockers, it's impossible to get the word out.
While I still have nostalgia for the good old days when so many people were so helpful to so many others, without asking what they'd get in return, I have to admit that those days are gone.
I'll continue to write articles on the same kinds of topics and post them at my Web site www.samizdat.com In the process I'll revive my old newsletter Internet on a Disk www.samizdat.com/ioad.html And I'll keep all the old chat transcripts at my site www.samizdat.com/chat.html But there will be no more regular/irregular weekly chat sessions.
I'd welcome suggestions on how to breath new life into the old idea. And I'm open to holding an occasional special session for an outstanding topic, when it's obvious that there is an audience with strong stake in participating. But this is good-bye for the old tried and true "Business on the Web".
Thanks to all the folks who participated over the years. I'll miss our fast-passed interactions. Please keep in touch by email and other means. And good luck in all your ventures.
PS -- As an alternative method of sending out chat reminder messages, I have set up a Yahoo Group for businessonthewebchat It is an announcement only list. And I'll continue to use it to send out short messages about articles I write on "Business-on-the-Web" related topics. If you would like to receive such messages, simply send a blank email message to businessonthewebchats-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/businessonthewebchats and sign up there.
PPS -- I never had a problem with the chat itself. The problem was with
email -- letting the right people know that the
chats were scheduled, and drawing enough of an audience to make it
worthwhile. So many people have filters set over aggressively (either their
own doing, or the doing of ISPs doing it for them, sometimes without telling
them), and so many people are simply inundated with spam and delete like
crazy without really looking at what they are deleting, it simply became
impossible to get the kinds of audiences that my programs depended
on.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
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