numbers

1,000,000 miles in 30 days

business, commonplace book, true stories / /

From MSNBC’s “Very, very frequent flyer hits 1 million goal“:

On his blog “The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005,” [Marc] Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane. …

The 30-year-old embarked on his venture using Air Canada’s North America Unlimited Pass — a C$7,000 ticket that allowed passengers limitless travel within the continent between October 1 and November 30. …

A typical day would start with a 10 a.m. flight to Victoria, British Columbia, about 70 km (45 miles) from Vancouver. He would fly back and fourth between the two cities about six times and then catch an overnight flight 4,300 km (2,700 miles) to Toronto.

In Toronto, he would immediately board a return flight. …

By reaching the 1 million mile goal, Tacchi gets the equivalent of about 10 round-trip business class flights from Canada to Australia, which he has estimated would normally cost about C$70,000.

He plans to redeem his travel points to take his family to Miami at Christmas, then maybe go to Hong Kong or Thailand.

When he wasn’t flying to collect travel points, Tacchi works as a contract pilot. Once a week, he flies a Boeing 747 cargo plane to Europe or Asia.

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More validation of the Long Tail

business, tech in changing society / /

Don’t know what the Long Tail is? Check out the seminal Wired article, or read the blog.

From The New York Times‘ “The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels“:

CD and digital album sales so far this year are down 8 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. And while sales of digital tracks through services like iTunes have risen 150 percent, to well over 320 million songs this year, that rise is not enough to offset the plunge in album sales. Overall sales are down less than 5 percent if the digital singles are bundled into units of 10 and counted as albums, according to estimates by Billboard magazine.

Still, despite the slide, dozens of independent labels are faring well with steady-selling releases by, among others, the Miami rapper Pitbull and the indie bands Hawthorne Heights, Bright Eyes, Interpol and the Arcade Fire. Independent labels account for more than 18 percent of album sales this year – their biggest share of the market in at least five years, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. (If several big independent companies whose music is marketed by the major music labels distribution units are included, the figure exceeds 27 percent.) …

In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry’s established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV.

“Fans are dictating,” said John Janick, co-founder of Fueled by Ramen, the independent label in Tampa, Fla., whose roster includes underground acts like Panic! At the Disco and Cute Is What We Aim For. “It’s not as easy to shove something down people’s throats anymore and make them buy it. It’s not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that’s cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading.”

There are several signs that as more consumers develop the habit of exploring music online they are drawn to other musical choices besides hitmakers at the top of the Billboard chart – a trend that suggests more of the independent labels’ repertory will find an audience.

On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody’s executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer’s sales.

“It’s no longer about a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience,” Mr. Quirk said. “It’s about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time.”

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How many people die each year in the world?

commonplace book / /

From Ask Yahoo!:

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That’s about a 155,000 a day. …

The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year. …

The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease.

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Cybercrime more profitable than drug trafficing

business, politics, security, technology / /

From Reuters’ “Cybercrime yields more cash than drugs: expert“:

Global cybercrime generated a higher turnover than drug trafficking in 2004 and is set to grow even further with the wider use of technology in developing countries, a top expert said on Monday.

No country is immune from cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy, said Valerie McNiven, who advises the U.S. Treasury on cybercrime.

“Last year was the first year that proceeds from cybercrime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $105 billion,” McNiven told Reuters.

“Cybercrime is moving at such a high speed that law enforcement cannot catch up with it.”

For example, Web sites used by fraudsters for “phishing” — the practice of tricking computer users into revealing their bank details and other personal data — only stayed on the Internet for a maximum of 48 hours, she said. …

Developing countries which lack the virtual financial systems available elsewhere are easier prey for cybercrime perpetrators, who are often idle youths looking for quick gain.

“When you have identity thefts or corruption and manipulation of information there (developing countries), it becomes almost more important because … their systems start getting compromised from the get-go,” she said.

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Nothing fails like excess

business, commonplace book / /

From The New York Times:

Perhaps it was the bottle of 1947 Château Pétrus for £12,300 ($17,500). Or maybe it was the 1945 vintage from the same vineyard for £11,600 ($16,500). During dinner at a fashionable restaurant here, six investment bankers lapped up £44,000 ($62,700) in fine wines, and now they are suffering from a huge hangover.

Their employer, Barclays Capital, has fired all but one of the bankers since the dinner last July at Pétrus, a restaurant in London … when some of the bankers secretly tried to pass off their part of the bill as client expenses, Barclays began firing them one by one.

Gourmets willing to spend £50 for three courses can tuck into the cooking of Marcus Wareing, including sautéed medallion of stuffed confit pig trotter or roast breast of Anjou pigeon on a parsnip galette.

But the food was very much a sideshow to this particular dinner, which also included a third Château Pétrus, this one a 1946 vintage for £9,400. Then there was a 1984 Montrachet for £1,400, two bottles of Kronenbourg beer at £3.50 each, six glasses of Champagne for £9.50 each, one juice at £3, 10 bottles of water totaling £35, a pack of cigarettes for £5 and, to wash it all down, a bottle of 100-year-old Château d’Yquem dessert wine for £9,200.

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Cave or community

business, technology / /

From Sandeep Krishnamurthy’s Cave or Community?: An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects:

I systematically look at the actual number of developers involved in the production of one hundred mature OSS products. What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course). …

… My contention is only that communities do things other than produce the actual product- e.g. provide feature suggestions, try products out as lead users, answer questions etc. …

To be more specific the top 100 most active projects (based on Sourceforge’s activity percentile) in the mature class were chosen for this study. …

Finding 1: The vast majority of mature OSS programs are developed by a small number of individuals. …

Moreover, as shown in Table 2, only 29% of all projects had more than 5 developers while 51% of projects had 1 project administrator. Only 19 out of 100 projects had more than 10 developers. On the other extreme, 22% of projects had only one developer associated with them. …

Finding 2: Very few OSS products generate a lot of discussion. Most products do not generate too much discussion. …

Finding 3: Products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. …

Finding 4: The number of developers working on a OSS program was unrelated to the release date.

It could be argued that older projects may have more developers associated with them. However, we found no relationship between the release date and the number of developers associated with a program. …

Even though the discussion here may seem like an example of extreme free- riding, the reader needs to know that all free-riding is not necessarily “bad”. For instance, consider public radio stations in the United States. Even the most successful stations have about a 10% contribution rate or a 90% free-ridership rate. But, they are still able to meet their goals! Similarly, the literature on lurking in e-mail lists has suggested that if everyone in a community contributes it may actually be counter-productive.

Similarly, a recent survey of participants in open-source projects conducted by the Boston Consulting Group and MIT provides more insight. The top five motivations of open-source participants were

1. To take part in an intellectually stimulating project.
2. To improve their skill.
3. To take the opportunity to work with open-source code.
4. Non-work functionality.
5. Work-related functionality.

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The Forbes Fictional Fifteen

business, commonplace book, cool stuff / /

If fiction can be regarded as a culture’s subconscious, then it’s clear that we are a nation obsessed with the very rich. From avaricious caricatures like The Simpsons’ Montgomery Burns to literary character studies like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, our culture — both high and low — is littered with images of billionaires and tycoons.

Rank Name $Net Worth
1. Santa Claus $∞
2. Richie Rich $24.7 billion
3. Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks $10 billion
4. Scrooge McDuck $8.2 billion
5. Thurston Howell III $8 billion
6. Willie Wonka $8 billion
7. Bruce Wayne $6.3 billion
8. Lex Luthor $4.7 billion
9. J.R. Ewing $2.8 billion
10. Auric Goldfinger $1.2 billion
11. C. Montgomery Burns $1 billion
12. Charles Foster Kane $1 billion
13. Cruella De Vil $875 millon
14. Gordon Gekko $650 millon
15. Jay Gatsby $600 millon” [Forbes]

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Perfect Score Achieved on Pac-Man

commonplace book, cool stuff, technology / /

From Twin Galaxies

For the first time in video game playing history, a perfect score was achieved on the legendary arcade game, Pac-Man.

On July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M., taking nearly six hours to accomplish the feat — on one quarter — Billy Mitchell, 33, a Fort Lauderdale hot sauce manufacturer visiting the famous Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, NH, scored 3,333,360 points — the maximum possible points allowed by the game. The results will go into next year’s edition of the Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records — which is the official record book for the world of video game and pinball playing. …

To get a perfect game on Pac-Man, the player has to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 — where the game ends with a split screen. This must be accomplished on the first man, too.

When I was a freshman in high school in Marshall, I played Pac-Man constantly. I actually won a contest for Saline County Pac-Man champ, and my prize was an Atari 2600. My all-time high score was 1,187,000, played in the Wal-Mart lobby over the course of two hours.

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Black Friday, now Cyber Monday

business, technology / /

From "Ready, Aim, Shop" in The New York Times:

Though it sounds like slick marketing, Cyber Monday, it turns out, is a legitimate trend. According to Shop.org, a trade group, 77 percent of online retailers reported a substantial sales increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year. “Not good for employers,” observed Ed Bussey, senior vice president of marketing at the online lingerie retailer Figleaves.com.

Figleaves.com said sales on Cyber Monday last year were twice those of Black Friday. And that number is likely to jump this year when it offers the online equivalent of a doorbuster – 20 percent off all items.

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Some numbers about General Motors

business / /

From "For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes" in The New York Times:

G.M.’s problem, at least in terms of its costs, is the enormous price of health care benefits for hundreds of thousands of retirees. G.M. is the largest private provider of health care, covering more than a million Americans. …

G.M. plans to cut its blue-collar work force even further, though, to 86,000 Americans nationwide by the end of 2008, about the same number of people it once employed in Flint alone in the 1970’s. At its peak, G.M. employed more than 600,000 Americans.

“Frankly in our business, the progress in improving productivity has been dramatic,” Mr. Wagoner said. “Over a 10-year period, we have gone from a ballpark of 40-plus hours a vehicle in assembly to 20-plus hours a vehicle.”

Benefits are another matter. G.M. pays about $1,500 per car assembled in the United States for health care, more than it spends on steel.

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Learning drops quickly over time

commonplace book, education / /

From “Building Better Bosses” in Workforce Magazine, May 2000:

Research shows that 30 minutes after adults hear new information, they will remember only about 8% of it. A day or two later, recall drops to 2%. But if people learn a little bit of information and practice it right away, retention balloons to 90% immediately and deflates to as much as 50% to 60% over time.

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