Portable pitching mound

http://coachchaz.blogspot.com/2010/09/building-portable-pitching-mound-for.html

AI Games

Wired gives a preview of new AI games. One of them will automatically harmonize with notes you play. Another takes your line drawings and tries to guess what you were attempting to picture.

WIRED: AI Games

Artificial intelligence playbook

Really cool site that explains AI in a decidedly non-technical fashion.

Andreeson Horowitz AI Playbook

Frank Chen explains artificial intelligence

Amazing Fast Company article on AI. Frank Chen of Andreeson Horowitz explains AI in very basic terms. It's really well done.

Fast Company: Unofficial Explainer of AI

What Plato knew about behavioral economics

Fascinating story in Aeon.

Aeon: What Plato knew about behavioral economics

"Many of Plato’s dialogues dramatise the habits and processes that lead humans to false conclusions. He depicts people believing what they want or what they are predisposed to believe (confirmation bias); asserting whatever comes most readily to mind (availability bias); reversing their opinions about identical propositions based on the language in which the propositions are presented (framing); refusing to relinquish current opinions simply because these happen to be the opinions they currently possess (a cognitive version of loss aversion); making false inferences based on the size and representativeness of a sample of a broader population (representativeness heuristic); and judging new information based on salient current information (a version of anchoring). And this is only a partial inventory of the mental errors that he catalogues and dramatises."

Why Amazon is eating the world

Excellent summary of the ways that Amazon has built competitive advantage for itself.

They have successfully integrated strategy into their operations:

"But this much is obvious — we all know about AWS. The incredible thing here is that this strategy — in one of the most herculean displays of effort in the history of the modern corporation — has permeated Amazon at every level. Amazon has quietly rolled out external access in nooks and crannies across their entire ecosystem, and it is this long tail of external service availability that I think will be nearly impossible to replicate."

....

"The key advantage that Amazon has over any other enterprise service provider — from UPS and FedEx to Rackspace — is that they are forced to use their own services. UPS is a step removed from backlash due to lost/destroyed packages, shipping delays, terrible software and poor holiday capacity planning. Angry customers blame the retailer, and the retailer screams at UPS in turn. When Amazon is the service provider, they’re permanently dogfooding. There is nowhere for poor performance to hide. Amazon has built a feedback loop as a moat, and it is incredible to watch the flywheel start to pick up speed.

Amazon has committed to this idea at a granular level. Even when it comes to services that can’t be sold, Amazon is still making a push to expose the services externally. The perfect example of this is Amazon’s Marketplace Web Service (MWS) API — this is the set of services that Amazon Marketplace sellers can use to programmatically exchange data with Amazon. Amazon built out a service that they call the “Subscriptions API,” which gives the seller instant notification of any price change by any competitor — including Amazon itself!

Amazon is externally exposing the tools it uses to set its own prices in order to guarantee that the price listed on Amazon is as low as possible for the customer. This has spawned a whole ecosystem of third-party price-optimization tools called “repricers,” which use the MWS API to automatically respond to price changes in order to maximize sales for the Marketplace seller (the WSJ published a great piece on this back in March, aptly likening it to high-frequency trading). The beauty here is that Amazon doesn’t care if a seller undercuts Amazon’s price — Amazon takes a 12-15 percent commission on the sale regardless, and then collects FBA fees to boot."

It will be difficult for the competition to catch them.

TechCrunch:  Why Amazon is eating the world

Softer side of robotics

Two links

National Geographic: Softer side

Datafloq: Softer side

US Household Electrical Use Falling: LEDs to Blame

This blog post shows how the decline in US household electrical use is likely caused by a large migration away from incandescent bulbs to LED!

Lucas Davis: Evidence of a Decline in Electricity Use by US Households

Hospital charges and how to dispute them

Elizabeth Rosenthal is the author of the book "An American Sickness". She describes the evolution of healthcare into the twisted business it is today. She also discusses in this article the tricks hospitals use to jack up your bill. The article also gives some pointers in ways to dispute your bill.

Tips:

• Insist on the consent forms that you are willing to pay as long as charges are in network
• Get an itemized listing of charges (there are often lots of errors in bills or charges for services that were never provided)
• Remember that you can negotiate your bills
• Avoid private rooms
• Refuse unnecessary treatment or equipment
• Identify anyone who comes to your bedside (hospitals or physicians will often charge for these "checkups" and "visits")

How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Hospital

Computer moves

In-depth article discussing some of the work underpinning Deep Blue.

Computer Moves

Incremental improvement