Ideas for Free

Problem: People balk at having online access to seldom used financial, insurance, and service accounts.

Financial and insurance institutions want consumers to access accounts online.  It lowers costs and provides consistent service.

People note the potential for high cost losses, the one-sided user agreements, and complete lack of recourse for most fraud.  Some may choose online access for primary banking; the convenience outweighing the risk.  Many more will avoid online access to a 401(k) plan.

Solution: Provide information only accounts by default.

Information about an account is less valuable than the money in it.  Being a little careless with your account, such as accessing it from a computer, becomes similiar to throwing out printed statements without shreading them.

These accounts would let people see their balances and fees, make most routine changes, but not make ones that severly compromise security.  For example, transfering money from savings to checking is OK; changing mutual funds is OK; adding a newborn to your insurance is OK; changing your address is not OK; disbursing money to outside accounts is right out.  The risk of catastrophic loss decreases.

There are some implementations approaching this solution, aimed at preventing catastrophic losses.  Bank of America provides alert notifications by email when selected activities occur, such as adding a new Payee.   E*Trade uses separate passwords for viewing information and trading securities.

This idea provides lower costs to institutions, more convenience to consumers, and less loss to fraud all around.  What’s not to like?

Problem: Homeopathy lives right on the border of science.  The edges suggest It could work:  strange dosage curves,  unexplained placebos and histamine effects (see #1 and #4),  mercaptan sensitivity in the 1:50 billion range.  Working would mean bringing drug production costs to nearly zero. Failing means that millions of people are being comforted by empty promises. We want to know!

Solution: Run a double blind study already!

Homeopathy works with minute quantities of medicine, in the realm of countable molecules. The doctrine is that the dilution is to zero molecules with only a ‘memory’ in the water. It is nearly impossible to control labs to zero molecule dilution and the real effect might be in the few molecules contaminating the blank pills.

Testing becomes difficult due to the cycle of a homeopath testing several possible medications on a patient based on background, random symptoms, and responses to previous medications. Also, successful homeopathic treatment solutions cause subtle cures of systemic aliments, making traditional testing difficult. The only data on success is the subjective evaluation of the patient.

This is SCIENCE! Science works! Run a double blind anyway. Stop arguing and do the experiment!

Ingredients:

• 1 dozen homeopathic doctors (”docs”) willing to try.
• 300 or more patients (”sickies”) with various suitable allergies, gastric problems, etc.
• 1 trusted pill dispenser and record keeper that can keep a secret (”peddler”).

Recipe:

Peddler randomly and secretly assigns each sicky to one of three types: righties, wrongies, and blankies. Peddler then assigns an equal number of righties, wrongies, and blankies to each doc. Each doc treats each sicky normally: he or she interviews and pokes the sicky, prescribes a homeopathic pill, follows up with more interviewing, poking, and pills, and eventually either calls the sicky cured or just gives up.  Science!

Ah, but each time the sicky is prescribed pills, he or she needs to get them from the peddler. Then begins the fun!  The peddler looks up if the sicky is really a righty, wrongy, or blanky. A righty always gets the pill as prescribed by the doc. A wrongy always gets a random homeopathic pill from whatever spilled on the floor: those pills are small suckers. A blanky always gets a blank sugar pill. So, for example, each time a blanky goes back to the doctor with weird symptoms and an updated prescription for a carefully chosen remedy, he or she really gets a blank sugar pill.

Run for six months if you loaded up with chronic suffering sickies. For acute sickies, you might finish in a couple weeks. By now, lots of sickies will talk about how much better they are! Fill in the surveys on “Did you get better? Did homeopathy work for you? Do you feel better or worse?”. Hand them to the peddler.

You’ve Got Results!

You only get a few numbers out, like how righties compared to blankies. Time to crunch that spreadsheet to see what you got:

Happy Fun Pills: Righties do well; Wrongies and Blankies do poorly.

• Congratulations! Collect your Noble Prize in Medicine. Use winnings to evade Pfizer hit squads.

You’ve Got To Believe!: Some sickies do lots better. About even across docs and types of sickies.

• Eh. Publish an article in Popular Science. Keep trying for tenure.

That Winning Smile: Sickies of some docs do much better than others. About even across types.

• Recruit docs into multi-level marketing selling time shares for the astral plane. Retire rich and wanted.

They Be Shamans: Righties of some docs do really well. Everything else about even.

• Oh, those docs know good things. Go figure it out. Live on research grants forever!

That Black Pill? Not so good: Blankies do average. Wrongies do really bad. Might mix with above results.

• Homeopathy does something! It makes you sick! Win as above, but also sell sickos’ stories to People.

Total Muddle: Everyone does about the same with the usual statistical minutiae.

• Embezzle remaining research funds. Publish paper no one reads. Teach at Yale or Brigham Young.

So, go do it?

Well, it’s hard. Studies in the United States may require providing test subjects with real medical care during or after. Also, there really isn’t much money in it. Look how excited the makers of Tagamet were about rumors of H. Pylori? Think of how excited those generous big pharma will be to your University when you hint you might do the study if you have no money for ‘real’ research.

Great for some small country wanting to make a name for itself.

I spent over a day writing a silly Python program to read in a Civilization 2 Technology Tree.

I learned:

• Python assert statements tend to fail silently during common misuse. Blogged about it. Suggested fixing it on the Py3k mailing list. Guido says there is a SyntaxWarning now.
• Google docs appears to use the python csv module to export to csv. Their spreadsheet works fairly well. I like the auto-save/auto-versioning.
• The csv package is pretty inflexible. It cannot discover the dialect of comma-separated-vague file it is passed. It works for, and is designed for, times when the export is either excel or Python. The Dialects do allow you to set some other basic options.
• nose is a great testing tool. nose.tools confuses pylint because of its on-the-fly playing with __all__. I should probably write a Wikipedia article on it.
• Whenever debugging recursion, make a note both when calling the recursed function and when returning. It makes digging through the log much easier.
• Nothing tests your code like a large, real world, example.
• The logging function rocks far less well. I filed bug on it: it picks up the wrong %(filename)s. This bug has apparently been going back and forth for years.
• Reading a correctly validated input file is about 10x the effort of reading an incorrectly validated one.
• Testing code is fairly easy and a bit bulky. It’s real cost is that it forces that 10x effort in validating the input in order to pass the tests. I could get behind Test Driven Development.
• The Civilization 2 Technology Tree has five errors, including two “Destroyer” units and a bunch of redundant dependencies, such as Fusion Power doesn’t need to depend on Nuclear Power.
• Sets in Python work well.
• WordPress has syntax coloring plug-ins that work fairly well, and it can handle arbitrary files.
• Programming is still fun.

So, with no plans to do anything with this:

tech.py — This is Python code. It loads the technology tree and doesn’t do anything with it.

civtech.csv — A CSV file with the Civilization 2 technology tree

CivChart — A GoogleDoc spreadsheet with that same technology tree

This post cleverly delayed for a few days to space out my postings.

Problem: People yell “Help!” when confronted with an emergency. No one comes.

Solution: Yell something with meaning. “Fire!” works.

Seriously, “Help” needs more information. The common use case is “Help!” being shorthand for “Help! My boyfriend is tickling me!”. Yelling “Fire!” has more information. It has a common use case of “Fire! Something is burning and assistance is needed to put it out, rescue people, or call professionals! Come evaluate!”

This is about information. People do care about their fellows; people have jumped out of bed one too many time for “Help! My boyfriend is tickling me!”

Problem: Python assert statements are prone to silently fail in obvious misuse.

Solution: Modify Python assert statement to “assert condition as message”

Python usually does the right thing ™. That is, usually a programmer’s code does what is expected without odd language gotcha’s. Here is one of the gotcha’s:

Seems reasonable? Sorry, that assert is equivalent to:

because your parenthesis made a tuple. You meant to type this:

Python 3.0 should be modified to require this:

or just make assert a built_in function and, therefore, require the parenthesis.

Have you ever had a downgrade when you thought it was an upgrade?

Now, NetGear make on this an option. You may have seen that my previous review was less than glowing. Now it comes with brand-new backup features in an upgrade!

1. BitTorrent Software installed to download and serve torrents to/from your backup device.
2. A proprietary photo gallery to browse pictures on your backup device
3. A new add-on infrastructure widgets to manage your new BitTorrent and Photo Gallery.
4. Support for new photo standards used by some unnamed new cameras and cutting edge hardware like the XBox 360.

And New Bug Fixes:

1. Flash auto-copy is enabled by default, which transparently affects the way files are copied from some devices in order to better support the new photo gallery!
2. Some bugs with the fan may have been fixed. Or may not have.
3. Lots of small stuff.

And New Bugs:

1. Yes, 10 outstanding issues that affect user performance in this update! Plus lots of “easter eggs” bugs that haven’t been mentioned yet.
2. Now broken with with Opera, Safari, Vista, Web/DAV, wireless, Mac AFP, and installing new drives when the machine is off.
3. The upgrade is “pray-ware”. It cannot be reversed or uninstalled, so no backups for the backup server. Oddly, the upgrade does not state as to if it destroys the data on your drives. It shouldn’t, but don’t assume.

How are these people employed?

So, it’s the coming up on Burning Man. I realize on holidays. Jews light candles. Candles have fire. Fire makes geeks twitch. We should have a Menorah Lighting Invitational. Here are some basic Menorah lighting techniques:

Roman Menorah: To commemorate the fireworks between Jews and Rome, simply replace the original candles with Roman candles.

Rocket Menorah: Simple but effective. Replace the boring candles with model rocket engines.Mounted upside down, they should make an impressive but short flame. In a rig to mount them right side up, meaning with thrust causing lift, you could see the mythical Flying Menorah.

Menorah and Lox: Lox is a favorite food of many Jews. Use cups filled with Lox and light. I might be a good idea to stand a bit back for this one.

Acetylene Menorah: A series of tubes makes a simple nine headed acetylene torch. This indoor favorite can heat your entire house.

Dry Ice Menorah: Instead of flame, just add water. Another indoor favorite, you can place blocks into the cups for a long lasting Menorah or you can shave the dry ice for a rapid transition to mist.

Salt Water Menorah: Really, just add lots of RF before lighting the water on fire.

Mixed-Marriage Menorah: For all those marriages that are Christian and Jewish, try a Christmas Tree Menorah. Larry actually does these occasionally, for Clan McDude.

Remember, your mileage and maiming may vary. Please do not attempt if you have no clue.

Problem: I’m a guy. When I try to cook, it uses these things called “in-gradients”. I am supposed to have little boxes, cylinders, and packets full of baking power, baking soda, and yeast.

Solution: I’ve already got a spice rack. Put ‘em in there.

Seriously, is it so hard to package baking powder into a spice jar? Or little packets of yeast in a spice jar? Every recipe wants a teaspoon or two. I don’t need a new shape in my three dimensional Tetris of cabinet space. And don’t get me started on bullion cubes!

Problem: I want a web browser plug-in that can edit the FavIcon for my bookmarks.

Solution: Build one.

There exist dozens of online FavIcon editors on the web. The FavIcon is the small graphic in the corner of the address book; the one for this site looks like this .  Some tools, like FavIcon Picker 2 let bookmarks be reduced to just the icon, making a compact tool bar of bookmarks. Unfortunately, not every site has a favorite icon, and different services help on the same favorite icon. For example, Google, Google (Linux) search, and Google Analytics have the same favicon.  I want to make my own icon as a minor variation of the single standard icon.  Alternately, I want to make dirt simple favicons for sites that have none.

My feature list for such a program would include:

• Take an existing favicon and alter the colors.  The red “G” might be search, the “blue” might be analytics.
• Add a letter overlay onto existing favicons, so my “Google Linux” button has an “L” on it.
• Create a one or two character favicon so that the cool Widgets site with no icon could get a “red Wi” favicon in my bookmarks.

None of this is particularly odd or difficult.  It’s a matter of a GUI front end, some data files, and some shelling out to ImageMagick to do the actual work.  Hmm….

I was there at Ocean Tomo’s Spring 2008 Live IP Auction, as a last minute assistant to a bidder. My role was to fetch and carry, drive, navigate, hunt for power outlets, obtain lunch, chase Ocean Tomo minions, and generally clear away all the little things that might get in the way of spending a million dollars. It was an experience.

The Auction Layout

Arriving at the Ritz-Carlton, the oddly lax layout immediately struck me as odd. There would be real money being spent, and Ocean Tomo would be keeping 25% of each auction as its take. A throng of black suited, white shirt lawyers shmoozed before being let into the room. They were there to witness an auction; the actual bidders often wore business casual attire. Watchers outnumbered bidders by many to one. Ocean Tomo dove-tailed their IP Strategy conference to the auction and invited all the conference attendees.

The thronged room included several strange little booths pimping specific patents and lots. Inventors were often on hand with little binders of information. News clips alleging greatness and multiple infringers were blown up for even the poorest eyesight. Little dishes of chocolate were available. All this was standard for a high value auction, but all wrong. The booths should be pimping for the next auction, not this one.

Patent auctions are not like auctions for artwork, automobiles, or fancy jewelery: there are no impulse purchases. Valuation, the guessing at a patent’s value, take time. After about forty hours of patent attorney time, reports from outside search firms, and understanding what engineering details could be worked around, then one can make fuzzy guess of the strength of the patent in litigation and a rough number for value generated. Also, Ocean Tomo requires you to specify what lots you are bidding on in advance and see some guarantees that you can pay your bid. Even the crazed executive could not impulse buy.

The Auction Itself

The auction was managed by an auctioneer, surprise! The auction process was never quite clear and evolved during use. Somewhere in the middle, the auctioneer started using the “going once, going twice, gone” model well known to everyone. Still, there were oddities. Starting prices were strange and somewhat random and would be reduced if there was no bid at that price. About half of the auctions sold to a sole bidder. There were hidden reserve amounts below which the lot would not be sold: one lot bid up to $700,000 and was below reserve. There was at least one “after gavel absentee bid” which was announced only after the gavel signaled the end of bidding and then opened up bidding again. Of more concern was the bidding on ‘our’ lot.

We were at the back of the room when the lot came up. We ended up bidding against two other bidders in ever increasing amounts. Several of the intermediate bids were off a bit: raises of $25,000 taken as raises of $10,000; a sign for “more time please” taken as a raise for $10,000. The final bid was heard correctly after being repeated, so no harm done.

There was a slightly slimy feel to all the gawkers. We had one person who moved behind us to try to puzzle out who we represented and tried asking when that failed. Anonymity had been promised, though no one stopped the press guy taking photos through the auction. I got the impression that most experienced bidders used the phone bank. They had people on platforms who would call registered buyers just before the lot came up, rely the bidding to them and correctly relay bids back to auctioneer.

Some lots traded for a millions. Several lots couldn’t get the minimum bid of $10,000: junk patents are not worth much. This auction seemed to favor computer hardware and software patents with less interest in materials and power technology.

Planning to Buy A Patent?

I have three pieces of advice if you plan to buy a patent at auction…

First, plan on time to evaluate the patent. It will take about two weeks and $30,000 to get ready. It will take a day or two getting your accounting department enough money to your intermediary. It will take a night’s sleep to decide if your decision is correct.

Second, use an intermediary. Have an agent or your outside counsel actually register and bid. You *really* do not want anyone to know you bid on a patent and failed to acquire it. It is worth the hassle to provide a back-up to the confidentiality policy of Ocean Tomo

Finally, bid on the phone. Being there in person makes you possible to recognize, makes it harder to bid correctly, and forgoes the option of a group sitting around a comfortable conference room table making the best decisions.

It was Fun

It was a fun day. I got to be an unpaid gopher and observer without stress. I gained an experience point: my expected behavior for buying or selling patents at auction changed. And I got to take home a bidding paddle used to spend over a million dollars. According to QFM, someone might be very interested in this paddle. I wonder what it’s worth on Ebay?