Monthly Archives: November 2007

I came across hi5, yet another social networking site, as the number 9 site on Alexa, according to traffic.  It turns out that part of the reason for all the traffic, according to Wikipedia, is that hi5 is the leading social networking site in a bunch of central american countries.  It continues to be intriguing to see social networking sites find niches geographically; after all, one of the pitches for the value of social networking is that it spans geographies!  One hypothesis is that even though “The World is Flat”, the vortex argument still breaks at national borders, because most people don’t interact regularly with people in different countries?  Will this continue?  Or will globalization lead to a flattening of social networking?

One interesting way to answer this research question would be to study social networking in the EU versus social networking in Central America.  My conjecture is that within the EU there will be a single dominant player, while across Central and South America there may be different players that dominate in different countries. 

John

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My firefox suffers from major bloat, especially now that I run gmail (with gmail macros, of course), and google reader.  Here‘s a very interesting post that suggests that the problem is not leaks (as conventional wisdom would have it), but our old friend fragmentation.  The argument is that firefox does lots and lots of allocation, and ends up with most of the free memory in tiny little chunks which can neither be returned to the OS (because they’re in blocks that are partially used), nor paged out (because the page has some active stuff on it).  It will be interesting to see the solutions that work in practice …

John

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I don’t have a good way to tie this to our research, but I’ll stretch …

A BBC program says that drugs for ADHD (like Ritalin) don’t work well for kids over the long-term.  This study is a follow-up of a study by the same authors that found that over the first year the drugs had very positive effects.  Over a three-year time-frame, the authors found (a) NO beneficial effects; but (b) significant decrease in height and weight gain.  I haven’t read the scientific papers, so I don’t know how strong these results were, but I imagine they’re scary for parents.  The problem is that some kids who need these drugs are quite difficult to manage without them, even getting violent.  What can be done for them, their parents, and their teachers?

Now the stretch …

When I worked in Net Perceptions, I noticed that many Internet executives had the classic problems associated with ADHD: short attention span, inability to sit still, and excitability.  I speculated at the time that the Internet boom would bust if Ritalin ever got into the Silicon Valley water supply :).  If we did have a way to dial up the perfect personality for each of us, I wonder what the long-term social effects would be?  Would we have a lot more happy people and a lot less innovation?  How do we as a society make the trade-offs between value to the society and value to the individual? 

John

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I just got a reminder email about the OLPC laptops going on sale on Monday at 6am EST. I’ve recently been thinking about getting one. My
primary concern is that it might be too small for me to type on. On the
other hand, it’s not meant to be a primary machine. What do you think?
Is it worth $400 to get a laptop and donate a laptop?
If you aren’t familiar with OLPC, it’s a really exciting project. Check it out at www.laptop.org.