The list is pretty random, and there’s probably a need to investigate or at least share how the evidentiary grades are assigned.

But, I can see there being some value to this type of easily understood distillation of typically complex research papers. (Certainly the autism community could use this if only to collect the research in one place.) I see this as a neat add-on to the orphan idea proposal for evidence-based diets, one that ties to other diet-related projects.

Combining either the diet idea or this supplement one (and supplements makes more sense as an initial project because of the money actually involved) with some cost measures would facilitate integration with the benefits to be perhaps presented with a mindset like that in this predictive health intervention tool  (again, fairly simple in this iteration but certainly susceptible of increased complexity).

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

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I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

Basically, these folks made a list of “cool” brands and decided to report the performance of this “stock portfolio.” Now, in fact, they’ve morphed this into a contest where brand fans can post content, get “hearts” awarded by the other users, and win a share of stock in that company. So, the underlying idea is really about marketing and getting people to engage.

But to me the more interesting idea is one that creates stock portfolios like this, personal tracking funds, for various reasons.

One is definitely vanity/marketing. The idea that mybrandz, which seems to be some sort of branding consultancy (there’s probably a Madison Ave. term for it, but here on the outside I’d call it that), creates a portfolio that is designed to draw attention to their underlying business. How about someone like Flextronics creating a portfolio of their customers, or at least of large electronics companies that rely heavily on outsourced manufacturing?

Another goal might be to double-down or indulge in your personal spending. AmericanExpress could probably create such a portfolio automatically from my statements of the companies where I invest spend the most money each month, or that have the highest number of transactions. What do I get from that? Well, if “my” companies are doing well, maybe I interpret that to mean that I’m good at identifying quality or value.

I could take that same information that “my” companies are doing well and I interpret that to mean that I’m feeding these expectations of growing corporate profits that are feeding the stock price increases and –whew–therefore should shop somewhere else. Indeed, instead of doing namby-pamby personal balance sheets for their clients, perhaps Ameriprise could just suck in account information from the other side of the house to identify quantifiable improvements in spending. Admittedly it’s a bit abstract, but that’s where we started.

Sales professionals always talk about customer results as a means of convincing new customers, with everything from 17% reductions in postage to airport terminal ads that say “Nike runs SAP.” Those are different methods of saying the same thing: we helped these folks — we can help you. Maybe if your sales target is the CEO/CFO of a publicly traded company, you should simply post the “McKinsey Portfolio Index” and let the chips fall where they may. The CEOs who won’t be impressed by this won’t even notice it, and the ones who will be impressed will, well, be impressed. The concept works best when you do all the work for a particular company so that you can claim the credit.

Do companies who use only FedEx do better than those that use only UPS? Well, the samples aren’t likely to be equivalent, but if you’re on the winning side of that argument, wouldn’t you post the data? Let the other side complain that their customers are in low-margin businesses and so the comparison isn’t really fair, blah blah blah. Hint: no customer wants to sign up to be part of the “low-margin business” crowd.

What other benefits or use cases do you see to creating your own stock portfolio like this? What would make you do it for yourself? Or for your company or business?

This WSJ article on nutrients in your diet describes some of the connections between diet, mainly of vitamins and trace minerals, and health from an immune response perspective. One more reason to look at all the studies and dietary pieces as a consolidated whole rather than “take two fish oil caplets a day.”

With detailed information from a variety of sources on the actions taken, not the words spoken or empathy expressed, we parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and especially self-advocates can become vastly better informed about how to cast our votes. Americans have spread out across the states and towns of our nation throughout the last 50 years; few of us live with our whole families in towns where we can influence political processes to the same extent as those who recognize more clearly defined common interests. But our children our everywhere, and there’s no reason my parents in upstate NY shouldn’t be voting to support ASD issues there just like my friends in California or Massachusetts. The problems of those children ARE my son’s problems. This entire class of children and adults, and perhaps an entire burgeoning ASD generation, needs our protection, assistance, and support so we can build in them the power to speak for themselves.

“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men….”

From a technical perspective, I imagine this project as being built in layers as tools rather than documents. What this means is that it starts with a straightforward national layer, since there are a number of good sources to get information about Congress and votes/actions on bills/amendments. It’s also relatively easy to look at something like Autism Votes for a list of important bills to track. Similar tools could be built at the state and then county/local levels to track both legislators and legislation. Then, the system could be expanded to track the executive branch and even judges. A user should be able to designate an organization that maintains a list of the public policy issues that group is tracking (like Autism Votes does here).

So what makes this different than Autism Votes? First off, I see this as a very direct, reductionist verdict, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on every person tracked. Remember, the premise is that ASD issues are more important to most people in our community than just about anything else. I don’t know at which point this idea crosses over into lobbying and the political influence categories that trigger different regulatory requirements, but it’s not a problem at this nascent stage.

The key to this project is the combination of some straightforward web 2.0 tools with a definite crowdsourced component (only locals will put school board names on a list after each election) and the ability to share judgments OPENLY, so people can advocate for their own views. For example, I would imagine that the science-heavy crowd among parents would diverge greatly from the “warrior mom” contingent on how they would rate people who support/oppose particular vaccine research funding. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Politics is how we deal with allocations of scarce resources in a democracy. It might as well work!

(As an aside, if this project were built with an open and extensible design plan, such as using references to open-source/public wiki-style definitions files, it could be expanded into a grass-roots political action tool for people with any particular concern.)

Quick Reference for Causes of Action and Affirmative Defenses in Texas. — Caselaw Snippets from Recent Texas Appellate Opinions.

Lawyers with a national practice (often driven by national clients) can spend a surprising amount of time pulling specific quotes from the relevant jurisdiction to either get complaints or answers filed or serve as the initial structure for various motions. The exact language of a cause of action may vary just slightly from state to state, and it never hurts to have the elements exactly right, since words, and the particularities of construction and meaning, are the tools of a good lawyer.

This is a great idea worth copying and extending to other jurisdictions, and even, if another tech-savvy lawyer were inclined, to collate into a wiki-style site to collect these statements.

Laws (and court opinions) belong to the people.

This very funny tweet triggered my memory and got me to put this post together:

Idea of the day: 100-calorie workout packs to work off those 100-calorie snack packs.

This model, of course, works for most people. However, there are organizations where privacy and security are more important for any number of reasons, from client promises to competitive pressure to regulatory requirements. These groups can not easily use webapps like this because the security and data privacy issues are fuzzy at best, in the absence of particularized licensing agreements, which is pretty much antithetical to the concept of webapps! (Perhaps this post will uncover some completely specialized services that are built to solve these problems, like garbage companies that agree to keep your garbage private, in part so that you have an expectation of privacy and the police can’t legally go through it without a warrant.)

One way to resolve the dilemma, in a way that would work for someone using a single computer to access the webapp, would be a plugin, perhaps using something like Gears to maintain some level of persistence, that encodes certain of your data that you enter into the webapp as a layer in-between your keyboard/browser and the http packets going back and forth.

Aside: I do specifically mean encoding here, substituting a whole word or sign (like “ketchup”) for the plaintext (like “Rick Colosimo”). This practice would allow you to not worry about the security at the webapp, or even of the traffic after it leaves your browser (both things hard to control) in favor of having to secure your laptop (maybe not easy to do but certainly easier to control).

Example: I type in, on my Basecamp page, something like “Buy 1000 shares Illumina for Rick Colosimo.” The plugin turns that into “buy rabbit shares of denver for fox.” That is what gets sent to the webapp and what it stores. Anyone else accessing the data, either through the servers directly or via the web, gets my encoded message. Using the plugin, though, I get back my correct message and should never, in fact, even see the coded version. Just like on-the-fly translation, I never see the other words. But this doesn’t require AI or huge amounts of processing power because the code structure (vs encryption) is a relatively static set of substitutions.

So now I can keep, for example, student records from my son’s school on a webapp, easily accessible by parents, while not worrying about whether I’m violating FERPA or HIPAA (or even whether I *have* to comply!).

Sure, this solution in the way I’ve described it doesn’t replace a fully secure, private, webapp. But it does so better than the non-secure, non-private webapp does today! Could it be extended, or tweaked to allow for online access to code cheatsheets? Sure. It might be very easy to include the code words within a series of obfuscated plaintext or html files, or even inside a photo on a website using steganography to protect it.

Please share your tips for increasing webapp privacy & security in the comments.

One alternative to drafting that I’ve always liked: “check the box” forms.” During any moderately stable period in Silicon Valley, certain terms become “market,” meaning that there’s little real dispute about them in substance and only some modest dispute about seemingly meaningless particulars (such as how many demand registrations an investor gets — as Ted notes, how often is that number, 1 or 2 or 3, actually operative? How often is the number even relevant for discussions, negotiations, or planning?). A similar drafting approach is used in traditional corporate finance documents, where definitions are used to maintain standard document formats with the deal particulars implemented via the definitions, e.g., Interest Rate shall mean seven percent (7%) per annum.

Using reasonable standard language would allow any law firm to essentially take minor issues off the table, or at least put them in proper perspective, and push the negotiations and diligence process to the most economically important items: capitalization, IP, voting rights, and liquidation rights. This reductionist approach helps parties move past the distracting issues and focuses them on the critical facts to identify in the due diligence process: the dealbreakers, the price-changers, and the term-changers. (Everything else is effectively ignored at this stage if it doesn’t have one of those three effects.)

I’ll look for the forms and post whatever I come up with.

I like the trendwatching briefings: they’re actually insightful rather than wishful thinking; they seek to recognize trends rather than create them. (I’ve always wondered about that particular issue in the fashion world — do designers discover hot colors or try to make a color hot?)

In this discussion of foreverism, which is a little broad, there is a subsection on Forever Beta. Maybe that’s the world’s new take on planned obsolescence. After all, if the software is regularly upgradeable on my phone, maybe you don’t have to make the phone break after all. This approach could clearly be more consistent with improving free cash flow, since software typically has a higher gross margin and, for a company in the marketplace today, they already have to expend the capital to create competitive software in the first place. Sales to people with older phones really exist on the margin, and they can therefore deliver even higher profitability. (Of course, this is one example; tell me how it would work for your field in the comments.)

Another way I think of this is in terms of companies using their brands to create value for customers rather than to take or destroy value for customers. I’ve long said that there are two types of companies: those that make money by giving more to customers and those that make money by giving less to customers. (Put your matched pairs in the comments!)

If you stop breaking your products but let customers use what they have, you’re at least not destroying value (Dell, you failed me when you changed the power connector on the same model number laptop AFTER I bought your extra charger!, and Fujitsu, when you changed the main battery design on your T4xxx series convertible tablets). Companies that use nonstandard power connectors, chargers, interface cables, and so on are showing us exactly what they think (revealed preferences: Economics-speak for “actions speak louder than words) about customer: suck them in with low price main object and charge more than value for accessories.

What companies don’t seem to grasp is that it’s this strategy that creates markets for competitive/knockoff/third-party accessories such as chargers, cellphone batteries, headsets, and so on. Who wants to pay $100 for a single-purpose Fujitsu laptop power cord when I can buy an iGo and extend it across all my devices? Heck, Fujitsu — if you made the universal charger, I would probably invest in your brand since I’m already springing $3-4k for the tablet!

In the olden days, i.e., when I was still in high school, information costs were far too high to undertake the sort of product searching that is now virtually automatic with, e.g., Amazon’s “people also bought…” section on product pages. Companies don’t seem to grasp that consumer behavior is changing rapidly because of the huge drop in costs.

The response from companies is that “our customers are searching on price, not value, and so we have to keep the price of X low like our competitors and make up the difference somewhere else.” Not only am I unsure of whether this is really true (as opposed to, for example, a rational response to high information costs of comparing products), but my sense is that it’s an effect, not a cause, of the fuzzy price-gouging that I’ve described. If customers aren’t seeing the value of your product, I have two questions: 1, do you know what the value of your product is TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, not to you, and 2, are you really communicating the value to them or hiding the ball with easy to sound important lists of specifications that don’t mean anything (like iLink (r) or FireWire (r) as branded names for a standard 1394 port)?

Apple has spawned a big ecosystem of people selling accessories for the iPod. But none of those people are really competing with Apple. I’d have to look for some numbers to justify my conclusion here, but I don’t think that Apple’s pricing policy is built around being able to sell Apple-branded chargers for iPods vs charging a healthy price for an iPod and looking elsewhere for something to sell that adds more value. Say what you will about iTunes, but it provides a lot of value to me, and the Amazon MP3 store doesn’t really match up quite as well, even at a (now-floating and fuzzy) 20% discount to a $0.99 song. In this respect, at least, I think the iPod and its relationship with accessories is a good example of how companies can compete where they want to compete and leave the extraneous stuff to others, deliberately.