Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Joel writes about measuring and incenting performance: Managers like to implement measurement systems, and they like to tie compensation to performance based on these measurement systems. But in the absence of 100% supervision, workers have an incentive to "work to the measurement," concerning themselves solely with the measurement and not with the actual value or quality of their work. 11:33:00 PM

Let's see what the esteemed Dr. Carl Sagan had to say on the matter of crop circles. Thanks for the link, Lisa (who raises another good point: if everybody acknowledges that all of the original crop circles were created by a couple of guys in England, it's a pretty striking coincidence, then, that some highly evolved space-faring race chose to communicate with us the same way). Anyway. Here's Carl: The tenets of skepticism do no require an advanced degree, as most successful used-car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their TV commercials. 5:01:13 PM

Weblogs will be the death of Google within a couple of years. If I understand the basic premise behind the use of Google, it's to search for information using one or more keywords. The expectation is that you get relevant results. Google's popularity has been a combination of simplicity and accuracy: you tend to get to where you want to be. But the search itself is a means to an end. The most important thing is that you get the information you're looking for As far as I understand the basic implementation of Google's page ranking, links are treated as kind of currency for "for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them." Blogs have lots of links. They link to lots of other blogs with lots of other links. In the insanely short time I've been regularly maintaining this site, I've discovered myself at or near the top of lots of different searches that may or may not have anything to do with what somebody was looking for. It's not that much of a problem now. But it's starting to crop up with greater frequency that the combination of keywords that I've used in a search returns results from a single blog with multiple, unrelated posts.The more popular blogs become, and the more they age, the more blogs will dominate the search results. Google could clearly change the way the rank pages, but anything other than a drastic change won't work. Maybe they'll need to add a new tab, just for blogs, similar to images and newsgroups. But unless something is done to filter out the growing number of blogs, it will become harder and harder to find relevant results. Once enough people discover that Google isn't relevant anymore, well, the next new thing will take over. 4:04:03 PM

Washington Post editorial: What is Operation TIPS? 10:41:53 AM

I made my font changes (or, more accurately, removed most font-specific settings from my styles) prior to reading Mark's take on using relative font sizes. If I understand the point of all this, the default browser font sizes are either too small or too large so we use style sheets to "fix" them, making them either larger or smaller. But we can't make them absolute (I agree) because for somebody ELSE, my choices may be either too large or too small. And because there are all sorts of software bugs and cross-platform issues with CSS, you need to insert oodles of lines of code to ensure that the font changes scale up or down like they normally would if you didn't bother to fix their size in the first place. Maybe it's because I'm not really "a design guy" who feels the need to micro-manage my font sizes down to the pixel, or point, or whatever granularity matters, but I don't understand why this is an issue. I'm constantly changing the font sizes in my browser. I do it so much that I added the non-default "size" button to my toolbar (at least for IE, right-click in a blank space on your toolbar, select "customize..." then add the "size button"). Usually I keep the font size at "smallest" and that works just fine. What is the benefit -- either to myself, or to the "end users" -- of specifying a particular font size in a style sheet, then surrounding in by code to make sure it scales appropriately for different browsers? 10:35:34 AM