This guy is awesome. He’s up there with Hedberg and Gaffigan in my opinion.

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem — Genesis 1:1, Ceiling Cat

[ The LOLCat Bible ]

This explains a lot.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the phenomenon whereby people who don’t know anything about something think they know more than those who do. The peculiar part is that those who lack the expertise are often far more confident and forceful when they discuss the issue than those who are knowledgeable.

This is because those who are knowledgeable know enough to know what they don’t know, whereas the pseudo-experts do not. The effect ends up being that the idiots with only partial knowledge come off as forceful and confident, while those who are more educated end up hesitating and appearing less versed on the topic.

Here are some main findings:

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

So the question for all of us is simple: how often have we been this guy? How many people do we know who are still this guy? And how do we avoid being this guy in the future? It’s definitely an issue for someone like me since my whole thing is quickly building (and sharing with others) models for understanding complex topics. It’s also an issue when the public is watching two people debate in order to determine who is better qualified in a particular area.

Anyway, definitely check out the Wikipedia article.

Well, after three years as a consultant I am re-entering the corporate world. I’ll be working with a great company (Fortune 200) that has been voted by Fortune nine years in a row as one of the best 100 companies to work for. It was an excellent opportunity that I simply couldn’t pass up.

Some things I’m looking forward to with the move:

1. Being with my fiancé
2. Not living in two places anymore
3. Enhancing my core technical knowledge
4. Going back to school
5. Re-energizing my home network

Anyway, it’s an interesting time to start a new chapter — January 2008, while the economy seems to be on the verge of tanking. Here’s to hoping for the best.

Oh, and expect a lot more technical content. :)

Cheers,

-Daniel

I wrote recently about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content on meritocracy-based sites like Digg and Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have towards reading self-submitted material. I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic.

But even more important than asking readers to appreciate self-submitted content is the call for people to write and submit their own. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit.

There are thousands upon thousands of good writers out there — people who could be improving the quality of what we see here everyday. But we won’t ever experience what they have to offer because there’s nobody to bring it to our attention. What are the odds that their stuff is going to be randomly “discovered”? Not good. The only only option is for them to drop the socially ingrained false-modesty and present it themselves.

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress.

So to all of you who think you have something to offer — show us. Getting someone else to submit it for you is more shady than doing it yourself, and it’s not going to be discovered on accident. If you’re doing anything to increase your chances of being seen (SEO, word-of-mouth promotion, etc.) you’re already playing the system. Accept this and have the balls to submit your own material if you think it’s worth reading.

The filter for good content on these sites is the voting system, not the source of the article. The approach that is best for the community is to get as much content into the system as possible and allow the voting to work for us. We cannot afford to discourage high-quality writers with foolish source-based filtering.

If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means 1) appreciating quality writing even when it’s submitted by the author, and 2) creating and submitting our own material without fearing the stigma of self-promotion.:

Twitter is one of the most interesting web services to come out in recent memory. Many are aware of it but most don’t use it. The reason is usually one of these two:

1. Not knowing what it is.
2. Thinking it’d be a constant annoyance.

What It Is

Twitter is basically a text message broadcast service. When doing something interesting (interesting is key, as we’ll see later) we are often compelled to send one or more of our friends a text message. With Twitter you send that same text message to a single place and have everyone who’s following you on Twitter receive it at the same time.

That’s how it works, but it’s not the important part.

The important thing to realize about Twitter is that it gives us the ability to reconnect with the lives of loved ones that are outside our geographic area. It’s so easy to let people slip from your mind — people who’d be part of your daily life if they lived closer. Nothing is more sad than realizing that you haven’t communicated with a friend or relative that was once so close to you in months.

Avoiding the Annoyance

Another problem with Twitter for many is the fact that each tweet represents an interrupt. If you subscribe to any of the Tim Ferriss or David Allan systems for time management, you’re likely to be adverse to the idea of having people constantly blasting you with text messages. Fair enough.

The trick is to come to an agreement with those you subscribe to. It all comes down to managing the quality and frequency of what gets Tweeted. If people use it too infrequent you don’t feel entwined with your them, and if they abuse it it’ll become a nuisance.

Try and communicate that tweets should be interesting to others (it’s been called micro-blogging). Posting things like, “Going to the bathroom again.”, or “Heading home from work.” is likely to make people stop following your account — or even unsubscribe from Twitter altogether.

Summary

So that’s the balance we’re looking for — get the benefit of re-connecting with friends while simultaneously avoiding the annoyance of too many interrupts. If we keep this in mind it’s possible to get quite a bit out of Twitter. Give it a second look.:

[ Original, longer version here ]

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

Create three types of tags within Google Reader.

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions - whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

I just added a new article to the /study section of the site. This one is a basic explanation of how Cross Site Scripting works.

[ Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Explained ]

Here he is ignoring a man in a wheelchair and essentially admitting he’d have him arrested for inhaling a common plant when it’s his only way to get relief.

Romney just very clearly showed us what kind of man he is, and I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think Jesus would approve…

A company called Nanosolar has reportedly found a way to build solar cells 100 times thinner, but in 1% of the time. As a result, they’ve supposedly reached the $1/watt threshold that makes solar more viable than coal.

This seems somewhat…major. A couple of other points:

• A top IBM’s executive has joined Nanosolar
• The company has raised raised $100 million already and has orders to keep its 600,000 sq. ft. factory busy for the first year and a half

Seems pretty legit — or at least moreso than the dozen perpetual motion companies that have come out with major press releases over the years. I can’t wait to see how this plays out. I just hope these guys spend some of that investment money on security.