Thought Provoking

Camera Memory Card Failure Lessons

Photography, Tech, Thought Provoking

Lessons From Losing a Week of Photos to Memory Card Failure

This was interesting to read about losing a week’s worth of photos from a memory card failure. I have had my own woes with memory cards and USB drives failing without backups being done. The costs are quite prohibitive for restoring hardware failures as indicated in the piece. The main lessons are getting many cards (reading negative reviews to judge failure rate), backup often and use a camera with dual card slots.

Some negative customer reviews are frivolous because they are rooted in user error, or because they concern themselves with delivery rather than the product’s quality or performance. However, negative reviews are generally more significant than positive reviews.

If you think that one shouldn’t focus on the negative while the vast majority of reviews are positive, consider that on Amazon, the average rating for a product is 4.4 (out of 5) as found here by analyzing 7 million reviews. Even a product with an average 4.0 rating (4-star) is below average. The large majority of products are rated above 4.0, so the difference between a great product and a subpar product is less than 1 (star) on average. On the other hand, we’ve just seen that the number of 1-star reviews for different cards varies by a factor of four.

Read the whole article.

Follow the legend – Graphic ideals for displaying data

2010s, Development, Tech, Thought Provoking

I really enjoyed this post about how to convey information in graphs. Taking a simple Excel and changing it so that it conveys information more clearly. 

To accelerate that understanding, upgrade your line graphs to be efficient and truthful. Some broadly applicable principles should guide you to the right neighborhood.

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/11/13/remove-the-legend

Read the whole article for more. Perhaps Microsoft can upgrade this graphic capability for charts in the future in Excel.

Brexit may not happen.

2010s, Business, Economy, Finance, Thought Provoking

Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times on why Brexit may not happen.

And what kind of new concession should be offered? That is easy. What Mr Johnson would need to win a second referendum is an emergency brake on free movement of people, allowing the UK to limit the number of EU nationals moving to Britain if it has surged beyond a certain level.

In retrospect, it was a big mistake on the part of the EU not to give Mr Cameron exactly this concession in his renegotiation of the UK’s terms of membership early this year. It was the prime minister’s inability to promise that Britain could set an upper limit on immigration that probably ultimately lost him the vote.

Sounds logical to me.

Mongolia about to use the most advanced location system in the world for its postal system.

2010s, Mobile, Tech, Thought Provoking

Who knew that Mongolia would be the first country in the world to adopt the most accurate location system in the world for its postal service?

Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.

The new system is devised by a British startup called What3Words, which has assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the globe. The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency. In What3Words’ system, the idea is that a series of words is easier to remember than the strings of number that make up GPS coordinates. Each unique phrase corresponds to a specific 9-square-meter spot on the map.