Our final appartment in Sunnyvala, CA

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My colleagues @ Google

Chin Chin's visit for dinner at my work

Chin chin visiting at Google

Cruising through San Fran

Palo Alto airshow

My desk @ Google

Riding to work :-)

Farewell dinner

Gail, Shawn, Tonya, Karen and Alex were celebrating Alex's and my departure to Rhode Island (Alex) and San Jose, CA (Tobi). Food at Bizou at the Downtownmall in Charlottesville was great and it was a shame that we discovered the place on the last day here.

Temporary Housing (8/24/07 - 9/24/07)

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Process excellence <> Outcome

Bob Bruner, dean of Darden, visited the Boeing factory and reflects on what makes operations successful:

The ingenuity one observes in a visit to a plant like Boeing’s is a reminder that process excellence is a vital driver of high performance. This is a message that we emphasize in our courses at Darden. It is not sufficient to deliver a quality product; it takes quality processes to generate a sustainable competitive advantage.

Source: Bob Bruner, Dean of the Darden school

7.49 < 5.69: The Right Digit Effect

Based on research from Coulter is appears that consumers experience price-discounts greater based on the right digits of the price even in cases where the overall price might be higher:

We use four experiments to examine consumers' processing of comparative regular and sale price information in advertisements. Consistent with our hypothesized right digit effect, we find that, when consumers view regular and sale prices with identical left digits, they perceive larger price discounts when the right digits are "small" (i.e., less than 5) than when they are "large" (i.e., greater than 5). As a result, they may attribute greater value and increased purchase likelihood to higher-priced, lower-discounted items. We examine alternate processing explanations for this right digit effect, as well as the moderating impact of price presentation format.

KEITH S. COULTER, Journal of consumer research

"Illusion of truth" effect

Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this "illusion of truth" effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term but paradoxically made them more likely to remember it as true after a 3 day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself but decreased recollection of the claim's original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising.

Source: Ian Skurnik, Darden faculty

House hunting in Silicon Valley

I flew to SFO for a house hunting trip in and around Silicon Valley. There is a myriad of apartment complexes, houses and rental places. Random driving yields great success in finding the bigger complexes, craigslist is the means of choice to find rental places on the open market. Since I won't need an apartments before corporate housing ends in September I'm just driving around stopping here and there, taking a tour of a complex and moving on. It's a lot of fun and I even had the opportunity to stop by at a converted Seven-Eleven that become for a limited time a Kwik-E-Mart, known from the TV show The Simpsons.

Peach picking

The weather was great and therefore Karen and I decided to pick peaches nearby on a farm in Crozet, VA. It's a lot of fun and one can eat as many peaches "on the job" as you can. For economists, this is a nice example of real-life decreasing marginal utility: after 5 peaches one barely has an interest in another one :-)

Cookies and What-you-see-is-what-you-get

Jean Piaget noticed in 1920 that children often fail to distinguish between perception of an object and the object's actual properties. When a two-year old child sees her playmate leave the room, and then sees and adult remove a cookie from a cookie jar and hide it in a drawer, she expects that her playmate will later look for the cookie in the drawer - despite the fact that her playmate was not in the room when the adult moved the cookie to the drawer from the jar. Why? Because the two-year old child knows the cookie is in the drawer and thus expects that everyone else knows this as well. Without a distinction between things in the world and things in the mind, the child cannot understand how different minds can contain different things. Piaget concluded that "the child is a realist in its thought" and that "its progress consists in riddling itself of this initial realism." Children come to realize that perceptions are merely points of view, that what they see is not necessarily what there is, and that two people may thus have different perceptions of or beliefs about the same thing.

Q: Are you aware of different perceptions?

Source: Stumbling on happiness, 2007.

Open Source & The Cathedral

Nicholas Carr distinguishes between the 'Cathedral' and 'Bazaar' model. The former is the traditional model 'from the ground up' for development of product and services and the later describes the 'Open Source' movement. The question is whether the Bazaar model can be used for everything like it was used for the development of Linux.

Carr claims that the bazaar model is most and only useful for actions that are divisible and require little coordination effort. Debugging is a typical tasks that can be parallelized. Like in an easter egg hunt, the bazaar model works best if there is a simple task 'find the easter eggs' and there are many independent participants.

The cathedral method is preferred for other tasks, e.g. product development from the ground up. It would be very challenging to develop a product in this way with so many participants. It should be noted, however, that even in the Linux project there was a tight advisory crowd that coordinated the debugging efforts of all the people. This ensured that the overall project moved into the right direction forward. As a side note, Wikipedia, another bazaar style project, does not have this kind of authority which makes it prone to prone to delays and errors.

In short, peer production works best for:

1. Routine tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd

2. Projects in which labor is donated and can be parallelized.

3. Projects that are not totally egalitarian or democratic.

Source: Nicholas G. Carr, The Ignorance of Crowds, Business & Strategy, Summer 2007.

Eric Schmitz's hiring lesson

According to a Stanford video, Eric Schmitz from Google claims that "A" hire "As" but type "B"-leader hire "C".

Countries visited

Decision making @ Starbucks

Five Easy Pieces