Marissa Mayer on Privacy

As TechCruch appropriately pointed out, it must be Google week on the Charlie Rose program. I just finished watching the interview with Marissa Mayer. There wasn't anything earth shattering in the interview, but it's the first time I've watched a lengthy interview with her.

Mayer has taken a beating lately, and I don't know enough to weigh in on whether or not it's deserved. All I will say is that, for its size, Google still seems like a pretty well run company that stays focused on its core business. Mayer has obviously been a part of that.

As usual during interviews with Internet execs, a question was asked about all of the information that Google has and the associated risks to our privacy. It's a valid concern, and the media should certainly ask questions about this. However, Google seems to often be the whipping boy for criticism about its database of personal information.

In their responses, most technology pros talk about the tradeoff between the usefulness of all these online tools and the information that we must share to make them useful. Mayer tows the line, but she also points out a couple other examples of places where personal information is amassed in startling depth:

Charlie Rose:
You guys have an enormous amount of data that you — you know more about people than what they buy, their email, who their friends are. It’s extraordinary phenomenon that one company would have so much knowledge about so many people.

Marissa Mayer:
It is. But there’s actually a lot of other analogies around that people don’t think about in terms of who knows what. I will say that, you know, we have a very strict privacy policy. We try to be very up front with our users, what information we have and how we’ll use it. But search engines aren’t alone. ISPs, your ISP knows a lot of what you do.

Charlie Rose:
You’re right.

Marissa Mayer:
Innocently, your credit card company knows a lot what you do. I was reading an article just the other day that said your credit card company knows two years beforehand that you’re going to get divorced with 98 percent likelihood.

Who do you trust more with all of this information: credit card companies (i.e., very large financial institutions), Internet service providers (i.e., the media giants) or Google? Of the three, Google seems just a bit more trustworthy.

Tribute to the Winter of Vomit

Gastroenteritis has been ripping through these parts at breakneck speed this winter, so much so that I declared this the Winter of Vomit a few weeks ago. In tribute, I've composed a few haiku:

Volumes of vomit
Are spewing from our children
I hope we're not next

Buckets of vomit
Fill the air with awful stench
Go easy, stomach

Here is a bucket
It is now filled with vomit
Time to do laundry

The whole family is healthy at the moment. Hopefully, we can stay that way for a while.

Distractions

In today's SmartBrief, there is a link to a post on the NY Times Shifting Careers blog. Author Maggie Jackson writes about how distracted we have all become in the Information Age. Here are a couple interesting facts:

Interruptions and the requisite recovery time now consume 28 percent of a worker’s day, the business research firm Basex estimates. The risks are clear.

Employees who are routinely interrupted and lack time to focus are more apt to feel frustrated, pressured and stressed, according to separate studies by [Gloria] Mark and the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit group.

There are no big surprises here, but the quantification of these phenomena are still remarkable. I am not so sure about the attempt to draw an analogy with the "planet focus" terminology, but there are some good observations and suggestions here.

My greatest career battle is an ever-diminishing sense of accomplishment. Even the most mundane tasks like managing my to-do list (now at 128 items) or listening to voice mail (43 last time I checked) have become huge challenges. I now receive 200+ emails per day, not including spam. Overload is real; it's not a pop culture complaint.

I suspect that the root cause of much of this pain is the distraction syndrome that Ms. Jackson talks about. It's amazing how productive I can be when I can focus. Staying focused has gone from a good work habit to a major league skill.

Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated

The same guys that brought us last year's study indicating that obesity is "contagious" are back with new research showing that smokers often quit in groups. The details are summarized in a Washington Post article today.

Taken together, these studies and others are fueling a growing recognition that many behaviors are swayed by social networks in ways that have not been fully understood. And it may be possible, the researchers say, to harness the power of these networks for many purposes, such as encouraging safe sex, getting more people to exercise or even fighting crime. 

I think many missionaries would find this research to be confirmation of what they've known for years -- that people often make major decisions together in groups. The specifics vary from culture to culture, but this is just more evidence to suggest that we are wired to interact socially with each other. Making major decisions, even tough ones, based on social influence, doesn't seem that surprising.

This also leads us to think about the potential influence of online social networks. My guess is that additional research will find that the online connections are just an additional method of communication and that real personal connections must have an offline component.

I Never Meant this to be a Daddy Blog, but...

As if this day hadn't already crashed and burned, it is now BBR (burned beyond recognition)!

J-dog wasn't feeling well when we got home from the airport this afternoon. After a nap he started complaining of a sore throat, so Lisa took him to the doctor. Turns out he has strep throat. Poor kid. To cap things off, Jack gagged when the nurse took the throat culture and filled the sink with a partially-digested McDonald's lunch.

Lisa and the nurse knew it wasn't norovirus or food poisoning when Jack proceeded to analyze the contents of his vomitous, deciding that the hamburgers had digested but the fries had not. He then proclaimed that he was starving.

Beware the Ides of March

We left for vacation this morning, but our flight was canceled. We came back home, and we'll try again tomorrow. I found it amusing that this happened on March 15th. Yesterday I remarked to a co-worker, tongue-in-cheek, that it was rather foreboding that we were departing on the Ides of March.

The airport was mobbed (unusual for Akron) with hundreds of spring breakers headed south. When they announced the cancellation, all the children started crying. It was sad to see that many kids crying at the same time. They were just heartbroken.

Merry Christmas

Another frenetic Christmas morning has mercifully come to an end. It's so much easier with the kids getting older. But they are still kids...

This cartoon really cracked me up. It's so true.

Raising Boys

This from GreatDad.com is hysterical. My favorite:

You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way. 

The Million Dollar Kid

This weekend's Wall Street Journal includes a piece about how much people spend on their children. They only focus on those in the top third income bracket, so as one would expect, there is some pretty shocking stuff here. The USDA estimates that the total cost to raise a child born in 2005 to these top earners is $279,450. I was unable to find any data this recent on the USDA web site, but there is some corroborative information on MSN Money. The WSJ says that the richest of the rich, so-called "Platinum" parents, spend up to $1.6 million to raise a child. Yikes!

Some of the extreme spending examples are incredible: $800 strollers, $1,000 birthday parties, etc. Other tidbits:

• Half of American teenagers own an MP3 player, and they each spend an average of $361 annually on iTunes downloads
• One in ten children now attends a private school
• The average domestic one-week vacation costs $1,830, and the average trip to Disney World is over $5,000 (uh... I think we'll skip that, thank you)
• Nearly two out of three teenagers has a cell phone
• Average cost of a 4-week summer camp is $3,000
  

After fifteen years in the toy industry, I am no longer surprised at the lengths to which some parents will go to give their children a "complete" experience or a competitive "edge." I've encountered my share of these parents over the years. In some cases I believe it actually reaches the point of child worship. Remarkably, though, most of the kids who don't have all these "advantages" seem to turn out just fine or better than the ones who "have it all."

To the immediate north of us is a very wealthy community, and just to our south is one that is decidedly middle class. Our city has people who would fit comfortably in either of these towns and a lot of people in between. Economically, we're a pretty heterogeneous community.

As I look at my kids' friends and get to know their parents, things generally seem pretty well balanced here. There are overactive over achievers and couch potato underachievers, and there seem to be some at each end of the economic spectrum of our community.

There's a Cost of Raising a Child Calculator on BabyCenter. It only goes back as far as birth year 1999, which is when Jack was born. Including college, it estimates that it will cost us $466,828 to raise Jack. They break the expenses down by category, it's actually somewhat believable. There are no splurge items listed.

Steve Jobs, Proud to Be Nonunion

I just Dugg this story from Wired that talks about Steve Jobs' position on school reform. The writer's left-wing rant holds some water, but hidden in his diatribe is his agreement that the current structure of teachers unions does not help our education system. Yes,  public schools are indeed a reflection of the socio-economic realities of their communities. Yes, Steve Jobs is right about the fact that unions hamper the ability to recruit and retain the highest-quality educators.

I don't know much about Steve Jobs' other political or economics views. Given his Silicon Valley roots, I bet he and the Wired writer are on more common ground than the article would suggest. As for me, I'm now one step closer to actually considering a Mac for my next computer.