robertparker

What's Going On With This This Site.

I want a site that reflects the way I think. My opinions aren't static blog posts, and my thoughts aren't endless streams. They're connected, and I wanted to give myself more context.

robertparker

“A key element of social networks is that the nodes are capable of cognition. People are reflective and projective creatures, and this affects how they react to their network positions, and how they change their network positions in pursuit of their goals. As a result, network researchers in the social sciences have become increasingly interested in how individual actors perceive (and systematically misperceive) the structure of the networks they are embedded in, and the consequences these perceptions can have…”

“Network Analysis in the Social Sciences”, Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca Science 13 February 2009: 892-895.

Facebook is eating the world. The global monolith went public in 2012 with the one of the largest rounds of financing in modern history. Its 28-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, never has to work again — he can live a millionaire’s life off the interest from his shares alone. Earlier this year, the company released Facebook Home, an Android app t

robertparker

Basketball, Twitter and the Era of the Athlete Commentator

Amnesty THAT

— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) February 24, 2013

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Sports journalism is reaching an awkward, hormonal stage in its evolution: one where entire articles annotate tweets; the dreaded [sic] imposes itself on every quote; and post-game interviews reach silly levels of non-candor.

Over the past decade, the antidote was fan blogging. Bill Simmons famously challenged Boston’s WEEI radio pantheon, and Henry Abott gained notoriety with TrueHoop. Now in 2013, Simmons is himself an established brand and Abbott oversees a network of TrueHoop blogs. Writing on Simmons’ own site Grantland, Carles delivered a eulogy for the fan perspect

robertparker

#In Search of Socialized Medicine

Policymakers have always been suckers for the new new thing. Faced with the burden of rising debt and aging populations in a complex world, they reach for an arsenal of silver bullets. “Innovation,” The Economist once declared, “is the new theology that unites the left and the right of politics.”

And so it is with health care: if there is an inviolable premise to the myriad new demonstrations and pilot programs being tested in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), it is that we can innovate our way to a better system. Section 3021 establishes the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to allow hospitals systems and provider groups to test promising care and payment models. Section 6301 establishes Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute to coordinate comparative-effectiveness research priorities and disseminate findings. There are initiatives for integrated care around a hospitalization (section 2704), payment bundling (section 3023), and

robertparker

Mumbai After 8 Years

I don’t understand India, but I finally understand that there is something to understand. A few years ago, a Rudyard Kipling quote adorned my apartment wall in Washington, DC:

“All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own Zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.”

My India was Kipling’s India: a country of the unwashed masses, wondrous and unbelievable and somehow patched together with some mystical thread. Now, seeing Mumbai, southern Maharashtra and Goa for the first time in 8 years, I think this interpretation is, if not patronizing, then exceedingly lazy.

Accepting India’s chaos and mystique left me blind to the logic behind how it functions. On Goa highways, facing head-on cars at every pass seemed terrifying, until I considered a worse fate: polite traffic backed up for hundreds of kilometers on a two-lane highway. In Sawant Wadi, I wonder

robertparker

Life in the platform economy

At some point in the 1990s, entrepreneurs realized that entire businesses could be built online. Servers could be hosted on Amazon Web Services. Websites could be built with open-source software. Distribution costs could be tracked on Google AdWords. In other words, the costs of entrepreneurship dwindled to zero.

Fledgling companies were buoyed by a pervasive assumption among VCs - that in this initial land grab, we are looking for the company that will "win" the Inter

robertparker

#Things Swimming in My Head

Like Homo Economicus Scorned

Over Labor Day Weekend, Twitter user @VXDS flew off his handle (so sorry) and made history. British Airways had lost his bag amd had been negligent in responding. Without the following to start a viral outcry over poor customer service, @XVDS did what any rational person would: he bought a promoted tweet and lamabasted the company for customer services.

The incident brings to mind a famous study in behavioral economics. In an experiment published in the Journal of Psychology, researchers gave people the chance to penalize teammates in a game for ruining the chance for the team to make money. Invariably, they did. The research flies in the face of classical economic assumption about Homo Economicus, ie the purely self-interested man. People are willing to spend their own capital in order to enforce social norms.

Is Software Eating Cities?

One prerequisite for a healthy city neighborhood, writes Jane Jacobs, is the presence of public spaces

robertparker

Like Homo Economicus Scorned

Over Labor Day Weekend, Twitter user @VXDS flew off his handle (so sorry) and made history. British Airways had lost his bag amd had been negligent in responding. Without the following to start a viral outcry over poor customer service, @XVDS did what any rational person would: he bought a promoted tweet and lamabasted the company for customer services.

The incident brings to mind a famous study in behavioral economics. In an experiment published in the Journal of Psychology, researchers gave people the chance to penalize teammates in a game for ruining the chance for the team to make money. Invariably, they did. The research flies in the face of classical economic assumption about Homo Economicus, ie the purely self-interested man. People are willing to spend their own capital in order to enforce social norms.

Is Software Eating Cities?

One prerequisite for a healthy city neighborhood, writes Jane Jacobs, is the presence of public spaces and commerce where people ca

robertparker

Want to fork your own gists? No fork button? No problem! Install this user script by clicking refork.user.js' "raw" link down below:

Starting with Chrome 21, userscript installation is blocked on all sites other than the Chrome Web Store. The new approach requires the user to download the script file and drag & drop it into the Extensions tab.

• http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128748
• http://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=2664769

robertparker

Why I'm Writing with Git.

"It's immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them." - Ezra Pound

Writers and coders strike me as similar. They learn and understand the backbone of language, they play with it, and they ultimately create and destroy on top of it. It comes as no surprise that some great Coders are also great writers (here's. some. examples).

But then, why aren't more writers on GitHub?

I don't mean tech bloggers. I mean the journalist who has dozens of back-and-forths with her editor. I mean the MFA who has re-written the same sentence twenty times. I mean the teenager who is writing the next Great American Novel. You know, Writers.