Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

I subscribe to e-mails from The White House (like the one below) to keep track of what they are actually saying. Normally their e-mails are recitations of the President's talking points and don't add anything meaningful. However, this time David Simas was soliciting input to prove their case that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is actually working. So, since I involuntarily have new health coverage as of January 1 (that's what The White House was asking for) I decided to submit my own "story." Here's what I submitted: I am retired. I pay for Medicare but I don't rely on it for quality health care. I have new coverage as of January 1st which I was forced to purchase privately as an individual. I believe I was driven to this largely by one of the unintended consequences of Obamacare which is that large employers will now more easily drop retiree group medical plans (to pay for other costs of Obamacare) citing Obamacare as the backstop for t...

One thing I learned from my father when I was very young was to always keep something in reserve. He lived this in many ways and I believe he meant it in those many senses. Don't push yourself beyond your limits keep something in reserve; save for a rainy day; do your best joke last; "don't drop your candy in the lobby" (an inside joke that all salesmen know...meaning don't tell everything you know about your product in the first five minutes of the sales call, listen, wait, keep you candy in the jar until you know what they want); save your ammo; make her happy before you are; and this list goes on and on. My dad had one particularly useful way of keeping something in reserve that he taught me sixty years ago and I'm still doing it today. It was after a Cub Scout meeting on a wintery Saturday afternoon, probably in Kentucky (I can't remember where). My dad and I were supposed to get milk at the grocery on our way home. Dad remembered the milk but when w...

It is difficult to describe how profoundly influential Dick Clark's American Bandstand was to many teenagers (like me) in the early 1960's. In those days before PCs, Internet, cell phones, IM, Facebook, MTV, etc. American Bandstand was what you did to see what new artists and what kinds of music the "cool" people were listening and dancing to, what they were wearing, how they did their hair, and what they thought about stuff. It was part of the vast technological impact that TV had on our lives visually improving the experience over radio DJ music programs by an order of magnitude. The impact of TV back then, now taken almost for granted and morphing again with nearly limitless new sources of online video, was not just a shift but a complete phase change from audio to video. It was amazing. In the late 1950's and early 1960's I happened to live near Philly. When we first heard about this American Bandstand thing we thought it would be like "The Hit Para...

I loved the ham sandwich and baloney story that Leonard Susskind told about his friend Richard Feynman.

I listened to a lecture today by Brian Wansink, Ph.D., author of Mindless Eating, a book about better eating habits that lead to weight loss and better health. It's amazing how simple things we get use to are really bad eating habits. Here's an example. Take two normal table glasses. One is tall and thin like a water glass, the other short and wide like a cocktail glass. Wansink's research shows that most people (even professional bar tenders) will fill the short glass with 38% more liquid than the tall glass. Why, because we're conditioned to be a better judge of the volume we want by height than by width. Same thing with the size of the plate we use to eat with. If we use a smaller plate we'll eat significantly less because using a larger plate we tend to fill it up and eat more unconsiously even though we'd feel perfectly fine with the volume of a smaller plate. I'm going to give his " Mindless Method " a try and see if I can shed this stomach o...

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.

My personal strategy for anonimity on the Web is to game the system by joining every social site I discover, liking everything, friending everybody (whom I actually know and who want to be friends, ok almost everybody), and posting the same benign profile stuff everywhere. Why you ask? To confound those spooky behavorial targeting algorithms that lurk in the backgroud of the Web as best I can. I see it as a challenge; to not be profile-able. Because of this strategy, I have long since passed the so-called "Dunbar Number" on many social sites to which I belong. It's also caused me to follow closely the work of people like John Udell and projects like Open Social. The Dunbar Number is a hypothesis about social group size limits by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. A good summary of the hypothesis can be found on The Psychology Wiki and in this blog entry by Chris Allen. What made me think of this in the first place was a podcast interview of Spencer Wells by NPR's D...