What we need is more Insurance.

Especially during this economically troubled time, we need Food Insurance.

It works like this. For $X per month you will be able to go to the grocery store and buy the food you want, but instead of purchasing the food, all you will have to do is show your insurance card. Then at the end of the month the insurance company will send you a statement showing how much you really own the grocery store.

Of course you will be able to purchase higher or lower deductibles and different levels of co-pays and out-of-pocket maximums. And then at the end of each year, the insurance company will tell you how much it will cost to participate in the plan for the next year. Why these plans might even become part of expected employer paid perks.

Now it will never do to have the consumer deal directly with the farmer, nay not even with the grocery chains. No more than for people to deal directly with doctors or their practice groups. There must be a new layer. Now this layer will add to the GDP, it will make money -- certainly it must be paid for all the grocery purchases that it reconciles. And it will provide many new jobs for clerks and managers and executives and boards of directors. These companies will go public and sell stock for our retirement plans. They will be able to stand up to the larger chains, forcing them to provide cheaper products.

When christenings, weddings, wakes arrive and we are not in a position to afford them at the moment, we will have our food insurance to depend on. Oh, I feel better already. How about it?

Spam, Ham, PHP, and Bayesian filtering

Most of the time I just want to google a package concept, find it and employ it.

When I had a task of analyzing free form text answers into a set of categories, I first remembered a project to do just that written 30 years ago using Snobol 4. Well this time, I've got the whole web, PHP and MySQL. Then I though of bayesian filters (as used in spam filters.)

Google showed me a simple implementation in PHP and starting from there... Well really, I didn't want a spam filter (that would be a filter whose object was to identify stuff that you don't want) rather I wanted ham filters to identify what I did want (slightly semantic, but with all the identifiers giving the wrong voice in the program, it became intolerable. I also wanted a gang of filters that operated in sync with each other.

The categories for the answers might be: Positive, Suggestion, Negative, Neutral, and Other (spam?). So I created a code (small integer) for each category and augmented the database tables to include this code. Now when you decide that an answer is Positive, you also decide that the answer is NOT any of the others. The operations of learning and unlearning (when you change a code) cycle through all the codes and insert the new answer as Ham or as Not Ham.

Consulting the filters to determine the coding for a new answer amounts to evaluating all the filters and taking the largest rating -- unless none of them produces a significant answer, then I initially assign it to the last code. The web page allows users (marketers, they probably are) to view all answers in a given code (plus all the unverified codes) and see if any are miscoded and if so, change them.

Do you need this too? Give me a shout.

Target Advertising

Advertising in closed groups is difficult because the group is closed, no one wants spam, and because often advertising equals spam, no one wants advertising. Yet everyone also wants to know, when they want to know.

In this respect a portal is often the best choice, a single place where members of the group can go to find advertising. Well isn't that just like the yellow pages books? Pretty much, except that access is limited by paying for the advertising. This paying question is one of the issues that the open community Craigslist.com deals with.

In order to provide a portal for the small group, that is free, I have created the experimental site http://BuyFromBahais.com. It serves a place where other Baha'i businesses and artisans may post ads about themselves with links to their own sites. It is searchable and able to serve, like the yellow pages, as the place to start looking for products or services that are provided by Baha'is.

Interesting challenges always occur in public facing web sites. Spammers, both human and computer, arrive to see what fun they can have at your expense. Therefore it must be made difficult for this to happen and there must be a remedy when it does. The ability for the community to flag offending ads allows many eyes to participate in the monitoring of the web site.

Users may upload an image along with each ad they post. In addition, each user may upload a banner ad, that will be displayed on the top of the web site from time to time.

Initial users are being invited to post ads by virtue of other announcements that they have made. Thus testing will proceed with motivated users.

Yet Another Must Read

YAMRing on...
Late author Jane Jacobs, native Pennsylvanian, well known Greenwich Village, New Yorker, 'street fighter', has written several book in this millennium that provide the vocabulary and images for understanding what our 'leaders' are doing to dismantle the old world order.

The new world order is being incubated even as we speak by the Baha'i world wide community. The part of the equation that no one knows is what the transition point will be, how great the change of slope will be or when it will occur.

Song Titles

I've had some thoughts for song titles, now if only I can write the lyrics and then sell them!
Hollar, if you are interested...

There Are Just Four Kinds of Love
If Justice is Best Beloved How is Truth the Most Important Virtue

these would be in the Bob Dylan style, very wordy, half spoken.

Innovation, not just a better mousetap...

We all understand pretty well what "Invention" is, but "Innovation"? that is not as well defined, even by the dictionary.

Recently I read that innovation requires that the invention be adopted into wide usage. So just inventing a better way to do something is not innovation until it is put into use. And on the flip side, innovation does not necessarily require an 'invention', just a change to a better way of working (though maybe that is the 'invention'?)

Anyway, being aware that innovating requires working with other people's habits is an important insight. So when we suggest a new feature, procedure or approach, it won't happen unless we can effectively sell it in the face of people's habits.

Let's hear it for sales!

Nevertheless, it takes the insights about both the business and the people to craft innovative improvements. Each person innovates every time they make a change in their habits for the better, but getting others to follow, that's leadership.

Village Center

Hey, googlers, here is a challange:

My wife and I are attacted to the idea living within three blocks (walkable, no hillsides or limited access roads) of a village center.

I can describe them, but I am not sure how to search for them. In particular, I need to search for houses for sale within village center areas.

A village center will be a commercial "main street" (not a mall, malls are anathama to village centers) that is compact, say 5 blocks by 2 blocks. It will contain as many as possible of: library, post office, pharamacy, grocery store, coffee shop (not Starbucks -- we are too old for that harsh roast), hardware store (not Lowes or HomeDepot), and restaurants.

The perfect house will be built before 1940 and be within three blocks of one of these village centers.

The search is daunting, mostly because it is not (yet) automated.

What I would like to have is a mapping function that will plot village center areas, the balloon can list the stores in the area, and houses for sale that meet the nearness criterion. The balloon for the house can even include the agent's name and phone number -- what realtor could complain about that?

Then my search for the perfect home could be just a matter of panning around on the map.

Now if the parameters of village center and the distance from one were all customizable, then this would be a universal house finder tool.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll let you alone now and stop bothering you so you can get to work.

Thanks!