I have a friend who is currently working at AdMob, and it looks like to me they’re doing some good work over there. They are using, what I would call, the “Bottom Up” method of building a company and platform. They started small, let the business grow according the existing market conditions, and now are on the cusp of being massively successful. I don’t know how much money was used to found AdMob, but I’m judging by the blog that the business started out with a relatively small amount of investment, and has been bootstrapping its efforts with profits. This is the same method I would use.

I, on the other hand, work for a company that would take what I call the “Top Down” approach. This means, that my company would start out by finding large advertising partners, begin long term studies and revenue projections, and then begin building the product from the existing advertising partners and revenue projections. There are reasons why we have to do it this way, and I fully understand the reasons. In some cases, we have no choice.

However, it seems clear to me that “Top Down” is almost always slower to innovate than “Bottom Up”. Entrenched corporate polices prohibit my company from really starting something like AdMob (not that we’re interested). It would be hard to convince the appropiate board members, sales staff, and IT managers to take a flyer on a product like AdMob.

I think this all points to a certain sweet spot for a size of the company, and it’s ability to innovate. If I had to guess, I’d say the perfect sized company for innovation would be made up like this:

• 1 Founder/CEO who has the vision
• 1 Marketing guy who also handles most of the general business functions
• 3 Senior developers with copious amounts of skills
• 4 Junior developers who could innovate the designs of the senior developers
• 1 Sysadmin to handle setting up servers, etc.

What do you think?

I’m not sure why Dembski pointed to an article that points out how evolutionary genetics have weakened the dog species.  He comes up with another snarky title, I guess hoping that his readers don’t bother to read the full article.

I’d like to see how this stories disproves evolution.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1326

I hate to give any recognition to any proponent of crackpot theories like Intelligent Design, however, one site really caught my eye.  William Dembski is one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, and maintains a blog at Uncommon Descent.  Much like the actual Intelligent Design movement, the blog lacks anything of real substance, and spends most of it’s time making snarky comments about various stories that may or may not be related to evolution.  Very little serious discussion occurs.  I suppose that is fine, after all, it is just a blog, and I know Dembski spends time writing books. 

A couple headlines stand out to me:

"Natural selection builds bacteria that build nanowires — yeah, right"

I’m not sure where "yeah right" comes from, since he doesn’t present any arguments for "yeah right."  I guess we have to take his argument on faith.

"Marsupials and Placentals: a case of front-loaded, pre-programmed, designed evolution?"

This is interesting.  Even though the ID movement is over ten years old, it’s failed to ever make a single scientific prediction, or lead to any advance in knowledge.  In fact, by definition, when things get hard for ID’ers to explain, they just end the investigation with "God did it."  It’s a very lazy way of being "scientific".

"For sheer smarminess, this one is hard to beat . . ."

In this post, Dembski responds to an email from a writer about Dembski’s own work.  Of course, Dembski couldn’t be bothered to respond,  and instread resorted to childishness, by belittling the emailer, without responding to any of the points in an email  This is typical of ID’ers.  When challenged by those outside of their group think, they crumble, just like in the Dover case.

I don’t know where Dembski gets the smugness from.  His theories have no acceptance, and worse, no accomplishments.  He’s not much different than a member of the Flat Earth Society, peddling old theories that have long been disproven.

While I’m am sure this will be a great disappointment to my legions of female fans, Kelly and I tied the knot on June 27th, 2006, at around 2:00 pm PDT.  I am now a married man. And let me tell you, life is exactly the same.  Nothing has changed between Kelly and I.  It was a fifteen minute ceremony that gave us new rights as a couple, but had no fundamental impact on our relationship.  We’re atheist and don’t plan to have a family, and none of that will change.  We’ve been together over six years now, so why did we choose to get married now?

Money.  That’s right, just money.  As cold as that sounds, let me assure you, that whatever legal status we have in the eyes of the law, we were always as real a couple as any married couple.  However, the laws in this country pretty much force you to get married.  Because she is officially my wife, I can take larger deductions from my taxes and she now has health insurance through my company.  Those are the biggest new rights, but there are scores of other rights we now have as a couple, and lots of unofficial ones too.  Just saying "oh, my wife wanted me to check into this" gets me through any sort of security related to her bank or credit card companies.   Marriage has an exalted status in this country, and after a while, you kind of just have to do it, or you’re throwing money away.

Of course, marriage is only available to heterosexual couples in this country.  For some reason, religious zealots in this country ranging from George Bush to John Kerry believe civilization would crumble to the ground if Adam and Steve were able to share health insurance.  That’s all anyone wants from the legal status of marriage.  The benefits, the insurance, the ability to make life decisions for a partner if the situation arises.  If godbaggers feel the need to disallow gay marriage inside their church, our constitution gives them that right.  However, it’s time to get with the times, and allow two consenting adults form the legal institution we call marriage.  Better yet, call it a civil union, and leave marriage to religions. 

Yeah, that’s a much better way to handle it.   I’m not longer married, I’m civilly unioned.