The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.

It looks like the video has above-average retention for all but 30 seconds–not too shabby! When I investigated that low point, I discovered that there is a span of about 5 seconds around 1:41 during which the frame is devoid of animation–it does seem like a disappointingly boring point in the video. I should trim out those dead seconds. A handy tool indeed!

Objective: Quickly accumulate airline miles to get free airfare.

What I Did:

• Opened Delta Gold AMEX card, received 30,000 bonus miles after spending $1,000 with the card. Annual fee waived for first year.
• Opened Citi Premier Pass Elite card (Expedia), received 20,000 bonus miles after spending $600 with the card. Annual fee of $75 charged.
• Opened Chase British Airways card, expecting to receive 100,000 miles after spending $2,000. Annual fee of $95 charged.

Total Credit Access: $30,000
Total Bonus Miles: 150,000

Coach class round-trips to Europe are about 50,000 miles, so that’s THREE FREE ROUND-TRIPS TO EUROPE!

My credit score dipped from 830 to 760 and is now slowly creeping back up. The average age of my accounts has decreased, but my credit utilization rate is now much lower as well, which will give me a better score as my accounts age. A few weeks of free score monitoring is available from FICO.

The British Airways 100k bonus is a fantastic offer. Next on my list is Citi’s American Airlines card which comes with 25k miles. If you own a small business, you can sometimes open two of each card and double your mileage bonus; that’s one card for you and one for your business. I don’t recommend the Citi Premier Pass Elite card; the rewards are cashed in via Expedia, and there seem to be a number of restrictions on what you can earn miles on, a lower miles-to-cash-value redemption rate, and fewer redemption options.

If you don’t regularly have enough expenses to reach these spending requirements, you can search the web for other spending strategies.

• Innovation is required to adapt to nature, to “control” nature and sustain growth path of society
• Innovation gives rise to unknown risks and challenges
• New challenges require further innovation

Problem: volume of challenges is increasing faster than innovation can solve them, except when we have major breakthroughs like fossil fuels, cities, microprocessors, antibiotics, the internet, the human genome.

Paths of innovation become increasingly myopic, path-dependent. The cost of backpedaling and choosing a new innovation path is perceived as far to high, though the unknown consequences may dwarf this cost. It gets more difficult to jump to better alternative paradigms. Like capitalism, innovation requires perpetual growth to maintain our society.

Innovation moves too quickly for our the nature-society interface to stabilize. Introduce a concept of a risk-barrier, similar to the sound-barrier at 768 mph. Before settled culture, humans constantly reacted to nature, facing challenges as they arose; humans acted within existing rules and either survived or didn’t. Now humans change the rules by innovating to circumvent nature in the short-run, while accumulating unresolved challenges–a risk-barrier–in the long run. Now with settled culture we have innovated to avoid constant change.

The world continues to change around us while we innovate to provide our own stasis. This effectively creates a backlog of risks and challenges that are deferred into the future with great consequences that increase in scale the longer they are avoided. Our time-frame of thinking gets shorter because risks are multiplying faster than innovation can solve them, because innovation itself adds new risks. Only major breakthroughs can make net progress in working through the backlog of challenges.

11/4/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — In October, 838,052 cars and light trucks were sold in the U.S., for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 10.46 million units. Over the past decade, the auto industry enjoyed annual sales of about 17 million units, but times have changed. General Motors is now making business decisions with the assumption that 10 million units will be the new “normal” annual rate for a while.

12/6/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — November numbers are now available. The SAAR for November 2009 was 10.93 million vehicles.

This past two weeks, I’ve used:

• a Prius to get groceries and dinner
• a Civic to check out an apartment in SF
• a 328i to check out an apartment in SF and visit Golden Gate Park
• a Nissan Versa to get groceries and go up to Mount Diablo to check for some of this week’s meteor shower action
• a Honda Odyssey to move from Berkeley to a new apartment in SF
• a Mini to get back over to Oakland for a Saturday homebrew BBQ

There are two ZipCar lots within two blocks from my new location in the city. The credit card style swipe is ingenious. I’ve called customer service twice and was able to talk to real human beings right away.

I can roughly quantify the opportunity to save money that I’ve created by switching from my car to ZipCar.

Assuming an average hourly cost of $10 (including SF 9.5% tax and the 10% EVP discount), I’ll save money in any month that I use ZipCar fewer than 50 hours. That seems like more than enough driving for me. The potential savings could be much higher with other people. I had access to cheap loans and cheap insurance, and I did repair work myself, so car ownership was relatively affordable for me. ZipCar is better though, because of the flexibility and simplicity I now enjoy.

Wordle grabs his last five posts from his RSS feed, and with some help from Excel, we can create some more tailored views of His Wordliness. Guy, I tried following you on Twitter but your stream is so voluminous that I couldn’t see my other dear friends!

Proper Nouns

Words That Appear Only Once

Top 20 Words

Top 75 Words

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