If I could go back in time I wouldn't be able to convince myself to invest in the internet.

If I could travel back in time to the glory days of the internet - back when I was in university - I wouldn't have been able to convince myself to invest in all today's popular websites.

I would have thought that Google was impossible. How can a search engine search the entire internet in 0.1 seconds?

Youtube - no way. I would have argued that people would simply just watch TV. The quality is better and America's Funnies Home Videos was a pretty bad show - a website of home videos would be just as bad.

Twitter. I would have argued that Twitter is a useless service. Why would anyone type what they're doing and send it to all their friends? Why wouldn't they just tell their friends what they're doing or - better yet - just meet their friends in person. Same with Facebook, though I would have thought the concept was pretty cool.

I do remember being very impressed with email at the time.

How to predict someone's performance.

I think it's interesting that we pretty much can't predict people's job performance ahead of time. Academics don't matter, intelligence doesn't matter, personality tests don't matter, traditional job interviews don't matter.

I was reading What the dog saw: and other adventure stories by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about researchers at Harvard studying the effectiveness of teachers.

Apparently, if you watch a 10 second video-tape of someone teaching, you can rate their effectiveness as accurately as a class who's had that teacher for a semester. In other words, your snap judgment is pretty accurate.

Same with job interviews. People who watched a video of the first 20 seconds of a meeting between a candidate and the interviewer, judged the candidate just the same as the interviewer did.

Yet job interviews are a rite of passage in our society. I've had dozens and dozens of them. They're a sham, and generally pointless. They're not related to job performance and they're superfluous since you can make up your mind on whether you like a candidate within 20 seconds anyway.*

(*Note: I'm just talking "traditional" job interviews here. Structured, behavioural interviews are shown to be a better predictor of performance. The problem is almost no companies use them. I've had 2 in my life - and I failed to get the job in both of them.)

New Year's resolutions and predictions for 2010.

Does anybody make New Year's resolutions anymore?

For awhile there seemed to be a huge cultural backlash to making New Year's resolutions. Lots of people started saying, "resolutions never work, you shouldn't have to wait until the new year to make resolutions, you should make resolutions every day".

I still think it's a good idea to make resolutions. A resolution is a goal, and all the psychological literature shows that making and working toward goals is one of the best ways to improve yourself. January 1 is the perfect time to make goal because it's the start of a new year.

Having said that, I don't have any New Year's resolutions this year. I do, however, have a few New Year's predictions:

1) People will begin pronouncing the years like "twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve" rather than "two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve", which is a great thing because the "two thousand" phrase was getting long-winded.

2) The electric car will finally be available in North America, but will generally be a flop. Mostly because they will be too inconvenient to operate and fuel.

3) Canada will win the most medals ever in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Canada might even "win" the games by getting more medals than any other country.

4) Another member of my family will be joining us in May 2010. He or she will be healthy.

5) By July 1st I will have (yet another) a new job.

6) My parents will be moving to Nanaimo and my sisters will both be getting new jobs, as well.

A computer can predict what I do.

This is perhaps the most frustrating game ever. It's called MindReader and the goal is to fool the computer by randomly pressing a 1 or 0. Meanwhile, the computer is trying to "read your mind" and predict whether you're going to press 0 or 1.

The first one to 100 wins. I've played 5 times and I haven't even been close to winning. In other words, the computer has successfully out-predicted me 5 times in a row - and by huge margins.

The computer uses math; specifically a "Context-Tree Weighting Method", which the programmers call "adequate". The computer uses math to read my mind and predict what I'm going to do next. Even when I try to be unpredictable, the computer still wins.

This scares and amazes me. It scares me because it shows that I'm not so unique after all. I can be predicted. It amazes me because this knowledge can be used to predict how people will react in certain situations. It takes the uncertainty out of behaviour.

The most interesting thing is that the computer predicts my next move even before I've consciously made it. The 2 or 3 seconds of my brain's reasoning is totally useless. I should just have a computer make all my decisions for me.

In the end, it will have chosen what I would have chosen most of the time anyway.

We could see the collapse of these 2 countries.

I'm sure many countries will collapse in our lifetime - especially many undeveloped countries. But here are 2 predictions for you:

In the next 5 years, I'm predicting the collapse of North Korea. Sure, they are an undeveloped country, but they've also been in existence since the late 40s, despite being shunned by the world. Well I think their time is up. They're currently suffering from another famine and many countries can't afford to send food aid because of the shaky world economy. Plus their "dear leader" is sick and may soon die. Look for North Korea to collapse.

Next prediction: Japan. This is a bold prediction considering they're currently the second largest economy in the world. I give them 40 more years. The big problem is that they're facing a HUGE demographic crisis. They're an aging country with a falling birth rate. Starting about 2015, they're population will fall drastically until 2095 at least. This is extremely bad news for any economy. Economies need growth and you can't grow if you're losing people. Most countries can fix this by immigration, but Japan is a deeply xenophobic country and net immigration is basically zero.