Where 2.0 is almost there, coming to San José, California, on June 13-14. It’s not too late to register, at $1,495 a pop, or you can try your luck with Ogle Earth: Where 2.0 Program Chair Nathan Torkington has kindly offered three free registrations to give away to Ogle Earth readers.
After thinking about it for a little while, I’ve decided that since this blog has a global readership, disbursing these three passes to the first three responses wouldn’t be fair, as at any given time fully one third of Ogle Earth readers are asleep:-)
So instead, for the next 8 hours, until 21.00 UTC May 26, 2006, please email one-off address ogle.where@gmail.com if you’re interested in a free pass and you can make it to San José in mid June. Please write a sentence telling me who you are in the body of the message. Duplicates will be disqualified. Anybody is eligible. I will then run a random number generator and choose the nth email, thrice. (I’ll be announcing the winners.)
What I really like about this competition is that it embodies everything I stand for: Leave everything until the last minute, maybe you’ll get lucky:-)
(Much as I’d love to go to Where 2.0, I can’t make it, unfortunately. I’m moving to Cambridge (UK) for the summer to work on a new web development project, and can’t really wander off to California for a week. I’ll be blogging Where 2.0 vicariously, however.)
That is great Stefan. Too bad you won’t be there. It would have been great to meet. I wonder if there will be any fallout after the great “Web 2.0” PR blunder….
Cheers,
Jeremy
Stefan:
The economist in me smells some “moral hazard” here. To wit, I sign up early to get the ‘lower’ early-bird rate, and now there are ad hoc freebie registrations floating around.
Armed with this information, what would be a rational course of action next year?
Anyway, it should be a very interesting couple of days…
BT
Brian, the mathematician in me thinks that’s an excellent question. Assume you know that next year, you can either get the early bird special for $1,095; or else wait for the 3 in 11 chance of going to the conference for free, but paying $1,495 if you don’t get chosen.
What is the expected cost of the latter strategy? ((3 * $0) + (8 * $1,495))/11 = $1,087.27, so yes, waiting for the Ogle Earth contest will save you $7.73 per year in the long term.
Given the trivial difference between the expected cost of these two strategies, I can only conclude that GIS pros are excellent optimizers. (Assuming, of course, that not more people decide to take part in a hypothetical future iteration of this contest, now that they know the odds.)
Stefan, oh geography maven you, where is San José, California? Might it be somewhere near the large metropolis of San Jose?
On this blog, San José doesn’t rhyme with banjos. And café doesn’t rhyme with safe. And el niño doesn’t rhyme with wino, etc…
I wasn’t talking about how San Jose was pronounced, you doofus, I was talked about how it is spelled. And I’m afraid that there are simply not any diacriticals in its name, no matter how much you might want them to be there for ease of pronunciation.