Page 54 of 141 (2810 total posts)
04/30 Debunking the conventional wisdom — What do you think, are younger people better programmers? Are they more productive, more clever, work longer hours? Or do older people have some advantages? Here’s a bit of research that says they do! [NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’...
04/23 The number of pages in a congressional bill — I have to do a little research. It seems to be a favorite talking point by politicians on all sides of a debate to criticize or dismiss a piece of legislation based on the number of pages it has. It’s an odd bit of criticism: how long is too long, how long is too short, doesn’t it depend on how many laws the bills are enacting? doesn’t it depend on the number of amendments? Watch this space. I am going to find some answers. If you know some of the data, please post a response or send me an email!
04/22 Ongoing coverage of MOOCs: How good are they really? — This trend is now unstoppable – massive open online courses – or MOOCs – are constantly in the news. The angle often seems to be about whether or how or how much they will impact higher education and education in general. It’s a topic I am very interested in. [Here’s another piece of the puzzle, th...
04/18 88% of spreadsheets have errors — Still! — A long long time ago there was a product called Lotus Improv. Our premise was that complex spreadsheets were very difficult to maintain, to audit and to modify. So much so that we had heard stories about companies fearing making any change to the spreadsh...
04/13 What do you learn in college? — As you know the topic of the future of the university, the role of MOOCs, and online learning, is highly topical these days. I happen to be interested in it too so I refer you to this [David Broo...
04/08 We’re not going back to the moon — This is kind of depressing, but I don’t know why – but NASA administrator Bolden says that NASA has no plans to lead another mission to the moon within our lifetime: > “However, he made it clear NASA has no plans to lead its own human return to the Moon under his watch. “NASA will not take the lea...
04/06 Control the Sun, really — Control The Sun! As you know, I am teaching a course at Olin College this spring – alas we are coming to the end. Anyway an important component has been a Lean Startup project, where students take invent a product and take it through a complete Lean Startup validation. Among many things that students do is to ‘go outside the building’ to validate their businesses. Do me a great favor and help a team of students validate their idea,“Sunrise Blinds”, and answer this super easy questionnaire!
04/01 Friedman, mentioning Olin College: again about inventing your own job — Tom Friedman, quoting Tony Wagner, describes what he thinks should be taught today (that isn’t really being taught:) > ““Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capac...
03/24 Olin College of Engineering — I don’t know if I mentioned that I’m teaching Engineering Entrepreneurship at Olin. What a cool school! While the two course have existed at Olin, I was asked to re-invent...
03/23 Practice makes perfect? — I am (after 10 years) a beginner pianist who wants to improve. I practice, but not diligently enough. On average I think I practice 5 days a week, for about 1/2 hour, so that’s less than 3 hours a week. Clearly I could do better. But I...
03/22 Who sets the price for Über rides? — I’ve used the now-famous internetty car service Über a couple of times. The prices for the two rides I took were about 20-25% more expensive than taxis. Which made me **wonder about how th...
03/06 Sage on the e-stage? — There are fascinating shifts going on in higher education today, from MOOCs to the ‘flipped classroom’. A lot of action. I think we are looking at another text-book “Innovator’s Dilemma” scenario playing out: The established players (traditional universities), aware of a new way of delivering their...
03/03 It’s very hard to know what’s true about government spending — I saw this in the Boston Globe this morning and I jotted it down because yet again a bit of totally counterintuitive and confusing info:  > “It is not like we have Soviet tank divisions at the German border poised to launch a sneak ­attack,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an indep...
03/02 LinkedIn invites are flooding in?! — I don’t know what’s going on, am I suddenly famous? LinkedIn invites are picking up. I think it’s more likely that LinkedIn has come up with a clever way to encourage people to link to others. I don’t know, but I am receiving LinkedIn invites, from people I never heard of before, and from other cities and even countries. Whatever, first I was feeling important, now I am starting to feel a little besieged!