All my blog posts and articles
In Venture Capital Deals, Not Every Founder Will Be a Zuckerberg – NYTimes.com: > It’s the dream of entrepreneurs to sell their company for millions of dollars. But the dirty secret of venture capital is that the dream can be dashed as the venture capitalists make millions in a sale, leaving the founders with nothing.
I picked up David Byrne’s new book: How Music Works
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjqf5F7PPGw]
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’...
Read more →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!
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...
Read more →This is from the New York Time’s article about Curt Shilling’s ill fated game company “38 Studios”: > “It just felt really good, when this all started, to have the sexy sports ce...
Read more →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...
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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...
This is a tired topic but this article from the New York Times does have some good tips on managing your avalanche of email … > “…There’s no quick fix. But set aside a few hours...
Read more →We saw “Ryan Landry’s “M”” at the Calderwood Pavilion in the South End last weekend. I started out a bit suspiciously when the playwright (who’s not famous) name is part of the name of the play being promoted. The play is based on a famous film “M”. Here’s a bit f...
Read more →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...
Read more →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!
Here’s a really interesting article: “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead”? from the New York Times. It’s abou...
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...
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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...
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...
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...
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA&w=560&h=315]
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...
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