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Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
Page 58 of 141
(2812 total posts)
July 2012
Bluetooth Powered Speakers
I am considering these Bluetooth Wireless Powered Speakers… which should I get? - Jawbone JAMBOX Wireless Bluetooth Speaker - [Braven 625s Wir...
Read more →[ELECTIONS] Continuing debate on hand vs. machine counting
Just from today’s New York Times: > “Voters in New York State use a vote-scanning system that can tally votes swiftly and, in most cases, correctly. Not New York City. The city’s Board of Elections uses a creaky system of counting by hand that is prone to embarrassing errors on election night.” (from Why Can’t NYC Count Votes?)
June 2012
[EDUCATION] Is the innovators’ dilemma coming to higher ed?
An interesting fact: > “In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today….[…]… Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research institutions created the Association of American Uni...
Read more →[EDUCATION] Booting up experienced technical talent who have dated skills
As you may know, I’ve been working on launching Bootup Academy, which will offer applied computer science or engineering programs to college students who want to supplement their studies with an intensive 10 week summer program. That’s why you may have seen more post...
Read more →Carrots vs. Sticks in affecting behavior
Instead of charging extra (‘congestion pricing’) to drive your car during rush hour, how about giving me a reward (a lottery ticket) for driving using less congested routes? That’s a clever idea that is being tested by a Stanford professor: > “[…]So this spring, with a $3 million research grant fr...
Read more →LinkedIn Passwords: Who stores passwords in the clear
I am a pretty regular LinkedIn user, so the news that some unspecified number of LinkedIn users had their passwords compromised was of some interest to me. Here’s what a recent post on their blog says: > “We want to pro...
Read more →May 2012
Happy Manhattanhenge
Today (May 29) is Manhattenhenge. One of two days every year when sunrise and sunset are exactly aligned with the Manhattan (New York City, New York, USA) street grid. Just a fun fact. > *“What will future civilizations thin...
Memorial Day
“It is impossible to be unmoved by the juxtaposition of the eternal stone-faced warrior and the disheveled modern military wife-turned-widow, him rigid in his dress uniform, her on the floor in her blanket nest, wearing glasses and a baggy T-shirt, him nearly concealed by shadow while the pale blue light from the computer screen illuminates her like God’s own grace.” (from At War Blog)
What’s all the fuss about Facebook’s IPO?
I totally agree with Frank Bruni’s account of the Facebook’s IPO. It seems to me that if the current price of FB is pretty close to the offering price, then the bankers were doing their job. I mean, as I see it, their job is to open the stock at a price that’s as close as possible to it’s true pric...
Read more →[EDUCATION] Sign of change in the universe
I would love to see this trend accelerate: > “The five-year-old [Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship] program, [Wake Forest University’s] most popular minor, requires students to learn the practical aspects of starting a business. It is a sign of change in liberal-arts colleges, which are...
Read more →[GEEKY] Look what Safari looked like for a moment
I can’t explain it but I was just scrolling around some pdf in Safari and it actually turned my world upside down (and inside out!) 
[EDUCATION] Crowd Sourcing your Strategy
The other day I referenced an article questioning the motivation and effectiveness of large scale strategic planning exercises in universities today. In this vein I was interested to see this [art...
Read more →Mark Twain: All Ideas are Second-Hand
I have often been heard to say: “Ideas are Cheap”, by which I mean to say that my admiration goes more with the implementation, the making real and tangible, of an idea than the idea itself. It’s much easier to come up with something that would be cool and useful (“A solar powered ambulance”, “a ret...
Read more →Social Networks: Good or Bad?
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about social networks in preparation for the 2012 edition of my Brandeis University Course, “Web and Social Applications“. This morning I was preparing lecture notes for “Current Issues In Social Networks”....
Read more →Bertrand Russell through the echo chamber
I saw this in Marginal Revolution, who saw this in BrainPickings who got this somehow from [Bertrand Russell.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
Read more →[GAMING] Article about game designer Jonathan Blow
A good article in the Atlantic about game designer Jonathan Blow. Interesting quote: > “I continued. “You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that quest...
Read more →Field Of Dreams: Americans Elect
Americans Elect got Tom Friedman to endorse their effort to get a third party presidential ballot in November. He wrote about it and convinced me too that it was a good idea. A month or two ago I started having misgivings and now, it seems like things are really turning sour for Americans Elect. A...
Read more →Warning Facebook users: Socialcam is dangerous
On Facebook you may see something like “George Harrison is watching a video on Socialcam” followed by a video. Beware because if you watch that video by clicking on it, ALL your friends will now see that you watched it too. On two occasions in the last few weeks, some pretty embarassing videos were watched by otherwise highly respectable people. Funny.
[EDUCATION] Strategic Plans – are they worth the paper they are written on?
I came across a very provocative article about why and how universities seem to often get buried in a time consuming and torturous process of strategic planning. My experience in the private sector is that it is very easy to get...
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