Blog Posts

June 2012

• 2012-06-29

  [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 posts here labeled [EDUCATION].

  We’re now adding an additional focus, Booting Up experienced technical folks who have never put together a web or mobile application, have not worked in an agile environment, and so may not have the right check boxes on their resume.

  We think they may be interested in rapidly bring themselves up to speed, develop skills, knowledge, contacts, and importantly, a por...

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  #education #business
• 2012-06-15

  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 from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. Prabhakar’s group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times. The program has proved so popu...

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  #science
• 2012-06-07

  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 provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts….” (from ...

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May 2012

• 2012-05-29

  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 think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.” (from Sunset on the Manhattan Grid)

  #science
• 2012-05-28

  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)

• 2012-05-27

  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 price, that is, what the market will think its worth. And common sense says the only way to find that out (‘what the market will bear’) is to put it on the market and see what the market will bear. If their research is excellent they will be able to somehow figure out what the market will bear, ahead of time, and offer it there.

  I think that’s just what happened! Good on them. From Frank Bruni’s Article:

  “Instead, virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad.” (from Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster – NYT)

  #business
• 2012-05-25

  [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 grappling with the responsibility of preparing students for a tight and rapidly shifting job market while still providing the staples of academic inquiry.” (from ...

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  #education #business
• 2012-05-22

  [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!)

  

• 2012-05-17

  [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 article describing how certain organizations have totally thrown open the process of developing and communicating strategy by employing some good old crowd sourcing.

  “In 2009, Wikimedia1 launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 vo...

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  #education
• 2012-05-16

  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 retractable and reusable parachute”, “email on steroids”) than actually design it, build it, realize it.

  I believe that as much about my own ideas as about anyone else’s. BlogBridge was supposed to be “an RSS reader done right”.

  I have a few wonderful ideas for new products, like “Twittepedia” which is an encyclopedia with 140 character definitions. Wouldn’t it be nice not to be able to learn what ...

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• 2012-05-15

  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”. Here are some good current links I have been able to find:

  Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Social Media’s Small Positive Role in Human Relationships ...

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  #education
• 2012-05-09

  Bertrand Russell through the echo chamber

  I saw this in Marginal Revolution, who saw this in BrainPickings who got this somehow from Bertrand Russell. Still some thought provoking and maybe good advice:

  Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overco...

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• 2012-05-07

  [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 questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it.

  The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact.

  You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time ...

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• 2012-05-06

  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.

  An article in Techpresident.Compaints a pretty bleak picture:

  “Americans Elect is the best example of the Field of Dreams Fallacy I have ever observed. The organization spent a reported $9 million building a cutting edge platform, assuming that high-priced technology and a mainstream med...

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  #politics
• 2012-05-05

  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.

• 2012-05-04

  [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 sucked into a process that takes on a life of its own and sucks a massive amount of time out of the organization for very questionable outcomes.

  Caveat: I don’t claim that I have a broad view on this, as my experience is quite limited but I’ll just say that for my money “Strategic Plans” are the management equivalent of “Big Design Up Front”, both of which I try to limit as much as possi...

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  #education
• 2012-05-03

  Funny: Are computers boys or are they girls?

  A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. ‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’ ‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’

  A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’

  Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

  The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:

  No one but their creator understands their internal log...

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April 2012

• 2012-04-26

  [education] Creative Monopoly

  An interesting article by David Brooks in the New York Times commenting on the views of the always controversial Peter Thiel.

  [Why is he controversial? Because he has a grant program for students who are so passionate about their startup idea that they are willing to drop out of college to get the grant. Which is ironic because in the article, Brooks is citing what Thiel is teaching in his Stanford COURSE!]

  The article is about Thiel’s views on what and how students get taught in college:

  “First, students have to jump through ever-more de...

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  #education
• 2012-04-24

  New Book: Founder’s Dilemmas

  This book looks good: “Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup”. I came across it in the “Startup Lessons Learned” Blog, which may be the best blog about leann startups.

  This excerpt talks about a common scenario with startups, where the founders assume that they way they chose to split equity on day 0 will continue to work for them as time goes on:

  “How should founders deal with such developments? In short, by assuming when they do the initial split that things will change, even if the specific changes cannot be foreseen, and therefore structuring a dynamic equity split rather than the static splits used at Zipcar, govWorks, and many other startu...

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  #business #books
• 2012-04-18

  Must See: “Luck of the Irish” at the Huntington Theatre

  If you are a theatre fan I strongly recommend a play I just saw last night. It’s called “Luck of the Irish”. From a review on Boston.com:

  “… It’€™s one of numerous instances in Greenidge’s superb, beautifully realized new play — now receiving its premiere in a Huntington Theatre Company production directed by Melia Bensussen — that illustrate the playwright’s sure grasp of the nuances of race and class and her insights into the complexities of human nature.” (from Boston.Com)

  Run, don’t walk to see this play at the Huntington Theatre in Boston!

  #boston