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anonymous

Falling Creativity - 0 views

www.overcomingbias.com/...falling-creativity.html

criticalthinking ideas creativity education

shared by anonymous on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • CEOs may give it lip service to creativity, but their actions speak much louder than their words. Most (not all) workplaces punish creativity, and while that situation remains most schools will drill it out of kids as well.
  • anonymous on 16 Jul 10
     
    "CEOs may give it lip service to creativity, but their actions speak much louder than their words. Most (not all) workplaces punish creativity, and while that situation remains most schools will drill it out of kids as well." By Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias on July 16, 2010.
anonymous

Quotations of Alex Kozinski - 1 views

www.jmitchell.me/...alex-kozinski-quotes

shared by anonymous on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • anonymous on 14 Feb 12
     
    "Private property, including intellectual property, is essential to our way of life. It provides an incentive for investment and innovation; it stimulates the flourishing of our culture; it protects the moral entitlements of people to the fruits of their labors. But reducing too much to private property can be bad medicine. Private land, for instance, is far more useful if separated from other private land by public streets, roads and highways. Public parks, utility rights-of-way and sewers reduce the amount of land in private hands, but vastly enhance the value of the property that remains. So too it is with intellectual property. Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as under protecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture."
anonymous

Your Media Diet is Immoral - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...your-media-diet-is-immoral

shared by anonymous on 05 May 14 - Cached
  • here are two important and related limits that I would like to focus on: the limits of our truth-seeking capabilities, as best documented in the biases literature, and the limits of what Daniel Kahneman calls our “slow thinking” capabilities.
  • In the first case, I refer to the fact that we are not some ideal Bayesian-updating computer, but in fact rely primarily on a ton of mental shortcuts that are usually useful but can and do often lead us systematically awry.
  • In the second case, I refer to the fact that deliberation and making choices consume energy, just as surely as physical exercise does.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What this adds up to is the simple fact that there’s a finite amount of things we can devote careful thought to on a given day, and the more we burn our energy doing other things the smaller that limit becomes.
  • As Kahneman and Haidt and others point out, even when you’re deliberating carefully there are shortcuts going on in the background. Nevertheless, for something like a math problem, “slow thinking” is much more likely to perform well when we are rested and our blood sugar is high, relative to where we are by the end of a full day of mental or physical activity.
  • Effective deliberation is bounded by these conditions.
  • Even our more telescopic friends do not have the stamina or the time to carefully investigate the relevant moral context of all of the stories that they consume. The feast is far too great, and the eating feels far too good, to examine all of the parts and bother to ask how all of it was made.
  • And most people are not so telescopic, or only take on the posture of being it. Nearly all of us prioritize deliberation about near things; what to wear today, how to best finish a task at our job, or what to say to comfort a friend going through something. And that’s how we should be. After all, the things that are in our lives are what we have the most context for.
  • Given the limited nature of careful deliberation, and given how our biases are likely to respond to out of context stories we carelessly consume, we are not likely judge most news stories accurately.
  • Storytelling in the public sphere, in its best form, is like an ongoing conversation that has no end in sight. Ask yourself: what conversations matter to you? Which are relevant to your life, and which are relevant to your interests? After figuring that out, be stricter about excluding stories that fall outside of those conversations.
  • Most importantly, let go of any pretense of telescopic morality. It will only hold you back from the things that really matter, the things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.
  • anonymous on 05 May 14
     
    "Moral determinations require context. Modern journalism, which faces a powerful tension between the context that is morally relevant and the context which makes a good narrative, has to cope with difficult ethical problems. However, journalism is not really serving two masters, the ethics of journalists on the one hand and the craft of storytelling on the other. No, journalism serves but one master-its audience. If a particular outlet is morally deficient, its audience must bear at least some culpability, for no outlet can continue without its audience."
anonymous

There Is No God, There Is No Devil, And Innovation Is The Work Of Multitudes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...print

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Nationalism, tribalism, us-vs-them-ism, the perpetual aggrievement of this or that identity culture – these are the real villains, if we must have villains, because this state of mind can only see competition as a threat rather than as a challenge.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 12
     
    After all, when it comes to the Ire of the Geeks, no controversy is too small. As Freddie deBoer puts it, in likening geek culture to the Tea Party, geeks are "so invested in certain grievances [...] that they seem completely incapable of judging whether those grievances are rational." Thanks to Erik Hanson for the pointer. Which might help explain the tone of The Oatmeal's response to Alex's piece. Freddie calls it "a whiny, petulant reply" and there's no doubt, that for all the creativity of a drawn response, it was petulant. Good faith is in short enough supply on the internet, of course, but still, one can't help but wonder what's at the root of such a response.
anonymous

The Roadmap to a High-Speed Recovery - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...-reset-recovery-economy-future

politics economics

shared by anonymous on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Let me say first that the bailouts and stimulus programs of the last two years were not a complete mistake. Economic policymakers don’t have the luxury of hindsight in the heat of a crisis; there is tremendous pressure on them to do something. It would have been suicidal not to give the banks the capital infusions they needed when the whole financial system was on the brink of meltdown or to refuse to help states avoid laying off thousands of teachers and police and other workers.
  • this is no bump in the business cycle that we are going through; it is an epochal event, comparable in magnitude and scope to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so, as historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has observed, to the decades-long crisis that began in 1873. Back then our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift from agriculture to industry. We are in the midst of an equally tectonic transition today, as our industrial economy gives way to a post-industrial knowledge economy—but by focusing all our attention of whether we need a bigger stimulus or a smaller deficit, we’re flying blind.
  • More R&D labs opened in the first four years of the Great Depression than in the entire preceding decade, 73 compared to 66. By 1940, the number of people employed in R&D had quadrupled, increasing from fewer than 7,000 in 1929 to nearly 28,000 by 1940
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. economy added some 20 million new jobs in its creative, professional, and knowledge sectors. Even today, unemployment in this sector of the economy has remained relatively low, and according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, is likely to add another seven million jobs in the next decade. By contrast, the manufacturing sector added only one million jobs from 1980 to 2006, and, according to the BLS, will lose 1.2 million by 2020.
  • Our whole education system needs a drastic overhaul to make its teaching styles less rote and more dynamic, to encourage more hands-on, interactive creativity.
  • Home ownership provided a powerful form of geographic Keynsianism. But that system has reached the end of its useful life. It has led to overinvestment in housing, autos, and energy and contributed to the crises we are trying so hard to extricate ourselves from today. It’s also no longer an engine of economic growth. With the rise of a globalized economy, many if not most of the products that filled those suburban homes are made abroad. Home ownership worked well for a nation whose workers had secure, long-term jobs. But now it impedes the flexibility of a labor market that requires people to move around.
  • Federal policy needs to encourage less home ownership and a greater density of development
  • Concentration and clustering are the underlying motor forces of real economic development. As Jane Jacobs identified and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas later formalized, clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates the diversity required for new ideas to fertilize and turn into new innovations and new industries.
  • the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it.
  • That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.
anonymous

Is the iPhone generative? - 0 views

www.hyperorg.com/...is-the-iphone-generative

ideas reflections technology

shared by anonymous on 12 Apr 10 - Cached
  • JZ defines “generativity” as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (p. 70)
  • Steve suggests that we instead judge generativity by the type of results we see, not by the nature of the software or hardware environment on which they run
  • the generativity of the iPhone and the iPad is — to use JZ’s word — seductive. Steve Berlin is right that they have unleashed a torrent of creativity. But it is creativity within bounds.
  • anonymous on 12 Apr 10
     
    On April 12, 2010. A look at what exactly makes something generative independent of whether it's an open platform or not.
anonymous

PlanetSide 2: what we know so far - 0 views

www.pcgamer.com/...anetside-2-what-we-know-so-far

videogames planetside

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The majority of your customization is done through the amazingly large skill trees.
  • Skills, also called certifications, are trained very similarly to EVE Online (over time, and continuing while you’re offline), but also go faster when you’re actively playing.
  • Skills “will affect everything” in PlanetSide 2.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • There is not a single use of instancing in the entire game
  • Unlike PS, you can capture any territory at any time, but you do get “significant bonuses” to capturing a territory adjacent to your own.
  • SOE is really pushing the idea of wanting to make PlanetSide 2 into a full “sandbox” game in the future
  • Expect to see a lot of influence from top modern shooters
  • The developers mentioned several times that they want to allow players to design their own structures in the future.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "This information will be pretty straight-forward; we'll host more in-depth discussions on the site later today with our interviews of SOE president John Smedley and PlanetSide 2′s creative director Matt Higby."
anonymous

Obama's Second Term - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...obamas-second-term

shared by anonymous on 21 Jan 13 - Cached
  • The foreign policy story of U.S. President Barack Obama's first term could be told through three personalities: former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke.
  • Because of Gates, Obama did not go "soft" as Democrats are supposedly liable to do. Guantanamo Bay prison remained open, there was no initial rush to the exits in Iraq, a robust campaign of assassinations against al Qaeda proceeded apace, and so forth.
  • In other words, rhetoric aside, Obama's first two years were not much different from George W. Bush's last two.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Holbrooke, though, may be the most significant member of the Obama story thus far because of his negative value: He was a larger-than-life personality who was crucially ignored.
  • By thwarting Holbrooke, White House advisers like Tom Donnelly signaled that while practical and hard-edged, Obama was not a risk taker with a grand strategy like Richard Nixon or George H.W. Bush.
  • Judging by his new appointees, Obama's second term will be like his first, only more so. Pragmatism will reign supreme, even as there will be little appetite to take authentically risky initiatives, whether diplomatic, military or otherwise.
  • Some in the media have celebrated Secretary of State-designate John Kerry as bold. Nonsense. Boldness is not necessarily about diplomacy for diplomacy's sake, which is all Kerry seems to be about thus far. Rather, boldness is often about backing up diplomacy with the threat or use of some kind of force in creative combinations toward a larger strategy.
  • Hagel is essentially a moderate Republican who is now closer to Democrats (he is distinguished by the fact that -- unusual for Washington -- he actually speaks his mind).
  • the emphasis at the Pentagon will be on smart cost-cutting; withdrawing from a high-maintenance, low-payoff conflict in Afghanistan; and avoiding -- unless absolutely necessary -- a military strike against Iran.
  • people extremely hesitant to embark on any adventures.
  • Indeed, the East Coast knowledge elite essentially believes that foreign policy is a branch of Holocaust studies, in which a president is judged by his willingness to intervene on behalf of innocent civilians in times of conflict. While it is true that the memory of the Holocaust -- less than a lifetime removed -- must play a role in foreign policy, at the same time it cannot define it.
  • Foreign policy is primarily about the battle of space and power, in which order takes precedence over freedom, and interests take precedence over values.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Feb 13
       
      I hate that this is right.
  • Such a realist mindset is rejected by the media and academia, even as it is quietly practiced throughout government and, especially, by successful foreign policy administrations. Obama's new appointees will practice realism, even as idealism will infuse their remarks at press conferences.
  • Yes, Obama intervened largely for humanitarian considerations in Libya. But it was a hesitant, unenthusiastic intervention in which no boots were on the ground beyond some Special Operations Forces, ensuring that the United States did not own the security situation of post-Gadhafi Libya.
  • Even if the new secretaries of state and defense are less cautious than they appear, they will steer away from anything that smells of a large-scale, boots-on-the-ground operation, unless it is within an international coalition enjoying near-global consensus.
  • Instead, Obama will want to beat his chest in the Pacific, not in the Middle East.
  • One of the unstated reasons why Obama is intent on continuing his emphasis on the Pacific into his second term is because it allows for a demonstration of American military power without the significant risk of war erupting.
  • foreign policy during his administration is in safe hands, no great initiatives or schemes have been -- or will be -- attempted, and any threats or challenges that arise will be addressed efficiently through procedural responses.
  • The media may turn out to be severely disappointed with Kerry and Hagel, and that might actually -- much of the time, at least -- turn out for the good.
  • anonymous on 21 Jan 13
     
    "Presidents define themselves by whom they appoint: At the very top of the Washington food chain, personalities matter much more than bureaucratic systems. This is particularly true in a second term, when the need to follow opinion polls is far less intense, allowing the president and his new appointees a freer hand."
anonymous

Vivek Haldar : Addicted to work - 0 views

blog.vivekhaldar.com/...addicted-to-work

shared by anonymous on 13 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Workaholism is the perfect term for this, because, like alcoholism, it connotes addiction. Nobody starts out wanting to become an alcoholic, or a workaholic. But you start down a path, and one fine day you wake up with a dry mouth and a splitting headache with no memory of the night before, or realize that you haven’t seen family or friends in days or weeks. You think you are in control of it, but eventually it is in control of you.
  • I’ve rarely seen a workaholic creative professional doing 80-hour weeks because their boss was tightening the screws on them. They did it to themselves.
  • Workaholics are usually already well-paid, and hardly ever enjoy that money anyway.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But just like addiction, workaholism is an easy way out. An easy way to ignore the work and time and compromise required for cultivating relationships. An easy way to pretend that there’s simply no time to step back and distinguish the urgent from the important. An easy way to distrust colleagues and do it all yourself. An easy way to deal with the stream of work as it arises, flowing in it, rather than putting in the time and deep thought required to prioritize and tackle items with potentially high impact.
  • anonymous on 13 Mar 13
     
    "I didn't start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left."
anonymous

A Woman's De-Liberation: There Never Was a Sexual Revolution - SynaptIQ+ Social Era Kno... - 0 views

www.synaptiqplus.com/...-never-was-a-sexual-revolution

gender business

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • At the end of my Feminist Reverie, my attention was drawn to two books next to the abridged section on feminist books––Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope, both by Barack Obama. He seemed to me to be the only public person who has talked about the issues that women face in a non-intellectual, non ivory-tower way.
  • When running for President, he often spoke about the challenges his own mother faced while raising her children and pursuing her education and career. I wondered whether he had ever read A Room of One’s Own. I felt sure he would have understood Woolf’s words about a woman poet’s unfulfilled creative destiny, “She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.”
  • Perhaps the modern wave of feminism should have as its champion a man who understands working mothers…because he was raised by, and is married to, a working mother.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "When I asked him if they would raise my salary to match my predecessor's if I dumped my boyfriend, got married and had children and bought an apartment, I was told that I should be grateful that I was working in what had always been considered a "man's job." In other words, if a woman was working she should count her blessings and not ask for a decent salary and respect on top of it.  When I took my complaint to the female head of Human Resources her advice was that if I wanted to keep my job, I should keep my mouth shut."
anonymous

How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...how-the-internet-made-us-poor

technology unemployment computing

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
anonymous

The Universe is Indifferent to Your Illusion of Control - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...nt-to-your-illusion-of-control

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 13 - Cached
  • Especially at a national scale, your vote does not make a difference in a democracy, no matter what institutional type of democracy we are talking about. Libertarians who recognize this fact tend to emphasize persuasion, but they are just as naive as the voters they make fun of.
  • The probability that your pet ideology will hit the diffusion of innovations jackpot, and that you will have had anything to do with it at all, are so vanishingly small that you might actually have a better shot of personally electing the next President of the United States.
  • If I love my local coffee shop, I am not really in a financial position to keep it operating by myself—my ability to enjoy what it offers depends entirely on other people’s willingness to spend money there.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This isn’t just about any random person’s experience with life; it is the universal human condition.
  • Even with all of the armed forces in occupied Japan at his disposal, Douglas MacArthur could not simply bend the fate of the nation to his will. You would think he could have written any constitution he pleased, pointed his guns, and said “sign!” But the reality is that he was enormously constrained, and made many compromises in order to get an approximation of his ideal constitution passed.
  • If Douglas MacArthur and his conquering army couldn’t do as they pleased in Japan, you are not going to get what you want in a national policy.
  • The stressors that are much closer to home, on the other hand, are those that we have some reasonable ability to influence.
  • If you participate in your homeowner’s association, neighborhood advisory board, and attend local hearings, you won’t be able to bend your circumstances to some ideal, but you will have some visible sway.
  • The only healthy way to live in a world you cannot control is to take pride in participating in something much larger than yourself—be it the community you live in, civil society, or one of the many communities of scholars. Participate, focus on a craft that takes a lifetime to master, and release the illusion of control.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 13
     
    "I have had many friends for whom the passion for politics infected them like a debilitating disease. They have such a clear vision for where they believe our policies should end up, and who the good guys and bad guys are in the struggle to take and hold public office. Reality was never going to move to satisfy their one specific story of the world, and so they ended up bitter and angry, and, ultimately, disenchanted and burned out. I have gone through these stages at various times in my own life, but in the end it is clear to me that we emotionally invest far too much in forces and circumstances we could never hope to influence. A healthier life is one spent treating policy, institutions and fashions generally as no different from any other sort of random volatility, and focusing on the small sphere we have some measure of impact on."
anonymous

Please Take Out Your Cell Phones | CIRTL Network - 0 views

www.cirtl.net/7723

technology

shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 13 - Cached
  • I have a theory about digitial distractions, a theory that's supported by anecdotes from the mobile learning pioneers at Abilene Christian University and by data from CU-Boulder grad student Bethany Wilcox. My theory is that if all students are expected to do with their mobile devices during class is take notes, then they'll distract themselves with Facebook et al. because notetaking doesn't keep their minds busy enough.
  • Good notetaking is hard work. Listening to a presentation, making sense of the ideas, and recording those ideas in writing in ways that allow one to revisit them later take a lot of brain power.
  • This kind of notetaking doesn't take 100% of a student's mental energy. As a result, they have some spare cycles available for digital distractions.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • If my theory is true, then we can minimize digital distractions by giving our students more to think about and do during class.
  • How might we do that?
  • The term "digital ink" usually refers to the ability to draw using a digital device, typically with a stylus. If I could pass out stylus-equipped iPads to all my students, that would be great. Since I can't, I have students participate in "digital ink" activities on the cheap.
  • On a couple of occasions, I've sent my students a link to a Google Doc spreadsheet and asked them to contribute to it during class.
  • In my cryptography class the other year, I learned how to pipe the contents of a properly formatted Google Doc spreadsheet into an interactive, online timeline.
  • Crowdsourcing is a nice framework for thinking about the use of mobile devices in the classroom.
  • Again I asked students to work in groups, this time to identify arguments for or against various points of view in this debate.
  • I'm a big fan of teaching with clickers. (I did happen to write the book on this topic.) When I teach a course, I ask my students to purchase clickers because I know I'll use them regularly throughout the course.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 13
     
    "When I talk with most instructors about cell phones or laptops in the classroom, I hear great concern about digital distractions. If you let students use mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, or laptops, they'll surely start checking Facebook, watching ESPN, or shopping for shoes. (I don't know what's up, but when this issue gets addressed in the media, shoe shopping is ALWAYS mentioned.)"
anonymous

I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...merce-how-do-i-measure-success

analytics google metrics engagement

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - Cached
  • My recommendation: Measure the four metrics that are under the "Visitor Loyalty" button in Google Analytics (or in your favorite web analytics application). Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, Depth of Visit.
  • The goal is to use web analytics data to interpret success of a visit to your website.
  • There is one singular reason I loved 'em: they showed distribution and not simply averages for each of the metric!
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?
  • The number you are used to seeing is "average visits per visitor". That is usually one point something. It hides the truth.
  • For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?
  • Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…
  • Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……
  • As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.
  • Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.
  • But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……
  • Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.
  • 1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!
  • Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.
  • You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..
  • Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).
  • Recommendations for all of the above metrics:
  • Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.
  • Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time
  • Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?
  • Segmentation is key to insights that will drive action.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "A vast majority of discourse in the web analytics world is about orders and conversions and revenue. There is not enough of it about non-ecommerce websites, metrics and KPI's."  - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
anonymous

Steve Martin's Advice for Building a Career You Love - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...for-building-a-career-you-love

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 12 - Cached
  • In the last five minutes of the interview, Rose asks Martin his advice for aspiring performers. "Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not the answer they wanted to hear," Martin said. "What they want to hear is ‘Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script,' . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can't ignore you.' "
  • It took Martin, by his own estimation, ten years for his new act to cohere, but when it did, he became a monster success. It's clear in his telling that there was no real shortcut to his eventual fame, and the compelling life it generated. "[Eventually] you are so experienced [that] there's a confidence that comes out," Martin explained. "I think it's something the audience smells."
  • If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind. This clarity is refreshing. It tells you to stop worrying about what your job offers you, and instead worry about what you're offering the world.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As I'll explain below, regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset can be the foundation on which you build a compelling career.
  • Research shows that the traits that lead people to love their work are general, and can be found in many different career paths. They include things like autonomy, a sense of impact and mastery, creativity, and respect and recognition for your abilities. Once you recognize that these traits have little to do with following a pre-existing passion, and can be cultivated in many different fields, you can safely abandon the myth that there's a single right job waiting out there for you.
  • Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.
  • They start by painstakingly developing rare and valuable skills—which we can call career capital. They then leverage this capital to gain rare and valuable traits in their career. These traits lead to a feeling of passion about their working life.
  • The reality I'm proposing is less glamorous. It argues that passion takes time and hard work—harder work than most people naturally invest in their jobs. It's also less certain in the sense that you cannot predict in advance the details of the compelling career you're cultivating. But it compensates with clarity.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 12
     
    "To simplify things, I'll use the "passion hypothesis" to refer to the popular belief that the way to end up loving your career is to first figure out what you're passionate about, and then pursue it (a strategy often summarized with the pithy phrase, "follow your passion.") The more I studied this hypothesis, the more I noticed its danger. This idea convinces people that there's a magic "right" job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they'll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt."
anonymous

The Case Against High-School Sports - Amanda Ripley - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309447

shared by anonymous on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.
  • Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      It does in my home.
  • When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?
  • On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.
  • Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.
  • The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.
  • Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.
  • Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.
  • But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
  • “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      This is so absurd.
  • But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”
  • Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”
  • Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”
  • Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      So much awesome.
  • In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one—not even the people in charge—realizes their actual cost.
  • When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.
  • “And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading,” Roza wrote. “In fact, this district’s ‘strategic plan’ has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.”
  • Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport.
  • Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.
  • That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all.
  • During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics.
  • Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.
  • Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
  • But here’s the thing: most American principals I spoke with expressed no outrage over the primacy of sports in school. In fact, they fiercely defended it. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have more athletic opportunities for students, not less,” Bigham, the former Tennessee principal, told me.
  • His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      "The process" equals sports, not education. Dipstick.
  • But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned.
  • America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits.
  • “Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support,” he told me in an e-mail. “If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.”
  • But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.
  • One study of 30,000 students at the University of Oregon found that the grades of men who did not play sports went down as the football team’s performance improved. Both men and women reported that the better their football team did, the less they studied and the more they partied.
  • Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
  • Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.
  • Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.
  • “I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 13
     
    "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"
  • Ed Webb on 20 Sep 13
     
    Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.
  • anonymous on 23 Sep 13
     
    It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.
Ed Webb

Thomas Piketty: "You do need some inequality to generate growth" - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article18586580

capitalism economics democracy

shared by Ed Webb on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • if people feel that a disproportionate share of growth only goes to the top-wealth minority, then a large fraction of public opinion in European countries or in North America might turn against globalization
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 12 May 14
       
      Seems Piketty's project is to save capitalism/liberal globalization. Deferring (indefinitely) structural change by applying minor corrections to the cycle of creative destruction and negative externalities. A kind of FDR project at the global level: dilute capitalism in order to prevent revolution.
  • I belong to the post-Marxist generation, if you wish – I turned 18 in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall; I travelled to Eastern Europe to see those countries after the fall of their communist dictatorships, and I’ve never had any temptation for that. Anti-capitalists should read the history books.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 12 May 14
       
      I am almost his exact contemporary. I visited Eastern Europe shortly after 1989. I have read many history books. I still want to overthrow capitalism.
anonymous

The Internet Is Killing the Middle Class - 1 views

mag.newsweek.com/...-killing-the-middle-class.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • There are two viable courses of action for the U.S., or any other nation.
  • One is to pass laws that redistribute wealth from the top tier down.
  • The second option is to do everything possible to shift large segments of the population into a new kind of job. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Some smart companies and educators contend that the next middle class will be made up of this new kind of worker: one who deals in creativity, philosophy, and idea synthesis, thinking that can’t be easily networked or automated. 
  • anonymous on 24 Oct 13
     
    The growing U.S. income gap has little to do with policy or politics and everything to do with technology.
anonymous

A Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms - 0 views

www.slate.com/2262822

politics criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 06 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Tina Fey's caricature of Palin as an unprepared high-school student trying to bluff her way through an oral exam by mugging and flirting hit its mark not merely because of the genius of the mimicry, but because of its fundamentally accurate diagnosis of Palin as bullshit artist. Palin's exuberant incoherence testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability. She is proud of what she doesn't know and contemptuous of those "experts" and "elitists" who are too knowledgeable to be trusted. This curious self-regard echoes through her book, Going Rogue, described by the critic Jonathan Raban as "a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance."
  • But the best Palinisms of all result when the huntress encounters something she wasn't hunting for—that is, when Sarah Palin comes into contact with most anything to do with domestic, foreign, or economic policy.
  • The issue is that she rarely appears to have the slightest grasp of what she's talking about even when she's supposed to know what she's talking about.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Bushisms, which I collected for many years, often hinged on a single grammatical or factual error. Palinisms, by contrast, consist of a unitary stream of patriotic, populist blather.
  • It's like Fox News without the punctuation.
  • It is so devoid of content that it hardly deserves the adjective "truthy." Let's call it "roguey." Palinisms do not have to contain actual evidence of rogue thinking, though; they just have to capture the rogue spirit. It's "Yes, we can, in spite of Them."
  • It is this situation that generates those priceless let me tap-dance and, also, sing for you a little song while you think of a different question moments.
  • anonymous on 06 Aug 10
     
    "Why Sarah Palin says all those stupid and ridiculous things." By Jacob Weisberg at Slate Magazine on August 6, 2010.
anonymous

DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - 0 views

www.douglasadams.com/...19990901-00-a.html

technology dougadams adams

shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
  • Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web.
  • ‘carved in stone.’
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Aug 10
       
      Add: You can carve lies in stone.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’
  • In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all. However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
  • We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
  • anonymous on 18 Aug 10
     
    "...the change is real. I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day." By Douglas Adams at The Sunday Times on August 29, 1999.
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