“In fact, one food giant, Gen­eral Mills, has essen­tially con­ceded that cook­ing their food in a microwave isn’t good enough.”

“Now tell me again: Why do we sub­mit papers to, ref­eree papers for, and buy jour­nals from these peo­ple? Some sort of mis­placed sense of loy­alty? Or some sad com­bi­na­tion of apa­thy and iner­tia? What will it take for the research com­mu­nity to cut Else­vier loose?”

“The duplic­a­bil­ity of record­ings has had another unex­pected effect. The pres­sure is on to develop con­tent that isn’t eas­ily copyable—so now every­thing other than the recorded music is becom­ing the valu­able part of what artists sell.”

“Many of these smaller deal­er­ships are fam­ily enter­prises; three and even four gen­er­a­tions old. Their longevity is a tes­ta­ment less to Detroit’s prod­ucts and more to their smart and sharp busi­ness prac­tices. And now that some of their com­peti­tors are clos­ing they may do even bet­ter. Let’s con­sider what busi­ness lead­ers can learn from these small-​​town auto dealers.”

[Watch the video] “The sen­sor mean­while detects sur­round­ing pH levels–the higher the pH con­cen­tra­tion, the faster the elec­tro­mag­netic pulses emit­ted by the micro-​​machine. The exter­nal com­puter uses these sig­nals to direct a swarm of about 3,000 magnetically-​​sensitive bac­te­ria, which push the micro-​​machine around as it pulses. The bac­te­ria push the micro-​​machine closer to the higher pH concentration.”

“37signals not only con­stantly fine-​​tunes their prod­ucts, they also think about the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence even when the cus­tomer is leaving.

I find that instruc­tive, edu­ca­tional, and inspiring.”

“Uni­ver­si­ties are going through a tough time finan­cially. Peo­ple no longer have to attend them to get the cre­den­tials they need. Peo­ple inside uni­ver­si­ties think they are sell­ing an expe­ri­ence and that peo­ple are turn­ing away from that. I think uni­ver­si­ties were always sell­ing credentials.

They’re just not the only place to get them any more.”

“The ad protests a bit too much that the higher cost of elec­tri­fi­ca­tion is actu­ally a LOWER cost once you fig­ure in the ben­e­fits. Peo­ple are crea­tures of habit, and I’m sure many Ypsi­lan­tians said, “No–the gaslights I’ve got now are fine, thanks.” An imper­fect ana­log today is solar power. Of course it’s more expen­sive, and sim­i­larly offers ben­e­fits in the long run. Per­haps one day every home will come with built-​​in pan­els and we will look back on DTE as some­thing as quaint as gaslight.”

“What’s the gap between dreams being fan­tasy and real­ity? Obvi­ously, it’s a mat­ter of action. But, what makes the free man take action where the cubi­cle cit­i­zen recoils? This is the ques­tion that has been burn­ing in my mind for some time. This mind­set makes the dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and near cer­tain failure.”

[Con­sid­er­ing this and some related exer­cises as sim­ple tuto­ri­als for Nudge programming]

“In this tuto­r­ial one of our senior mem­bers from our forums Japasla­vian (Jeff Masamori over at Flickr) shares a sim­ple pho­to­shop tech­nique for enhanc­ing contrast.”

“An early and promi­nent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the asser­tion that pairs work­ing together in star­tups are 20 times more pro­duc­tive than indi­vid­u­als work­ing alone. The author has also per­son­ally expe­ri­enced the boost of what is here termed pair­work in a uni­ver­sity set­ting dur­ing the startup phase of sev­eral edu­ca­tional and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary ini­tia­tives. The paper briefly explores pair­work in the his­tory of tech­nol­ogy and con­structs both qual­i­ta­tive and lit­tle quan­ti­ta­tive mod­els of pair­work. The quan­ti­ta­tive model under rea­son­able assump­tions eas­ily recov­ers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly exam­ines the author’s recent expe­ri­ences with pair­work in four inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and edu­ca­tional initiatives.”

“And I worry that the idea that learn­ing in rela­tion to his­tory can eas­ily be kept within some type of bounds implies, to a degree, that the impor­tance of his­tory is its fac­tual con­tent. Gen­er­a­tions of cap­tive his­tory stu­dents, face-​​down and drool­ing on their desks, indi­cate that approaches of this nature are not only unfor­tu­nately lim­ited, but also a fatal blow to any intrin­sic inter­est in exam­in­ing historical/​cultural change.”

“There are a num­ber of qual­i­ties that can’t be copied. Con­sider “trust.” Trust can­not be copied. You can’t pur­chase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It can­not be down­loaded. Or faked. Or coun­ter­feited (at least for long). If every­thing else is equal, you’ll always pre­fer to deal with some­one you can trust. So trust is an intan­gi­ble that has increas­ing value in a copy sat­u­rated world.”

“In recent research exper­i­ments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galin­sky, found that peo­ple who felt pow­er­less were will­ing to pay more money for lux­ury or sta­tus items than peo­ple who’d been con­di­tioned to feel more pow­er­ful and in control.”

“Build­ing com­mu­ni­ties is vital today, whether it’s to build a reli­able sup­port net­work, serve as a valu­able source of new ideas, or pro­vide a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool. In The Art of Com­mu­nity, you’ll learn about the broad range of tal­ents required to recruit, moti­vate, and man­age com­mu­nity mem­bers. The book takes you through the stages of com­mu­nity, and cov­ers top­ics rang­ing from soft­ware tools to con­flict res­o­lu­tion skills. ”

“But if an entire team walks, that’s much more like an addict’s “hit­ting bot­tom”. The con­se­quences are going to be huge because any new team would have to learn the sys­tem from scratch. (Though I sup­pose man­age­ment could delude them­selves into think­ing they have the project doc­u­men­ta­tion to make that tractable.) And the depar­ture of any series of employ­ees [or, in the case of an addict, friends] is easy to ratio­nal­ize: “he’s just a mal­con­tent [no fun any more since he got mar­ried]”. But when *every­one* rejects you at once…”

Nice images of the few times we got out­side with­out totally freezing

See in par­tic­u­lar Chap­ter 2, on Data Bal­anc­ing. This is impor­tant stuff for those of us deal­ing with data-​​driven mod­els and tech­niques, espe­cially those not based on ana­lyt­i­cal closed form first-​​principles junk.

Wan­dered here after fol­low­ing up on the A2 Mech Shop open house http://​annar​borchron​i​cle​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​0​4​/​1​3​/​e​l​e​c​t​r​i​c​-​v​e​h​i​c​l​e​s​-​t​o​-​b​e​-​p​r​o​d​u​c​e​d​-​i​n​-​s​c​io/

I had no idea; met a re-​​enactor at a party the other day. The world is full of inter­est­ing things.

Think­ing seri­ously about how to use this, and how often I might do so. Seems rental might be the way to go.…

Proof-​​of-​​concept of dis­trib­uted population-​​based meta­heuris­tics run­ning on a num­ber of phones.