Blog: Via Meadia: Yule Blog 2012-13 Edition: The Meaning of Christmas
Blog: The American Conservative » Rod Dreher: Money Changes Everything
Blog: askblog: Exaggeration in Political Stereotypes
Blog: Via Meadia: Yule Blog 2012-13: The Hinge of Fate
The best interface is no interface | Cooper Journal
“Following three simple principles, we can design smarter, more useful systems that make our lives better.”
Blog: Svbtle Featured: Exec Cleaning, or the challenges scaling a real world business
Blog: Baseball Prospectus: Punk Hits: Why Do We Fear The Beard? by Ian Miller
YouTube: Malcolm Gladwell Keynote Speech at SapientNitro iEX 2011
Interesting thing in the Q&A afterwards about the tradeoff between resources and freedom. Sometimes, to solve a problem, what you don’t want is to give somebody more resources, what you want to give them more freedom. Don’t throw more money at crafting expensive health-care trials, let people experiment quickly and cheaply. You get a different kind of creativity with those different restraints.
He ends his Q&A with a nice rant about how seldom we are explicit about the tradeoffs we make, when we are always making tradeoffs. Like how we make tradeoffs on sound fidelity when we put our music into our pockets with iPods.
The main part of the speech is about some of these tradeoffs we don’t make explicit:
- Being first vs. being third
- Elite groups vs mass groups
- More resources vs limited resources
YouTube: Malcolm Gladwell Explains Why Human Potential Is Being Squandered
YouTube: SapientNitro iEX 2012 Malcolm Gladwell Keynote Speech
WWII-generation paradigm: hierarchical organization
Baby boomer paradigm: treat me like an individual!
Millenial paradigm: networked/social organization
What’s the tradeoff: networks are open, not closed. Decentralized, not centralized. Flexible, not disciplined. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
“That notion of being treated and seen as an individual is not a preoccupation of the current generation. It’s not part of their paradigm.”
Boomers want to surround themselves with the totems of their individuality.
Millennials want to be surrounded by things that signal that they are a member of a community. _Not_ to be profoundly different. That’s why they all have identical Apple laptops and iPhones. They don’t care.
Not interested in deference to hierarchy and experts, they’re interested in participation. Millenials care about the supply chain. Where did this piece of meat, or that computer, come from? No one in previous generations cared about that. Millenials care because they see themselves as belonging to series networks, and they want to understand what the networks they are joining look like. Current brands need to explain who they are, where they come from, who they work with, what they intend to do.
Blog: Svbtle Featured: Square’s Gift Card Gift To Small Merchants
Flickr: She’s still up there, isn’t she?
Planning His Legacy, Cisco Chief Maps an Expansion – NYTimes.com
Planning His Legacy, Cisco Chief Maps an Expansion – NYTimes.com
“Cisco’s plan is to create networks of sensors and data analysis systems, working closely with government officials and civil engineering companies. And it will work with companies to set up efficient mining, manufacturing and distribution systems.”
Blog: NotGraphs Baseball: Ode on a Ken Phelps Starting Lineup Action Figure
Simulated brain mimics human quirks
Simulated brain mimics human quirks
“Just like human volunteers, Spaun was better at remembering the first and last number in a series. Also like people, Spaun took longer to count to higher numbers.”
Blog: Via Meadia: The Coming: Part Two
Nick Cave’s Love Song Lecture
Nick Cave’s Love Song Lecture
“Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits.”
