Month: September 2009

James Marcus Bach dropped out of high school, became a engineer-manager at Apple when 20 years old, and went on to teach at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. He says he has been entirely self-taught throughout his life, a “buccaneer scholar”.

The pattern I experienced at Apple would be confirmed almost everywhere I traveled in the computer industry: Most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects. This has the effect of making them more alike instead of more unique. It’s an educational herd mentality.

That last line – becoming more like than unique reminded me of the time when one of my previous employers ran a ‘brand building’ workshop for employees but which turned out to be all about executive presence – how to talk, conduct oneself, handle phone conversations and presentations. I pointed out to management that contrary to making each employee a unique brand, this was about everyone acting, talking and behaving the same way, and my managers all said “well, we want them to represent a certain brand, the company’s brand, and that’s what we’re trying to build”.

One view of how Obama, who said his job is to not be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle, actually does a splendid job of using it to maximum effect:

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

Us Now is a documentary film about how the future might be with mass collaboration and active participation in every activity of companies, Government and society. Where everyone could be a bank manager, or the part owner of a football club:

In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s FA Trophy Semi-Final match against Aldershot . Around the world 35,000 other fans are doing the same thing, because together, they own and manage the football club. If distributed networks of people can run complex organisations such as football clubs, what else can they do?

Available for free viewing online. You can also download it through a torrent.

Also, a list of websites of the real-life collaborative organizations mentioned in the film. And a Financial Times article about the film.

Dead Man’s Switch is a service that, when you die, will send your passwords and other critical information to people whom you specify.

Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to… happen… to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an “electronic will”, one could say.

For all the hand-wringing about what happens to your digital possessions – email, pictures, videos, social network profiles, blogs, comments – after you die, Dead Man’s Switch’s solution is to leave that problem to someone else.

Update (6th October 2009): The Guardian has a feature on businesses like DM’sS.

Several startups want to bring higher education into the Internet age. First, make courseware for higher education available online. Then, provide the supporting infrastructure that a physical university provides: teachers, peers, evaluation of competency and, finally, accreditation.

Today, we’ve gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It’s only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions. The string-quartet model of education is no longer sustainable. The university of the future can’t be far away.

My first exposure to such efforts was a few years ago when MIT began to make a lot of its educational material online through its OpenCourseWare program. I attempted to take a course or two, but without firm targets, guidance and the pressure of evaluation, it only resulted in a few weeks of desultory study. Clearly, students need something more.

It seems (from the article at least) that each startup seems to favour tackling one particular aspect of this problem – one focuses on aggregating educational content, another on providing “social inrfastructure”, a third on accreditation.

Several startups want to bring higher education into the Internet age. First, make courseware for higher education available online. Then, provide the supporting infrastructure that a physical university provides: teachers, peers, evaluation of competency and, finally, accreditation.

Today, we’ve gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It’s only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions. The string-quartet model of education is no longer sustainable. The university of the future can’t be far away.

My first exposure to such efforts was a few years ago when MIT began to make a lot of its educational material online through its OpenCourseWare program. I attempted to take a course or two, but without firm targets, guidance and the pressure of evaluation, it only resulted in a few weeks of desultory study. Clearly, students need something more.

It seems (from the article at least) that each startup seems to favour tackling one particular aspect of this problem – one focuses on aggregating educational content, another on providing “social inrfastructure”, a third on accreditation.

The problem lies not as much within the American health-care system itself as in Americans’ dietary habits.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet.

I think this observation is brilliant. It immediately brought to mind this piece titled “Profile Before Optimizing”:

When it comes time to optimize a piece of software, always get profiling information first, so you can tell where you need to spend your time making improvements. Without profiling data, there is no way of knowing for certain whether any “improvements” have indeed improved the code.

David Foster Wallace, master narrator of human emotions, as he captured America’s state of being one day after. For Rolling Stone magazine.

Matt Mullenweg details his thoughts about the hypothetical SafeBank. A bank that’s not high-return but therefore rock-solid safe, that offers “amazing white-glove service to the initial customers” to build loyalty, that is completely online to eliminate fixed costs and risk of robbery, with a website that has an “old-time vintage design aesthetic combined with a Google-like simplicity”.

Existing banks couldn’t compete in a traditional way because they have such a sordid history of customer apathy and bad PR. SafeBank wouldn’t be trying to capture their profits, it would largely be destroying them and making much smaller amounts of money in non-traditional bank ways. It would be somewhat like a credit union, but for the masses.

Matt Mullenweg has had big ideas before, of course. One of them was WordPress.

Mom: We ought to short-list some of the best pictures from the wedding (from earlier this year) and print them out – you know, your hard drive could crash someday, or the backup CDs could scratch.

Me (thinking, just the previous day): We need to digitize all these old photographs in our albums; look how badly the old ones have deteriorated.