July 2010
17 posts
“Great minds talk about ideas/concepts.
Average minds talk about events/things....”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
(via bluepojo)
Eighth-Grade Education
Doubt there are many college grads today who could pass this 1895 8th grade final exam
Take this test and pass it on to your more literate friends.
What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895… Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is...
TWEET.
bluepojo:
by Oyl Miller
- - - -
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected...
Poverty and the Environment
In my class on Native American culture, a random non-Math/Science elective I decided to take this term, my professor was showing some photos she took of a Native American Reservation (Pine Ridge, I believe). I commented on the beauty of the land after class, and she offered this pearl of wisdom:
The thing about real poverty is that it leaves things pristine. [Reservation Indians] can’t...
“Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they...”
– Neil Gaiman (for SIMCITY) (via threeneilsaday) (via neilgaiman) (via clockwatching) (via arcktip)
Clifford Stoll: Why Web Will Never Be Nirvana →
Awesome article from 1995 by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and author, in which he derides the Internet and says its a dead-end. Some great quotes:
“Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
“Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog...
How to make a lost cat poster if you're a graphic... →
“All new Zappos employees receive two weeks of classroom training. Then they...”
– The Zappos Way of Managing in Inc
What the Internet was Made For
This morning I found an email from MyHeritage.com stating that I had 5 “Smart Matches”. Clicking in the email, I discovered that this service had matched my immediately family with an existing family tree on their service. Okay, this is cool if its accurate, right?
I click into MyHeritage.com to check out the family tree belonging to the other guy (who I later found out was actually a...
Germanic English
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.
In the...
“Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”
– Benjamin Franklin
BluePojo: My teachers sucked at knowing things →
Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_misconceptions
There’s plenty of information there, take some time to poke through it.
Why is it that my teachers taught me so many of those things? Are their lives so full of other things that they can’t take the time to seek out real answers…
“I LOVE popcorn. It’s all I ever want to eat. I make it in a pot on the...”
– Kate Lang
June 2010
12 posts
“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.”
– George Herbert
“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do...”
– Clarence B. Kelland
Livingstone: The Next Generation of Web Services →
I am noticing a growing trend amongst my friends and I: we are increasingly using the web to manage our daily lives.
Over winter break I told my mom that I don’t go to drugstores as often as I did a few years ago. Amazon has made this part of my life easier. I buy a fair amount of items on…
Wonderful Discussion on Teasing →
I’m a big fan of teasing, but this post and the comments below I found quite interesting, as they reminded me of my relationship with my sister growing up (I loved teasing, she didn’t).
Web Services as Governments →
Brilliant post by Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures drawing the analogy of social networks to governments (rather than ecosystems), in which the application developers play the private sector and the users play the citizens.
As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don’t make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time...
The Real Science Gap →
The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the U.S. research establishment.
scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly...
Tabbloid + G-Reader + Evernote = Bliss
Total Recall isn’t just an old Governator movie, it’s also a goal for anyone that’s ever forgotten anything. Evernote goes a long way to making that possible, but you still have to remember to save or send items to it before it can “Remember Everything”. One thing missing from that equation for me is RSS feeds - I subscribe to several hundred feeds (of which I...
Proposal for Downsizing Congress
Although this was sent to me as spam-mail, I thought it provided at least semi-interesting thoughts on national finance and governance.
When a company falls on difficult times, one of the things that seems to happen is they reduce their staff and workers. The remaining workers must find ways to continue to do a good job or risk that their job would be eliminated as well. Wall street and the...
Gun Control
Although I haven’t settled my views on gun control, I found these images enticing.
May 2010
27 posts
O'Reilly Open Books →
About Open Books
O’Reilly has published a number of Open Books—books with various forms of “open” copyright—over the years. The reasons for “opening” copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.
Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the...
Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution... →
Lessons learned as a print and online publisher:
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Piracy is progressive taxation.
Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
“Free” is...
Banned Books and Censorship, A Letter to the... →
I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money, either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations,...
“As opposed to traditional firms where public relations is controlled by...”
– http://archrecord.construction.com/practice/business/1004practice-1.asp
User innovation →
User innovation refers to innovation by consumers and end users, rather than suppliers. Eric von Hippel (von Hippel 1986) of MIT and others observed that many products and services are actually developed or at least refined, by users, at the site of implementation and use. These ideas are then moved back into the supply network. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible...
The Oracle of Silicon Valley: Tim O'Reilly →
O’Reilly began to see starting a company as an interesting way to live life on his own terms. “I wanted more control of my life,” he explained in a company newsletter in 2002. “I wanted work to fit in, not to dominate; to support, not to lead the pattern of my life.”
“There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics,” he wrote in an early company...
Will Real Estate Developers Build Our Mass...
In his piece “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” real estate developer Christopher Leinberger (who also wrote the lauded 2008 piece “The Next Slums?”) brings up a point that’s in his frequently mentioned, but definitely important in the discussion of the long slow death of suburbs and the urban renaissance: “Two-thirds of all households today consist of singles, childless...
Some interesting thoughts on education
http://davetroy.com/posts/how-education-is-ruining-your-life
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=18167
http://gyanpedia.in/tft/Resources/books/DESCHOOLING.pdf (haven’t read it yet)
http://davetroy.com/posts/learning-by-accident
http://gyanpedia.in/tft/Resources/books/teachyourown.pdf (haven’t read it yet)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html?emc=eta1
...
Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college →
“College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.”
“Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company, and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup...
Kaspersky
Anna: On my way to pick [my new laptop] up right now :) we bought it plus antivirus plus microsoft office
Cody: Antivirus? Which
Anna: Didn't pay.. Free for 6 months. Kaspersky. Apparently geeksquad uses only that.
Cody: Kaspersky? What the heck is that?
Anna: Some guy who loves shutting hackers down and has ninjas working for him 24/7
poor people
One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live. They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, ‘How was the trip?’ ’It was great, Dad.’ ’Did you see how poor...
Kaspersky
Anna: On my way to pick [my new laptop] up right now :) we bought it plus antivirus plus microsoft office
Cody: Antivirus? [...] which one and why [did you] pay [for antivirus]?
Anna: Didn't pay.. Free for 6 months. Kaspersky. Apparently geeksquad uses only that.
Cody: Kaspersky? What the heck is that?
Anna: Some guy who loves shutting hackers down and has ninjas working for him 24/7
Consulting for Local Businesses
Today’s Inquiry:
I used to work for a large consulting firm and was on the road a lot. Now that I have my own firm and would rather spend time with my family, how do I build a solid base of local business?
Building a local base takes experimentation. Try some of these strategies, including a new approach to any of these strategies that “didn’t work before.”
Join the...
“…a certain amount of insurance in the form of proprietary technology,...”
– The Coming War Over Innovation
Copy machines - security risk →
Watch
Concerned Students + God
Why I went into Computer Science originally →
the modern era of data-driven science. “Science is becoming data-intensive and collaborative,” noted Ed Seidel, acting assistant director for NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate. “Researchers from numerous disciplines need to work together to attack complex problems; openly sharing data will pave the way for researchers to communicate and collaborate more...
Entrepreneurship in Drexel Smart House
http://davetroy.com/?p=1136
“critical elements of successful entrepreneurship…. acquire key initial customers, product development, building a team and staff, operational infrastructure, raising capital, etc.”
Sounds like the top roles within Drexel Smart House (just replace “customers” with “supporters” or “granting agencies”, and note that our...
Flickr.rb
If you’re just starting with flickr.rb and are getting an error like
ArgumentError: File does not exist: .
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/xml-simple-1.0.12/lib/
xmlsimple.rb:984:in `find_xml_file'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/xml-simple-1.0.12/lib/
xmlsimple.rb:168:in `xml_in'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/xml-simple-1.0.12/lib/
xmlsimple.rb:203:in...
Rails Select Tag (Undocumented)
I just spent a half-hour trying to figure out the easiest way to build an HTML select form using the Rails FormBuilder. Various tutorials suggested rendered a partial with a collection, or writing a custom FormBuilder. Its really just this easy though.. give the name and an array of options:
<% form_for @service_account do |f| %>
<%= f.select :service, [:tumblr, :flickr] %>
...