My daily readings 01/28/2012
January 28, 2012My daily readings 01/26/2012
January 26, 2012-
Google Works on Internet Standards with TCP Proposals, SPDY Standardization | Webmonkey | Wired.com
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Initially, SPDY was a proprietary Google protocol implemented only in Google’s Chrome browser. That’s changing, however. Amazon’s Silk browser includes SPDY support, and Firefox 11 will include preliminary SPDY support. Partially motivated by SPDY’s uptake, the IETF’s HTTPbis Working Group — the team of industry experts tasked with maintaining and developing the HTTP specification — is considering the development of a new specification, HTTP/2.0, with the goal of improving the performance of HTTP connections. The working group will solicit suggestions from the industry, and with two, soon to be three implementations already, SPDY is likely to be well placed among those suggestions.
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blog.reddit — what’s new on reddit: January 2012 – State of the Servers
My daily readings 01/21/2012
January 21, 2012-
Forming a new software startup, how do I allocate ownership fairly? – OnStartups – Stack Exchange
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and weekends. Since I think the idea does have the potential to turn into a successful venture, I want to go ahead and solve the ownership/payment issue now before it becomes an issue. I’m leaning towards splitting ownership
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My daily readings 01/20/2012
January 20, 2012-
If the people lead, the leaders will follow:
If the people lead, the leaders will follow: http://t.co/juwztFIc
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Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits – NYTimes.com
My daily readings 01/19/2012
January 19, 2012-
Tagged: Four Years Profitable, Big Plans for hi5 | TechCrunch
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Tagged also launched its own in-house development studio last year, Sarner says, because it found that the games that did the best achieved the company’s aims were built by Tagged itself. There are still a few games built by third parties on the network, but moving forward the company’s focus will be in-house.
Unlike the better-known social networks, Tagged focuses on what it calls “social discovery,” or, as Sarner describes it, “the meet new people space” (as opposed to connecting you online with your real world friends). Sarner argues that other companies are finally starting to catch on to the potential here.
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Free Social Teaching and Learning Network focused solely on education
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Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Magazine
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The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.
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But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”
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Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
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Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.
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Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”
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Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing. Another researcher, Erping Zhu, had people read a passage of digital prose but varied the number of links appearing in it. She then gave the readers a multiple-choice quiz and had them write a summary of what they had read. She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting.
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And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.
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The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.
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On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.
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Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak. That’s why the extensive brain activity that Small discovered in Web searchers may be more a cause for concern than for celebration. It points to cognitive overload.
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Focus Changes Your Brain – J.D. Meier’s Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs
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You might have heard the expression, “you get what you focus on.” But, have you heard that what you focus on actually reshapes your brain? The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in your brain. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz write about how focused attention can physically change the structure of your brain in their article, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, in “strategy+business” magazine.
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Amazon Web Services Introduces Web-Scale Database, DynamoDB | TechCrunch
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DynamoDB is a “a fully managed NoSQL database” that can be scaled up or down according to demand. Amazon takes care of all the provisioning and management of the database. The whole service takes advantage of solid-state drives, greatly speeding up the transfer of data from the database (which is often a bottleneck).
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Idea for some tiny web software: L337Quotes – ideashower’s Space
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Ideas on this? Here’s one idea: it doesn’t have to be quotes per se,
it can be any short nugget of valuable info that a particular group
wants to share. Think short food recipes, hacks, poems, whatever
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My daily readings 01/18/2012
January 18, 2012-
Khan Academy Blends Its YouTube Approach With Classrooms – NYTimes.com
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Venture Sandbox: Is online learning coming back?
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1999 everyone was talking about how all training was going to be online by 2010. It hasn’t happened at all, and even worse, flagship companies such as Saba, with a market cap of $142M and SumTotal, which was taken private by Vista Equity Partners in 2009 for about $160M didn’t perform as expected.
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On the other side, companies such as BlackBoard, with a market cap of $1.45B and SkillSoft, with a market cap of $1.05B did much better. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation after this first generation of e-learning startups. However e-learning as an industry seems to be making a comeback with companies such as 2Tor, founded by Princeton Review’s John Katzman, getting a lot of attention after raising a $10M series A in June 2009 and $20M series B recently led by Highland to go after elite programs at elite schools.
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Even though most of the spending is done by corporations, the healthcare, higher education and PreK-12 segments are growing faster. What makes it even more interesting is that new devices such as the iPad create interesting opportunities to develop solutions for these growing segments. Imagine if someone could leverage the iPad, Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and other highly interactive and addictive solutions to go after the training market?
UPS had a lot of press lately about the use of video games to train the younger generations of truck drivers. Gaming is hot and portable devices are much better in handling multimedia applications. The ecosystem is ready for a second wave of innovative e-learning companies and I expect to see a lot of action there!
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Using del.icio.us as a writing summarization tool (by Jeremy Zawodny)
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- A single quote from the article that the reader seems to think represents the spirit of what was said. For example, several folks quoted me saying “Computers need operating systems but networks don’t.”
- A statement of agreement or support, such as “Peach it!” or “Right on.”
- A combination of those two
- A restatement of the premise of the article in the reader’s own words.
Interestingly, the majority of folks so far who’ve made any notes about the article did so via #1 above. A smaller number did #2 or #3. So far nobody has done #4, but I have seen that reaction to some of my previous articles.
It occurs to me that with a sufficient number of people bookmarking an article and selecting a short passage from it, I have a useful way to figure out what statement(s) most resonated with those readers (and possibly a much larger audience). It’s almost like a human powered version of Microsoft Word’s document summarization feature.
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Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News « The Story’s Story
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Looking at Different Writing Tools for Macs — The Brooks Review
My daily readings 01/17/2012
January 17, 2012My daily readings 01/16/2012
January 16, 2012-
Differential Synchronization – YouTube
MobWrite
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Convert your Kindle ‘My Clippings.txt’ file to Excel, Word and PDF
export kindle note
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这种做法需要有很好的敏锐度。他对《环球企业家》说：“我们更希望看到产品人员在这一个月他能够感受到当时的用户背后的那一种需求潮流，用户不一定会直接说出来，但是你能感受到。”这种应需而变，平衡好了计划和变化之间的关系，使得产品开发始终有一条最终的判断准绳。而同时，产品也随着用户成长，最大限度地在用户厌倦之前，以新东西带来新鲜感。
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很多人会希望给一个产品很清晰的定位，要么做熟人的，要么做陌生人。张小龙觉得这些都是从概念上来分析的，而不是从用户的需求层面来思考的。“任何人电话簿里的号码本肯定是有熟人也有陌生人的，所以我们并没有先给自己一个概念上的框框，然后在那个框框里面做事情。我们更多的是考虑这个需求是不是一个普遍的需求。至于满足需求，可能带来一个复杂度。产品经理的责任，就是在于怎么样把一个复杂的需求最后以一个简单的模型，通过产品的形态来展现出来。”
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与创业团队相比，微信诞生之初已经具备了一定的积淀。它的一大优势就是背靠广研，并非平地起高楼。微信项目中的很多开发人员都是从广研QQ邮箱团队调配的，除了新招聘的技术人员和应届毕业生外，QQ邮箱团队时不时会在关键时刻对微信给予支持。比如微信2.0版本发布前后，QQ邮箱所属的阅读空间项目组就从一半的数量直至全部都空降到微信上。近期，广研着手将两个团队正式分拆开来。过去两拨人混在一起，你来我往，可以说在产品理念和团队文化上二者有直接的血缘关系。
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这是一支产品能力很强的团队。据腾讯内部人员称，早在QQ邮箱时代，马化腾就经常表扬广研邮箱团队，在广研办公室的走廊里，毗邻新员工照片墙，挂着表彰QQ邮箱的腾讯年度创新大奖和年度重大业务突破奖锦旗，而单就后者来说，邮箱业务就获得2次，微信也获得了2011年的重大业务突破奖。在去年首届腾讯微创新奖中，9个获奖项目广研占了3个，其中两个属于微信的摇一摇和视频。从获奖次数上看，广研可算作腾讯的创新标杆。
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实际上，QQ邮箱项目的诞生并不像微信诞生时那么命好。QQ邮箱前身是腾讯于2005年收购的由张小龙带领开发的Foxmail。在由一个客户端软件向互联网网页产品转型时其遭到当头一棒的挫折：以软件设计的思维去设计一个很复杂的产品。投放到市场后结果发现用户根本不买账，体验很糟糕，公司管理层也对产品不满意。那段时间是QQ邮箱团队最艰难的时候，熊明华也经常到广研来帮助他们扭转思维，招聘合适的互联网工程师。
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经验积累能帮助微信团队加速学习，而团队保持创业般的激情在一个大公司里显得异常难得。广研的工程师被戏称为“矿工”，他们经常晚上开发，与广州的黑夜作伴。这也是延续着QQ邮箱时代的节奏，在弹性工作制下，他们中午会熄灭办公室的日光灯，有的人躺在行军床上午休。长期打磨一个产品的团队在转向新产品上虽说会遇到一些困难，但换一个产品来将过往的经验倒出来重新设计和实验新产品，经历一个个用户量暴增的时刻，这也让他们感到兴奋。
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而张小龙在团队管理上信奉管人是服务于管产品，根据产品需要来调配人手，最终目的是做好产品。为了增加新鲜感，项目中的产品人员也会经常轮换，被全面锻炼。与用户的接触也是要求之一。在微博上，微信产品经理会花专门的时间来收集用户关于微信的建议和问题，进行反馈。
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