My daily readings 02/28/2010

• MIT’s Sketch-Interpreting Software Turns Tablet Computers into Smart Whiteboards | Popular Science

  tags: mit, iPad, idea

• 李琰感谢美国牧师点拨 王濛为“后妈”挂金牌_网易体育

  tags: no_tag

  • 但刚从美国回来，李琰也一度失去方向，她不再像以前似的先夸奖再说问题，而是直接批评，这让“刺毛驴”王濛也有点接受不了，不过，好在李琰及时改变了自己，她甚至抛下了丈夫孩子，和队员们在宿舍一住就是四年，“我想到为什么回到中国来，为什么执教中国短道队，为什么要这样做，有段时间回到美国度假，我就不停问自己，反省自己，我哪儿做得不好，是不是可以做得更好，回来第二年我知道自己要转变，只要队员需要我的时候，我保证在那儿。”

    而这份改变李琰还要感谢一位美国牧师，作为基督徒的她说，“牧师和我说首先要改变自己，原谅别人，要明确回来的目的，所以我回来一下子心大了很多，明确了我自己，为什么要回来，一切不用很计较。”

• Hacker News | People Don’t Hate Change – They Hate You Trying to Change Them

  tags: no_tag

  • This is not just true of the corporate world; it’s also true of relationships. People are constantly changing, trying to better themselves or their lives or their jobs.

    People embrace change — as long as it’s the right type of change. It needs to be change that they own, change that they think/feel is productive, change that they view as a positive.

    If you find people resistant to changes you’re trying to impose, chances are, it’s not “change” they’re resisting, but your particular choices. Identifying a common goal and then allowing the other person to come up with a solution is often a far better approach than declaring a solution someone else must implement.

  • Basically, people aren’t slaves. If you want a significant change in their daily lives, involve them rather than dictate to them. I’d like to say this is so well known and obvious that it’s absurd to write an article on it, but seeing the corporate behavior and especially HR that I do, it’s not.

• Fistful of Talent: People Don’t Hate Change – They Hate You Trying to Change Them

  tags: Change, HR, management

  • Here’s the reality of it.  People don’t mind change – they just hate being forced to change.  If positioned correctly – and the employee is involved in the change – it is much less difficult to drive change.  But normally what happens is decisions are made in mahogany-paneled boardrooms and passed down to the masses.  “Do this and things will get better.”  Too often the employees already know what change is required.  They do the job every day.  They know the flaws in the system.  They

    know

    know all about the pointless and inefficient processes they are forced to live with each day.  Just ask them.

  • A huge driver of employee engagement is a psychological principle called “locus of control” – the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them.  Increasing your employees’ belief (and reality) that they have control over the outcomes will increase their desire to make changes and increase their engagement with the change.

    Don’t take HR’s word for it… Your people aren’t afraid of change – they’re afraid of you trying to change them!

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/26/2010

• YouTube – The Gummy Bear Song – Long English Version

  tags: gummy bear

• Susan Boyle – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  tags: susan

  • Global interest in Boyle was triggered by the contrast between her powerful voice and her plain appearance on stage. The juxtaposition of the audience’s first impression of her with the standing ovation she received during and after her performance led to an international media and Internet response. Within nine days of the audition, videos of Boyle — from the show, various interviews and her 1999 rendition of “Cry Me a River” — had been watched over 100 million times.^[7] Despite the sustained media interest she later finished in second place in the final of the show behind dance troupe Diversity.

  • Boyle still lives in the family home, a four-bedroom council house, with her 10-year-old cat, Pebbles.^[13] Her father died in the 1990s, and her siblings had left home. Boyle never married, and she dedicated herself to care for her ageing mother until she died in 2007 at the age of 91. Boyle has a reputation for modesty and propriety, admitting during her first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent that she had “never been married, never been kissed”.^[16] A neighbour reported that when Bridget Boyle died, her daughter “wouldn’t come out for three or four days or answer the door or phone.”^[16]

    Boyle is Catholic, who sang in her church choir, at her church in Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland. ^[35]. Boyle remains active as a volunteer at her church, visiting elderly members of the congregation in their homes.^[18]

    On a 2010 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Boyle summarized that her daily life was “mundane” and “routine” prior to stardom.

  • She was one of 40 acts that were put through to the semi-finals.^[43] She appeared last on the first semi-final on 24 May 2009, performing “Memory” from the musical Cats.^[44] In the public vote she was the act to receive the highest number of votes and go through to the final.^[45][46] She was the clear favourite to win the final,^[47] but ended up in second place to Diversity; the UK TV audience was a record of 17.3 million viewers.^[48]

• YouTube – EUROVISION 2009 WINNER -NORWAY ALEXANDER RYBAK FAIRYTALE -HQ STEREO

  tags: eurovision, Music

• Customer Development for Web Startups « Steve Blank

  tags: customer, development

• Idealists portrait of the teacher

  tags: no_tag

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My daily readings 02/25/2010

• Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping! [dive into mark]

  tags: simplicity, lifestyle

  • As part of my pursuit of happiness, I have been steadily shedding attachments, getting rid of things I don’t use, thinking about ways of keeping the things I do use longer, and just generally being a pain in the ass. This, for instance, is an actual conversation I had with my wife last fall:

• TerraPower: How The Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor Works

  tags: terrapower, nuclear

  • How close to reality is this technology? According to this presentation by Gilleland, “operation of a traveling wave reactor can be demonstrated in less than ten years, and commercial deployment can begin in less than fifteen years.”
  • 

• Hacker News | Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping

  tags: no_tag

  • I really wish more people would accept that giving me something isn’t the way to celebrate my birthday or any other event.
  • I used to wonder why it’s so hard to buy gifts for people. Then I realized the answer is that most people already have way more crap than they need.
  • Actually, research shows that unlike buying stuff, experiences like vacations lead to happiness that does not diminish over time.

    You’re not just trading $1000 and a week to get stuff done, but also a lifetime of happy memories.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/23/2010

• {Suresh}: The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

  tags: no_tag

  • Chris does a brilliant job of highlighting that the debt induced fiat monetary system which has driven our economic progress over the last 50-years is likely to fail in the future. In fact it was really nothing more than a sophisticated ponzi scheme which can only continue on the basis of perpetual compounded growth and a continued acquisition of real physical energy resources. The virtual economic economy is tied to the physical world — this perpetual growth cannot continue forever as we are seeing with the massive de-leveraging across all asset classes in the current 2008 – 2010 recession.

• Bump’s Mobile Data Swapping API Now Open To Everyone

  tags: no_tag

  • To kickstart its API launch, Bump held a contest that invited developers to work the API into their iPhone applications. You can see a gallery of the winners here. The winning apps include CheckOut, which lets you share gift cards with friends by tapping your phones together; CloudNote, which lets you swap digital Post-It notes; and SocialFuse, which allows you to connect on Twitter and LinkedIn with someone (again, by tapping your phones together). Be sure to check out the gallery page for a half dozen runners-up to get more ideas of what the API can do.

    For many startups, an API is a nice way to build a community but isn’t necessarily a key to success. I don’t think that’s the case for Bump — its API will likely prove very important. Bump wants to become the way people are swapping their contact information, data, and even money when they’re standing next to each other. Bump can integrate that functionality into their own app, but the barrier to using the service would be much lower if it was built-in to a variety of other popular applications.

• Hacker News | If You Didn’t Write It Down, It Didn’t Happen — Take Notes

  tags: note, productivity

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My daily readings 02/22/2010

• Gamma error in picture scaling

  tags: no_tag

  • the problem: The
    Gimp,
    Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome,
    Paint and
    Krita. Also three
    different operating systems were used: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
  • Photographs that have been scaled with
    these software have been degradated. The
    degradation is often faint but probably most pictures contain at least
    an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I suppose this
    happens since the first versions of these software, maybe 20 years ago.

• I Had Downtime Today. Here’s What I’m Doing About It.: MicroISV on a Shoestring

  tags: operation, web

• Wikipedia creator had lots of earlier failures

  tags: failure

  • This leads to Wales’ theories of failure:

    •Fail faster. If a project is doomed, shut it down quickly.

    •Don’t tie your ego to any one project. If it stumbles, you’ll be unable to move forward.

    •Real entrepreneurs fail.

    •Fail a lot. But enjoy yourself along the way.

    •If you handle these things well, “you will succeed.”

• Why I Hate Your Web App

  tags: UX

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My daily readings 02/21/2010

• Hacker News | Stuff

  tags: philosophy, lifestyle

• Stuff

  tags: philosophy, lifestyle

• Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation – HBS Working Knowledge

  tags: management, motivation, productivity, Team, HR

  • Three key goals of people at work
    To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work—and then satisfy those goals:

    • Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
    • Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
    • Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/20/2010

• 9 Tactics for Rapid Learning (That Most People Have Never Heard Of) « Scott H Young

  tags: learning

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My daily readings 02/19/2010

• What Startups Are Really Like

  tags: startup, entrepreneur

  • Here’s a typical reponse:
    
    

    You haven’t seen someone’s true colors unless you’ve worked
    with them on a startup.
    

    The reason character is so important is that it’s tested more
    severely than in most other situations. One founder said explicitly
    that the relationship between founders was more important than
    ability:
    
    

    I would rather cofound a startup with a friend than a stranger
    with higher output. Startups are so hard and emotional that
    the bonds and emotional and social support that come with
    friendship outweigh the extra output lost.
    

  • Several people used that word “married.” It’s a far more intense
    relationship than you usually see between coworkers—partly because
    the stresses are so much greater, and partly because at first the
    founders are the whole company. So this relationship has to be
    built of top quality materials and carefully maintained. It’s the
    basis of everything.
  • Running a startup is not like having a
    job or being a student, because it never stops. This is so foreign
    to most people’s experience that they don’t get it till it happens.
    [1]
    
    

    I didn’t realize I would spend almost every waking moment either
    working or thinking about our startup. You enter a whole
    different way of life when it’s your company vs. working for
    someone else’s company.
    

  • How hard it is to keep everyone motivated during rough days or
    weeks, i.e. how low the lows can be.
  • I’m surprised by how much better it feels to be working on
    something that is challenging and creative, something I believe
    in, as opposed to the hired-gun stuff I was doing before. I
    knew it would feel better; what’s surprising is how much better.
  • But I think the reason most founders are surprised by how long it
    takes is that they’re overconfident. They think they’re going to
    be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. You tell them
    only 1 out of 100 successful startups has a trajectory like that,
    and they all think “we’re going to be that 1.”

    Maybe they’ll listen to one of the more successful founders:
    
    

    The top thing I didn’t understand before going into it is that
    persistence is the name of the game. For the vast majority of
    startups that become successful, it’s going to be a really
    long journey, at least 3 years and probably 5+.
    

  • Because we’re relaxed, it’s so much easier to have fun doing
    what we do. Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the
    desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. We can concentrate
    on doing what’s best for our company, product, employees and
    customers.
    

    That’s why things get so much better when you hit ramen profitability.
    You can shift into a different mode of working.

  • The principle extends even into programming. There is rarely a
    single brilliant hack that ensures success:
    
    

    I learnt never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything
    to bring you success. It is never a single thing. Everything
    is just incremental and you just have to keep doing lots of
    those things until you strike something.
    

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My daily readings 02/11/2010

• Inkling Corporate Blog – Business Intelligence Using Prediction Markets: How old were you when you decided to start giving up?

  tags: no_tag

  • I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying you’ll magically get good at this skill you don’t have right now. But you can probably learn it enough to accomplish at least a baby step of your goal.
  • I look at the example of starting Inkling. We knew we wanted to make work places more efficiently democratic, and prediction markets were a means to accomplish that. We also knew we wanted to use an algorithm to make the tool easy to use. The great part was this algorithm was out there for everyone to read. The bad part was a very smart economist wrote it.

• How Google Buzz Is Disruptive – Open Data Standards – NYTimes.com

  tags: buzz

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My daily readings 02/10/2010

• Hacker News | If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.

  tags: no_tag

  • I’m not so sure that’s what the focus of the iPad naysayers is. It’s more “why do I want this?”. Nobody questioned why everyone would want a tiny, pocketable device that held every song they would ever want. They questioned whether Apple’s mp3 player would be the one people wanted (and, by the way, the first iPod was not, it took a few generations). Nobody questioned whether people would want a smartphone at all, they’d been popular for years, just where in the market the iPhone would end up.

    The iPad’s a different animal because it’s trying to sell people something they don’t even know they want. It’s more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don’t, but it isn’t the feature set that’s worrisome, it’s the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between?

    Only time will tell.

• I am looking forward to playing board games on… – Bret Taylor – FriendFeed

  tags: iPad, idea

• Paul Buchheit: If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.

  tags: product

  • I believe this “more features = better” mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design (e.g. most open source projects).
  • What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.
  • We took a similar approach when launching Gmail. It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent.
  • By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs “everything” in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good.
  • Ultimately, the real value of this device will be in the new things that people do once they have a fast, simple, and sharable internet window sitting around. At home we’ll casually browse the web, share photos (in person), and play board games (Bret’s idea — very compelling). At the office, maybe we’ll finally have an easy way of chatting with remote people while discussing a presentation or document (e.g. audio iChat with a shared display). Of course these things are theoretically possible with laptops, but it always ends up being so clumsy and complicated that we don’t bother (or give up after trying once).
  • Making the iPad successful is Apple’s problem though, not yours. If you’re creating a new product, what are the three (or fewer) key features that will make it so great that you can cut or half-ass everything else? Are you focusing at least 80% of your effort on getting those three things right?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.