Love this iPhone in the style of the old Mac OS. (found on http://repponen.livejournal.com/80856.html)
WTF Zynga? Why are there 3 options here to not get emails from you.
In light of the Stanford study I’d take Clay Johnson’s argument further–instead replacing junk media with more high end media, try using technology to work and read and watch faster. Then use that time to go explore the world or do whatever makes you happier. Is it hanging out online? If you think this, then you probably have not seen the things I have seen away from my computer. You can argue that different styles of life are better and worse for different kinds of people, but as the Stanford study implies, online worlds are just not as of high resolution as real worlds and experiences. Again, Like button
http://thewirecutter.com/2012/01/happiness-takes-a-little-magic/
Excellent read from Brian Lam on what’s important in life.
12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
Do STEM Faculty want more undergraduates in the first place?
It’s a good question to ask - are the right incentives there in the first place?
Back in 1984, our initial success at Disney was based on the ability to tell good stories well.
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Intelligently approached, risk is a necessary component to success in the movie business. It is impossible to create new and original — and therefore appealing — new works without taking on the chance that you’ll fall flat on your face.
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Most important, this is why we should provide a place where talent has the right to fail. By making long-term arrangements with talent we believe in, we can control costs while they can gain the security that’s necessary for taking creative risks and going in new directions.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/11/some-thoughts-on-our-business.html
Highly recommend reading the whole thing, but especially the first 8 pages of the memo (don’t worry, it’s not that long - they were faxed pages, the text is also available underneath the scans.). I found myself reading into it replacing Disney/movies with companies and actors with engineers/designers. Lots of great stuff in here.
(Found via @rjs)
Why Students Leave the Engineering Track
After reading this New York Times blog post, I wonder if the reason there aren’t more engineering graduates is because of how it’s taught. I was reading this article about Sebastian Thrun leaving Stanford to start an online university called udacity and this piece caught my eye:
Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good.
Getting a college engineering degree today seems more like a hazing ritual and seeing who makes it rather than a system that’s optimized to help students learn. Having met many folks who’ve been self-taught or learned how to build software through avenues other than an academic route leads me to believe the problem is in how it’s taught.
People have many different learning styles and I’m really excited to see many different approaches being taken to attack the problem from a variety of angles. There’s plenty of room for success, and I’m looking forward to seeing more innovation around education.
Recently watched this talk by Wilson Miner from the Build conference in 2010. Loved his take on the designer as a craftsman. Designers should care about quality, how it gets made, and appreciate the tools to do so.
cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.
Enjoyed this video about a Japanese sword maker from the Etsy folks. Really admire his pursuit of trying to recreate an ancient Japanese sword for the last 40 years, along with a sense of responsibility to make his disciples better than he is in technique and passion. The latter is a really simple way of looking at what the mentor/apprentice relationship is about.
