Month: October 2011
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Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is my primary interaction with Twitter. Managing two Twitter accounts would be annoying via the web (two browsers given Prism is dead). At times I do accidentally post under the wrong one. Though I think the solution to that might be not having two blue profile icons. It is not Tweetdeck’s fault I fail to…
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TED Talk: Battling Bad Science
From TED’s About This Talk: Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry. If…
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RIP Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. So naturally the fanatical fans were devastated, the normal fans were sad, and the rest of us understood. Comparisons made to Martin Luther King, Jr, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Edison, and yes even Tony Stark seemed maybe somewhat exaggerated. Though not by much. He possessed intense curiosity, powerful intuition, great vision and…
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Disappeared
Stats about views of my content can make me waste many, many hours. Sometimes I wonder why people viewed mine instead of anyone else’s. Well, except for Ezra Freelove as I appear to be the only one. Maybe I should create another Ezra Freelove and see which people like better? I love the stories people…
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Cheating
In yesterday’s Underground Back Channel post, I wrote: Because students are engaging in forbidden activity these conversations are underground. Well, the smart ones. Some are having these conversations on Twitter where one party of the conversation is not private and anyone (like a nosy DBA like myself) can see it. If they are used to…
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Underground Back Channels
During first couple years at my first real job post-college, a friend of a friend would IM me questions about how to solve computer problems for which he could not figure out the answers. These requests started as me doing the work for him with dubious promises of doing the same for me. (I knew…
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Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Another I cannot believe I did not blog this. The book was really good. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons…
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TED Talk: Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code
From the TED’s About This Talk: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp. When I ran across Dan Ariely’s…