Tag: via Instapaper
March 1, 2012
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Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations: Scientific American
Credit: Neil T/Flickr Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that…
February 28, 2012
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Mobile Opportunity: The Two Most Dangerous Words in Technology Marketing
"Just wait." So powerful. So easy to say. So appealing when your current products are behind the curve, and the press and analysts are beating you up about it. You can shut up the critics instantly if you just drop a few hints about the next generation product that’s now in the labs. So dangerous.…
February 27, 2012
February 26, 2012
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Is the 90-9-1 Rule for Online Community Engagement Dead? [Data] | CustomerThink
There is a rule that has floated around in the social media world for quite some time called the Rule of Participation Inequality or the 90-9-1 Rule. This rule states: User participation in an online community more or less follows the following 90-9-1 ratios : 90% of users are Lurkers (i.e., read or…
February 25, 2012
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“Cargo Cult Science” – by Richard Feynman
Center for Theoretical Neuroscience A Computational Approach to Neurobiology The Center for Theoretical Neuroscience was established at Columbia University in New York City in 2004 as part of the Swartz Program in Theoretical Neuroscience. In addition to the faculty listed within, we have additional…
February 24, 2012
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The Technium: Why the Impossible Happens More Often
[Translations: Japanese ] I’ve had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the…
February 23, 2012
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What’s the probability that we’re living in the Matrix?
The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High Nick Bostrom Times Higher Education Supplement, May 16, 2003 The original academic paper is here: [ pdf ] The Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality. But the…
February 22, 2012
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The Great Bank Robbery – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel – Project Syndicate
NEW YORK – For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. For banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion.…
February 21, 2012
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Jeopardy! – Interview with Ken Jennings, Producer Harry Friedman, and More: Movies + TV: GQ
TV How Jeopardy! Defines Us The beloved trivia game show has evolved in the last two decades. But can a game show really reflect a nation’s shifting intelligence? Here are the Double Jeopardy! categories from a 1991 episode of the famed game show , wordplay, and two jokes, one with a Jewish…
February 20, 2012
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Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout – Grantland
T he Boston Red Sox signed their first black player in 1959, a utility infielder named “Pumpsie” Green. 1 This was 12 years after the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color line with Jackie Robinson. No other team in baseball dragged its feet on integration like the Red Sox. It wasn’t until 1965, in fact…
February 19, 2012
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Republicans Against Science – NYTimes.com
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an…
February 18, 2012
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H-P’s One-Year Plan – WSJ.com
Let’s say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard . HPQ 0.91 % Here’s how you do it: Al Lewis looks back at all the missteps that have led have added up to a disastrous year for Hewlett-Packard. Fire well-performing CEO Mark Hurd over expense-report irregularities and a juicy sexual-harassment…
February 17, 2012
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The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities
by Jared M. Spool on May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970’s, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy’s troop movements. Each expert analyzed the data and…
February 16, 2012
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What it takes to win with customer experience – Bain & Company – Publications
Why don’t more companies emulate Apple, Schwab and others that win with customer experience? It’s a long, hard road, especially for companies that have neglected their customers. Turning that around requires energy and resources, and it takes time. But the journey is not mysterious, and the rewards…
February 15, 2012
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Can communications service providers earn their customers’ love? – Bain & Company – Publications
As a result, the strategic priority for communications service providers has shifted dramatically from simply acquiring customers to keeping the customers they already have. What does this mean? Having an acceptable performance is no longer good enough. To be successful, providers will need to earn…
February 14, 2012
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The Meat to Math ratio – O’Reilly Radar
As we enter one of the biggest tech IPO seasons in recent history — LinkedIn, with Groupon, Pandora, Zillow, Dropbox, Zynga, and CafePress all lining up behind it — it’s hard to know what will fly and what will flounder. One indicator of a company’s potential is how well it can scale its business…
February 13, 2012
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Don’t compete on features | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)
The “Ultimate Driving Machine” is a classic slogan that makes BMW compete based on position, not features. It’s hard to keep things simple, especially when adding so many new features In my recent post on the virtues of marketing simple products , a couple readers wrote in to write a really…
February 12, 2012
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Four Ways To Spot Markets Ripe For Disruption | Co. Design
[ This is the second post in a three-part series of excerpts adapted from Luke Williams’s book Disrupt: Think The Unthinkable To Spark Transformation In Your Business . The first excerpt is here . ] People often say, "Apple doesn’t do consumer research." This usually precedes an argument against the…
February 11, 2012
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Our Social Nature: The Surprising Science of Smiles | Wired Science | Wired.com
All hail the powerful smile. The right smile, at the right time, wins friends and calms enemies. The smile held for too long, not long enough, flashed too intensively or too dimly, arouses suspicion, fear or anger. Far from being a straightforward show of joy, the language of smiles is filled with…
February 10, 2012
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Web Actions: Identifying A New Building Block For The Web – Tantek
Every once in a while, design and development practices emerge on the web that enable a leap forward in our understanding of its potential. Developers’ asynchronous use of JavaScript (JS) led to AJAX and breakthrough interactive web applications. Designers’ semantic use of class names led to…
February 9, 2012
February 8, 2012
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Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing – Rob Wheeler – Harvard Business Review
“Alright, you caught us. We’re actually not making any money. In fact, we are really losing a lot of money.” This is the essence of Groupon’s declaration last week that it will remove the controversial accounting metric called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income (ACSOI) from its financial…
February 7, 2012
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The (actual) future of the Big Idea » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
The critics are right: Neal Gabler’s essay in yesterday’s New York Times — the one proclaiming the death of the big idea at the hands of Twitter and Facebook and the Internet in general — is wrong. And we should probably, after giving the thing a slow clap for its bold attempt to transform the Death…
February 6, 2012
February 5, 2012
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The Brain on Trial – Magazine – The Atlantic
Adrianna Williams/Corbis O n the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed…
February 4, 2012
February 3, 2012
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Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 207, Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s fiction bears the mark of a Midwest upbringing, his books preoccupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken apart by contact with the rest of the world. But four long novels into an unusually public career, Franzen now moves about the country quite a bit, living most of the…
February 2, 2012
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I watched every Coen brothers movie. – By David Haglund – Slate Magazine
Click here for a ranking of the Coen brothers’ movies. Click here to read about their short films and advertising work. Raising Arizona When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist…
February 1, 2012
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RPI: News & Events – Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas
July 25, 2011 In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over…
January 31, 2012
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Face-recognition software: It’s coming, everyone will use it, and you can’t stop it. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
According to the Wall Street Journal , police departments across the nation will soon adopt handheld facial-recognition systems that will let them identify people with a snapshot. These new capabilities are made possible by BI 2 Technologies , a Massachusetts company that has developed a small…