Toward a theory of information relativity

People will also believe that they understand something when they don’t really understand it. Have you ever left a meeting where everyone seemed to be in agreement, yet their later actions made it clear that they didn’t agree after all? It’s common to see nodding heads in a room when people don’t agree – they think they agree but in reality they don’t. This is because when an explanation is sufficiently vague, people are free to believe what they want to believe. Politicians often use this rhetorical principle to great effect. Words like “freedom, justice and fairness” mean different things to different people. Vague explanations are common in business, and they can give the illusion of agreement. But they don’t get results.

Questions for Buzz Aldrin

You gave yourself communion on the surface of the moon. Are you still a churchgoer?

No. My Sunday mornings are spent in a recovery meeting in Pacific Palisades.

pretty interesting read about his personal life, Pixar shorting him some cash, and - most importantly - how the U.S. isn’t focusing space exploration correctly.

Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell

Thus we come back to the title of the post. Most people are using standard analytics packages that are commoditized to focus inwards on metrics like pageviews and revenue. To use an analogy, that’s akin to the idea of measuring the # of life preservers that you sell, and trying to optimize for that, rather than optimizing for the benefit, which is the # of lives saved.

By/Association | Manifesto

It’s not about getting help with your current need or project. It’s about connecting to people that make you better — to inspire more action, better ideas, and new ways of seeing the world.

via tina

The Real Time Web is a Beautiful Distraction

syntheticpubes:

These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward.

The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation.

yup. 

the .45

quite simply, stuff that won’t waste your time.

pruned from over 500 others.  great for anyone in need of new reading or those looking for a curated, authoritative starting point on the web.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

How do you do concrete interviews for non-technical people?

Nontechnical interviews and weak signals for competence
Now let’s compare this to nontechnical interviews, which, in my expertise at least, generate weak signals for competence: Almost every interview process I’ve ever been involved with, whether I’m the interviewer or the interviewee, seems to lack the level of rigor that most engineers go through. Why is that? I imagine that much of it has to do with the fact that in nontechnical positions, it’s harder to decide objectively what’s “good” or “bad” - people often disagree on strategy, design, and it’s hard to figure out if you’re actually competent or not.

As a result, many of the nontechnical interviews I’ve seen tend degenerate into descriptions of previous work, or soft skills, or very subjective conversations around “how would you improve X or Y?” That’s not to say that these discussions aren’t useful, but for me personally, I’ve seen far too many people with 10 years of experience in some area that turn out to not be able to tie their shoelaces. The question is, how do you find this out sooner rather than later?

this post was sorely needed. thanks andrew.

Wolfram|Alpha

(via cbp)

NPRbackstory: Finding value in news archives through automation

It was from an automated Twitter account called NPRbackstory, a project by a man named Keith Hopper. Keith is a project manager at Public Interactive, a division of NPR, and NPRbackstory is an intriguing experiment in getting value out of one of the most overlooked assets any established news organization has: its archives.

i’ll write about this more, in-depth, on OTD this week. however, in the meantime (via andy), it’s significant enough to mention today. seems like NPR read matt’s post on news & context.