Can you train people to innovate? Financial analyst Barry Ritholtz has shared a helpful slide set titled “Innovation can be trained” that’s worth reading. Printing and then tacking individual slides to your cube walls can be used as a daily reminder that organizations can create cultures of innovation. It’s based on the work The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Does your calendar make you to run to death?
The organization’s heroes are not those who promise a lot, but they are getting a lot for the benefit of customers already.
Striking in a hurry
Hurry is basically due to the fact that our work is not as regular and predictable as we would like to believe. It only takes one illness, a busy queue going to work, wrong assessment of the amount of work or an unexpected difficulty in doing the work, and the whole house of cards falls apart.
Entire project offices may be put in crisis meetings, to manage flood of e-mail, and time and time again to organize the work detail again. When the false promises are to be kept, will be taken to compromise the quality of the high risks and overloading the workers. This creates a bad spiral of productivity will decline from round to round, and in a hurry to get worse.
Do not block your calendar
Multi-use inherent in the very small to-do lists to keep the jobs in memory. When the calendar tool to help lead us to the Lutheran work ethic ahnehtimisen temptation. So we fill our calendar 110 per cent, and the problems can start.
Success in principle is simple: “Take one small task at a time and make it ready.” If the job is big, it is worth it to split, that can be done with one spell of work completed. These sizes less than a day to keep prioritize tasks so that the benefit to the customer is good.
Team work is a distressing look at the work to stop because someone has booked a job and then do it. The bottleneck is often a boss or a specialist, even if the job is quite capable of making someone else. Excessive specialization and co-ordination of decision delimitation will lead to chaos, which will be unbearable, especially if the team is not in the same room. This is reflected in waiting, when the work performed by others are not ready when I have the time available to continue the work.
In creative work such as the design of the software is needed to focus on and work in peace. Task switches, redundant work of moving one person to another, waiting, interruptions, participation in multiple projects at the same time, the correction of errors and their prevention rather than inefficient meetings are a waste, the reduction is worth investing.
Performance management does not work
A very common method is to set a strict schedule jobs without a realistic plan or the ability to achieve these goals. Deming’s 14 point quality of the program has been abandoned quantitative targets, as they reduce the quality. The fact that the work may not be completed on schedule by heart, not because of laziness, but employees work into the process, including a natural variation.
Parkinson’s Law, according to which the work meets the allotted period of time, to keep its place in, if the work is done the motivation is external reward or avoiding punishment. It’s easy to do the same thing as the required task, but also other less important and less urgent matters. Realistic goals and milestones help you focus and work in simple tasks, such as running a marathon. Creative challenges in complex team work situation is quite different.
The problem may also be the only working in the budgeting and investing your calendar. This is particularly evident in those meetings where the norm is to use the entire time allotted, even if the work has already been done.
Trust in the fact that the employees are doing their best, based on openness. Guests receive a high-quality supplies at frequent intervals – in the software industry every few weeks. The customer and the supplier know each other well and make the day to day co-operation. Leadership is the presence of the encouragement
Lean, Kanban, Scrum and agile
Simple laws of life and the practice of products to help their dissemination and implementation. A large part of the IT sector employees is Lean, Scrum and agile certification.
Preparation and tests are, of course, only a first step towards better ways of working and corporate culture change towards the standards of this millennium.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/viisaat/tieturi/juoksuttaako+kalenterisi+sinut+kuoliaaksi/a932581
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World’s Software Code
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/10/runnable/
In 2004, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos decreed that any software built by an Amazon engineer must be shared with every other engineer at the company.
Google does something similar, and it makes good sense. The idea is to ensure that they never build the same thing twice.
“It created a huge discovery problem,” Kumar says. “There were hundreds of thousands of components and services.”
As it turns out, many other outfits face much the same problem — even if they don’t share code in the way Amazon does. In building software, modern companies rely on all sorts of code and tools they don’t develop themselves. This includes open source software that’s freely shared with the world at large, but also application programming interfaces, or APIs, that provide hooks into online services across the web. The open source search engine Ohloh spans 20,656,731,705 lines of publicly available code, and the API tracking site The Programmable Web lists over 10,000 publicly available APIs.
But Kumar offers a solution. Inspired by his time at Amazon, Kumar created a service called Runnable, a means of finding and using all the software “building blocks” that are freely available across the web.
It’s early days for the service, which is still in the beta testing stage, but the aim is provide a way of not only searching for tools, but actually testing them.
In order to test code for you, Runnable must also host it. All the code in questions sits on the service itself, and it spans several programming platforms, including PHP, JavaScript and Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.
http://runnable.com/
Tomi says:
The Era of Young Innovators: Looking Beyond Universities To Source Talents
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/06/0251219/the-era-of-young-innovators-looking-beyond-universities-to-source-talents
“Tech heavy industries are constantly looking for new sources of innovations. But where are the best place to find them? Increasingly, businesses are looking beyond universities and source ideas from savvy high schoolers.”
Comments:
Innovation is one thing, it’s a completely different thing to create business from it. We are missing out a lot of good innovations because the ideas get stifled or the innovator gets pushed down because the investors thinks that it’s a bad idea. (The idea may be bad for their business, so therefore they don’t promote it)
you almost have it…19th Century *Business* model.
you’re absolutely right the industry doesn’t know what ‘innovation’ is b/c many tech leaders (broadly) got to be in that position not by ‘innovation’ but by sheer luck, stealing other’s work, or by being a lackey.
M$’s government contract aided ascendence is the perfect example. They scaled up from the garage b/c Gates & Co. were willing to do w/e IBM wanted. IBM, of course, had just gotten a huge government to put PC’s on every government desk.
Who needs to do R&D and ‘innovate’ when the government guarantees your company a revenue stream and captive market???
The industry is killing itself from hype…it’s like a human eating only SweetTarts candy everyday…it’ll kill you eventually
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inspiring Today’s Students to Become Tomorrow’s Innovators
http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=268354&cid=nl.dn14
A child goes to the orchestra for the first time and is awed by the xylophone player. When she goes home, she says to her parents, “I want to play that.”
So what do they do? Do they buy her a full-sized multi-octave xylophone? No. Why would they give her expert equipment before giving her a stepping stone instrument to learn on? Instead, they buy a xylophone that’s made for her. It’s brightly colored, fits her size, can withstand her dropping it, playing on it, chewing on it — whatever she wants to do with it, her xylophone can handle it. It looks radically different from the orchestra player’s xylophone, but it’s still a xylophone and the fundamental concepts and skills she learns on it apply as she graduates to bigger and more complex instruments.
The same is true for riding a bike
For science and engineering, the inspiration is there — SpaceX is launching rockets to space, CERN is creating the world’s largest particle accelerator, and projects such as North American Eagle are working to break the world land speed record.
But while students can see these engineering marvels, most never get exposed to how they work or have the opportunity to build one of their own. In fact, students rarely get to participate in activities where they actually do engineering.
Unfortunately, our society and education system bombards our students with lectures, rote memorization, theory, and math throughout their education.
Employers expect the students of today to be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow — even the ones that don’t exist today. Is that a fair expectation if we’ve never given our students a chance to do engineering?
In our society, failure is considered a bad thing. But we must remember that failure is essential to innovation and that success is more than getting a good grade on a test. We must teach problem-solving skills and critical thinking through hands-on, project-based learning.
LEGO is the expert in the benefit of hands-on learning and the importance of building on fundamental engineering skills. Today, more than 3 million students create, build, program, and succeed using the LEGO MINDSTORMS platform.
Robotics clubs and competitions are a great start to inspiring the next generation, but they are still primarily just after-school activities. If we know how successful these hands-on experiences are in keeping students engaged, why are they not part of the core curriculum of grade school science and mathematics classrooms?
Creating an inspired classroom where lesson plans give students “aha” moments using techniques and tools the pros use to apply mathematical models to real-world data is critical to inspiring students.
Students of all ages need access to hardware that lets them experience early successes and scales to their abilities, eventually allowing them to learn on the same technology they will see after graduation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Let’s Stop Focusing on Shiny Gadgets and Start Using Tech to Empower People
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/focus-on-people-not-tech-and-other-impt-lessons-for-interaction-design-and-life/
Red wasn’t particularly interested in IPOs or the latest tech fetish, even though she was always exceptionally proud of her students and their accomplishments. She knew that technology was a means to an end — and that the end was people.
In that simple reframing from technology to empowerment of people, I believe there’s something everyone one of us — whether designer, programmer, entrepreneur, investor, teacher, student, parent, or child — can learn from Red. Especially in a world where we tend to focus on teaching kids to code, debating the flatness of the latest iOS, or discussing the newest and shiniest device still searching for a meaningful application.
She helped develop the right and left sides of the brain by teaching artists to code and engineers to empathize.
Red is known as “the godmother of Silicon Alley” because ITP — a bold exploration into how media could be made interactive and empower communities and individuals — produced graduates such as Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, as well as Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award winners Sigi Moeslinger (whose firm designed the Metro Card vending machines for the NYC Subway system) and Jake Barton (whose firm designed the interactive exhibits for the 9/11 Museum).
But Red wasn’t that interested in technology per se; she saw it as something you needed to get to the real work: improving people’s lives, making them feel more connected, bringing delight in big and small ways, and empowering them to affect change.
“I’m not going to teach you any software programs. Software changes. Technology changes. You are here to learn how to learn.” Those are the first words I recall hearing from Red in my very first class at ITP.
‘Don’t see the world as a market, but rather as a place that people live in.’
‘Think of technology as a verb, not a noun; it is a subtle but important difference.’
‘Create images that might take a writer ten pages to write.’
‘Remember the issues are usually not technical.’
‘Combine that edgy mixture of self-confidence and doubt.’
‘Consider why natural phenomena seduce us.’
‘Ask yourself what you want and then work backwards.’
‘The inherent preferences in organizations are efficiency, clarity, certainty, and perfection.’
Tomi Engdahl says:
NFC Ring Opens Many Doors
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=268479&cid=nl.dn14&dfpPParams=ind_184,industry_consumer,aid_268479&dfpLayout=blog
Near field communication, a.k.a. NFC, is at a turning point. Excitement for wearable technology is at an all-time high with the launch of hotly anticipated products in recent months. Few, however, have proven practical for the everyday use. NFC is the gateway technology to more practical wearable products by providing one simple solution: information exchange. A few weeks ago, I hosted a webinar called The Power of a Ring to demonstrate how wearable technology and NFC are making everything from completing payments to unlocking our doors more convenient.
Functional NFC technology is only possible if more engineers and hackers are comfortable implementing it in their designs. An understanding of today’s NFC trends and international design standards, as well as of the resources available for all experience levels, are a must to eliminating barriers to entry. The design possibilities for NFC are limited only by the ideas of the engineer working with it.
When designing NFC-based devices, certain design standards need to be met to ensure that all forms of NFC can interact with existing and future devices. ISO/IEC 18000-3 is the type of RFID communication used by NFC devices. It’s an international standard for wireless communication at frequencies of 13.56 MHz on Type A and B cards. ISO/IEC 14443 allows the ID cards used to store information in NFC tags.
Technical specifics aside, the NFC devices must be within 4 cm of each other to transmit information. The interrogating device, functioning at full duplex, sends a signal to and powers the NFC tag, which operates at half duplex. This is how the device is powered without a battery,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Accidental engineering: 10 mistakes turned into innovation
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/serious-fun/4412399/Accidental-engineering–10-mistakes-turned-into-innovation
Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “Name the greatest of all inventors: Accident.”
Here we take a look at 10 major discoveries, inventions, and inspirational moments that were, for the most part, come across by accident.
Call it fate, call it chance, call it dumb luck, some of the following changed the path of science and engineering in significant ways.
Tomi Engdahl says:
When the Finnish companies claim to be innovations, one might think that they emerge as the conveyor belt. When the government or a donor representatives speak, innovation is sorely lacking.
Unfortunately, the latter outfit is right. Finnish companies get products for the vast majority of existing products, improvement, re-positioning, packaging and branding of existing products, or re-heating.
Finnish everything from product development to only six per cent of the right to produce innovations, ie, by definition, completely new, commercial launch and commercialization of the products, which are in demand in the market. International average is 17 percent.
However, Finland invests heavily in research and development, the highest in Europe. R & D share of GDP is about four per cent, while the international comparison number is half of this.
The contradiction is devoid of common sense. Major inputs are non-existent amount of the desired results.
We have already been warned by the European Commission last April by the report pointed out that Finland will become less competitive, because product development investments, too few innovations used in relation to money and highly-trained workforce.
Finnish management consulting firm Synergy Group Europe carried out a survey last spring, which was attended by 50 major Finnish company’s R & D decision-makers. “The study showed that all the participating companies was clearly room for improvement,”
In Finland, the money is not the main obstacle to innovation. “The participants emphasized such factors as the lack of ideas and non-functional brainstorming processes. Although the company would use the time and resources in product development, corporate culture does not support the creation of innovation, “Winquist said.
Shortage of innovation also leads to the fact that often a new creation takes a lot more time than the former product or brand enhancement.
In the short term, product enhancements, and works to keep owners and investors satisfied. In Finland, as many as 56 percent of the product development investments redirected to the current enhancement of products and product applications for making, while the corresponding figure is 23 per cent globally.
“Mainly in the global market, firms have almost twice as many innovations as compared to the product portfolio of domestic and neighboring markets, focusing on companies,”
Innovation has contracted a company in trouble will not die right away, but first suffer from withering a long time. The Finnish food, furniture and electronics industry would die out because they have not been able to bring new products to consumers stimulant.
In synch with the overall picture is also bright spots. Rovio and Super-success stories are familiar, but the innovations generated elsewhere.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/uutisia/suomen+nousu+on+vaikea+koska+olemme+olennaisessa+asiassa+rupusakkia/a938493
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Problem with Android is Choice
http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/androids-problem/
Android is flexible. Most reviews tout that as a key advantage of the operating system, particularly when it’s being compared with iOS.
Here’s why that’s a bad idea:
1. Choice reduces user satisfaction.
2. Choice reduces usability.
3. Choice reduces product quality.
Android: A Layer Cake of Choices
So you’ve decided to buy an Android phone.
Great! Which one?
At some point you make a decision on which phone to buy.
You download a bunch of apps and set up your home screen. Good news! You have choices here too.
There’s a drawer with an alphabetical list of all your apps.
On some phones, there’s a Favorites page.
Later, a friend texts you a hilarious photo. You’d like to save it for later. You’re presented with these choices:
And that list of choices only gets longer because each app you install adds itself to it.
Over time — talking to friends, reading blogs — you’ll realize you’ve barely scratched the surface of Android choice.
You can install custom lock screens!
Launchers!
Replacement phone apps!
Different fonts!
Choice Reduces Satisfaction
As a society we’re deluded about choice.
We perpetuate the myth that more is better — yet there’s research going back decades to suggest the opposite.
Perhaps the most famous is Sheena Iyengar’s 1995 “jam jar study”, which showed a 4x increase in options decreased purchases by 85%.
That’s bad enough in a traditional retail environment, where you make your purchase and move on. But it’s worse in the world of software, where apps are cheap and each app provides its own array of options.
Choosing vs. Tinkering
There’s a distinction here between choosing and tinkering.
We all have friends who tinker with their cars, their bikes, their computers. It’s a hobby, and the constant fiddling is a destination in itself rather than just the journey. For such hobbyists, a plethora of choices is necessary: it’s the fuel that powers the tinkering.
I think many who extol Android’s flexibility fall into the tinkerer category, including some tech bloggers. They love all the ways they can customize their phones, not because they’re seeking some perfect setup, but because they can swap in a new launcher every week. That’s fun for them; but they’ve made the mistake of not understanding how their motivation differs from the rest of us.
Choice Reduces Usability
We often talk about the best products being simple. But that’s not quite it: The best products are opinionated.
A great product is one you can disagree with because its creators have made choices on your behalf. If they’re good product designers, they’ve made good choices, and the result is that much-lauded simplicity.
Choices vs. Preferences
It’s also worth distinguishing between choice and preference.
Catering to all individual preferences creates a bloated, bland product. Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate.
Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at identifying what we want.
To deliver a product that will improve people’s lives, we must sometimes break expectations and force users through a period of adjustment. The long-term path to user satisfaction sometimes involves short-term dissatisfaction.
Choice Reduces Product Quality
It takes a lot of code to produce software. And bugs are unavoidable because developers are human, and because that’s what happens with a system whose many, many moving parts are constantly changing with an incomplete awareness of each other and the dependencies among them.
To test effectively, it’s necessary to replicate as many of the conditions under which the product might run as possible. And to fix a bug, a developer needs to reproduce it–make it happen again so she can see what’s really going on.
So, software teams spend a huge percentage of their time finding and fixing bugs.
The more variation, the more testing, and the harder it becomes to replicate a bug when it’s found.
This is why Android’s fragmentation — the array of Android versions and devices an app must support — is such an issue.
We can’t control fragmentation, but we can avoid exacerbating it. When we introduce excessive choice, we increase the number of possible environments in which something could break, and the number of conditions we have to test. That increase isn’t additive, it’s multiplicative: the number of conditions downstream of a choice is multiplied by the number of options it provides.
Epilogue: Dealing With User Feedback
To begin with, the loudest users aren’t necessarily the most typical; someone might request a feature that would genuinely improve his experience, at the expense of most other users.
Tomi says:
Tim Cook says Nokia died because it didn’t innovate, Microsoft now copying Apple’s strategy
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4747676/tim-cook-nokia-no-innovation-microsoft-copying-apple-strategy
“To not innovate is to die.”
Tomi says:
As Google’s revenue grows 12 percent, Page says he’d love to spend more on moonshots
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/17/as-googles-revenue-grows-12-percent-page-says-hed-love-to-spend-more-on-moonshots/
Google had a great Q3, with revenue growing 12 percent. Google CEO Larry Page would love to spend more of that money on moonshots.
Google under co-founder Larry Page has become known for its crazy moonshot projects: Self-driving cars, Google Glass, and Project Loon: the internet relayed by helium balloons. But Page, who became the company’s CEO in early 2011, said during the company’s Q3 earnings call Thursday that the company — and the tech industry in general — still is spending way too little on these kinds of projects.
“My struggle in general is to get people to spend money on long-term R&D,” he said.
He went on to complain that most other companies spend very little on experimental research: “Even companies with big budgets, 99 percent gets spent on incremental stuff,” he lamented. But he also admitted that spending big on moonshots is actually harder than it seems. “It’s very difficult to spend meaningful amounts of money … on things that are speculative,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guest Rant: From Bits To Atoms
http://hackaday.com/2013/10/18/guest-rant-from-bits-to-atoms/
I’ve been a software developer for quite a while. When you spend long enough inside a particular world, it’s easy to wind up with an ever-narrowing perspective. You start seeing everything from a software point of view.
Anyway, the point is, it’s always good to broaden one’s horizons, and solve as many different kinds of problems as possible. To that end, I started to get into hobby electronics
First of all, I learned that hardware is really not so different from software. The same principles of engineering design and debugging apply. When designing a complex hardware system, you use the same basic approach as a large software system. You break it down into increasingly smaller components until all the pieces are small enough to be implemented and verified in isolation. Then you start implementing the pieces, connecting them, and debugging issues that occur as a result of those interactions. Gradually you wind up with a complex entity that functions, but is too large to understand all at once.
Second, I learned that hardware people have cooler tools (like, with blinking lights and stuff). Some of them make noises. Some of them are hot or sharp.
Hardware arguably has more of what are thought of as “hard bugs” in production software engineering. These are bugs that are difficult to reproduce, or behaviours that are non-deterministic. These types of problems are common in very large systems, realtime systems, and multithreaded systems. An experienced software developer has encountered and solved many of these, often spending days or weeks on a single bug.
Good software engineering is largely about minimizing the hard bugs. A well designed system will experience fewer memory leaks, fewer deadlocks, fewer race conditions, and so forth. Hardware is a world of AC noise, electromagnetic interference, static electricity, parasitic capacitance, and all kinds of other random phenomenon that can make debugging difficult. Similarly to software, much of good hardware design is down to minimizing these sorts of influences.
Perhaps the acceptance of the idea of hard work going into something fleeting is the difference between hardware and software people. Software people are used to thinking “virtually”, and long ago came to terms with the idea that when a project is done, it is pushed aside, perhaps forgotten, and all focus is put on the Next Thing.
This is a great time to explore both sides of the hardware/software divide. Microcontrollers and friendly development boards are blurring the lines between the ‘wares. The barrier to entry to the other side is getting lower all the time.
Raspberry Pi-based Kickstarter projects « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog says:
[...] Pi-based Kickstarter projects Raspberry Pi has seem to have boosted people to innovate. People have designed very many Cool uses for the Raspberry [...]
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Be a ‘Doctor of Engineering’ Without Going to Grad School
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=268786&cid=nl.dn14
While Carlos was visiting us this summer, I asked him about the process that doctors use to diagnose their patients. As he explained the process to me, I realized that it could also be applied to engineering failure analysis.
The process is called “differential diagnosis.” It consists of four main steps. First, the doctor collects the patient’s medical history, and makes a list of the patient’s symptoms. Next, the doctor makes a list of possible diseases or conditions that might cause each of these symptoms. Third, the doctor organizes this list by priority. The ranking must take into account the likelihood, as well as the potential severity, of each possible condition. Finally, the doctor begins testing for each of these conditions, starting with the top of the list and working down. If the test results rule out a possible condition, the doctor moves on to the next one on the list. Sometimes, test results may prompt the doctor to reprioritize the items on the list.
As my son described this technique to me, it occurred to me that it’s very similar to the approach that we as engineers use to diagnose the root causes of mechanical failures.
When somebody brings a broken part to me, one of the first things I do is to familiarize myself with the part’s function, the materials and manufacturing process used to make the part, and the conditions under which the part was used. This might be considered to be the part’s “medical history.”
Next, I catalog the symptoms of the failure as accurately as possible.
From there, I carefully examine the part itself, and analyze the symptoms on a more detailed level.
After thoroughly investigating and documenting the symptoms of the failure, I put together a list of possible causes.
The next step is to organize the list of possible causes in terms of priority. Doctors have a saying: “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” In medicine, this saying means to rule out common diseases before considering rare, obscure ones. As applied to engineering, it means that it’s usually best to consider simple explanations before complex ones.
Finally, start testing the different possibilities. Like doctors, engineers need to consider the limitations of different tests; some tests can provide false negatives, while others can provide false positives. In engineering, it’s important to consider how closely test conditions match up to real-world conditions.
The process of differential diagnosis, as practiced by physicians, provides a framework for thinking about problem solving in many contexts, of which engineering is just one.
Tomi says:
Play is serious business
Play is a serious matter. At least, it should be taken as such. This is what many scientists are now.
One of them is Stuart Brown. He is the author of the book Play – How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and invigorates the Seoul. Brown game each separated from the following factors:
Jest is not intended for any other, or it is done for its own sake. Play is voluntary in nature and to remove us from the passing of time. It also enchants, opening up opportunities for improvisation and makes us want to, that play would continue. Most importantly, play attenuate the amount of self-awareness, as it can be eventually end up-flow mode.
On this basis, Brown argues that the play would be the single most important factor that determines our happiness and success.
But what if the work belongs to a healthy dose of play? Would be be bored to it then just as easily?
A few competitive sectors for play has begun to carve out a prominent role. If you look at innovative business culture, the play has to availability. It can also be seen on the premises. Photos from Rovio, Reaktor and Zappos bear witness to this.
I see now a lot of signs of the rise in the importance of play. More and more companies want their activities imaginative environment.
The biggest innovation, however, is yet to come. It comes from the fact that everything that can be converted into a game, will also change.
Using a cell phone use in applications and games can now develop the condition, to get from cigarette smoking, improve sleeping cycle and have a child.
Latest market, which is rapidly moving to play with, is the emotional well-being. Soon, we will coach ourselves to every man cell phone.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/tividuunit/leikki+on+vakava+asia/a942559
Tomi Engdahl says:
14 Signs Your Perfectionism Has Gotten Out Of Control
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/06/why-perfectionism-is-ruin_n_4212069.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
If you’ve ever cried about getting a B+ or ending up in second place, there’s a good chance you’re a perfectionist.
As a culture, we tend to reward perfectionists for their insistence on setting high standards and relentless drive to meet those standards. And perfectionists frequently are high achievers — but the price they pay for success can be chronic unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
“Reaching for the stars, perfectionists may end up clutching at air,”
Here are 14 signs that perfectionism could actually be holding you back — and simple ways to start letting go.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The body of engineering knowledge combined with the Internet can lead to quick expertise in any area. Technology has grown at an exponential rate, inspiring thousands of people to get involved on their own by creating their own gadgets, systems, and products. This is known as the maker movement and is the result of technologies such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and 3D printers such as the MakerBot. Through these technologies hundreds of projects have been built, and a huge community has been formed, supporting everything around it. The next big thing to come to the maker world may be a combination between the small computers and 3D printing.
The printed circuits also allow circuits to be utilized in many unique applications. For example, the circuits can be printed and then flexed while still maintaining conductivity.
Teams working in labs can take advantage of the rapid prototyping it will allow as well as a hobbyist working from home. The technology may also be integrated with 3D printing or pick-and-place machines, which would open a whole new door in the electronics world.
Source: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=269470&cid=nl.dn14&dfpPParams=ind_183,industry_consumer,aid_269470&dfpLayout=blog
Tomi Engdahl says:
Should Tech Designers Go With Their Guts — Or the Data?
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/design-world-stop-fighting-over-data-vs-instinct/
In the design world, there’s always been a dichotomy between data and instinct. Design departments — think Mad Men – were once driven by the belief that some people are gifted with an innate design sense.
But today’s digital products — think Facebook and Google — glorify “data” instead; it’s now possible to measure each design element among hundreds of variations until the perfect outcome is selected.
For designers, this influx of data can be frustrating.
Designers who thought they were hired for their good taste will quickly get discouraged in a culture where tech companies meticulously test 41 shades of blue. Imagine convincing a team to trust your gut instincts when cold hard data says you’re wrong. How do you simplify a crowded homepage when the data scientists agree it’s ugly, but tell you it signs up customers faster?
From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important … but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences that include failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.
With each wave of design feedback, however, I was asked to make the button bolder, larger, more eye catching, and even “clicky” (whatever that means). The proposed design slowly became more garish and eventually, downright ugly.
To make a point, a colleague of mine stepped in with an unexpected move: He designed the most attention-grabbing button he could possibly muster: flames shooting out the side
This move reset the entire conversation. It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.
We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.
While it’s tempting to make design decisions based on the data we have at hand, the best teams recognize that some goals are hard to measure. Data is incredibly useful for incremental, tactical improvement, but it must be tempered by another factor: our instincts.
…And Instincts Are Made, Not Born
Trust me: paying this much attention to the details can get annoying. Not just for designers but for those around them, too.
But there’s a benefit to being so aware. Whenever designers notice something is difficult, we mentally dissect why that’s happening, what design was involved, and how a different design might solve the problem. Each time we do this, we’re slowly building our design muscles — what people commonly refer to as “instinct.”
Still, this introspection only gets us so far, because the audience for our designs are often different than ourselves: older, younger, bringing other cultural contexts or expectations, different in other ways.
Watching customers use a product through user research is the absolute best way to develop design instincts and avoid mistakes. And user research is really just another stream of data — one that’s qualitative and messy, but still extremely valuable.
The Goldilocks of Instinct-Driven and Data-Driven Design
When the whole team watches customers struggle with their designs, it’s possible for everyone — from engineer to CEO — to possess brilliant design instincts. Just don’t let these instincts run the show. The trick is to recognize situations when teams should dig for data, and when they should let instincts shine.
Curious about customer behavior? Use data
web and mobile analytics tell us exactly what customers do.
Making decisions about product quality? Use instinct. To build quality into a product, you have to pay attention to hundreds of details like crafting clear help content or moving that button 3 pixels to the left. None of these small changes individually would prove worthwhile with data
Deciding between a small set of options? Use data
There’s nothing like an A/B test for making an incremental, tactical improvement.
Concerned with long-term impact? Use instinct.
A good reputation takes years to build, but just one bad experience can destroy it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MakerBot wants to put a 3D printer in every US public school
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57611935-235/makerbot-wants-to-put-a-3d-printer-in-every-us-public-school/
The 3D-printing company is “on a mission,” according to Chief Executive Bre Pettis. In an initiative supported by the White House, MakerBot is turning to crowdsourcing to fund the scheme.
MakerBot wants to put a 3D printer in every school in the United States, and it’s drumming up support from the industry and general public to make it happen.
“Instead of waiting for someone to create a product for you, you can create your own,” he said. “It can change the whole paradigm of how our children will see innovation and manufacturing in America.”
With the initiative launching Tuesday, individuals and corporations can donate funds using DonorsChoose.org, a crowdsourcing site for teachers. Pettis wants those in communities around America to contribute to their local schools. Meanwhile, MakerBot is offering significant discounts to lower the price point of the 3D printing machines.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Magnetized Circuits Snap Together to Form World’s Cutest Synthesizer
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/11/littlebits-synthesizer/
When synthesizers first became popular in the Late Jurassic 1970s, musicians needed a solid knowledge of how they worked in order to play them
Today’s synthesizers are often far simpler
The DIY synth is just the latest maker set created by littleBits. Originally founded by corporate finance consultant Ayah Bdeir five years ago, littleBits manufactures tiny, candy-colored circuitry doodads that connect like Legos or Tinkertoys via a set of magnets (plus a power signal and ground). The sets allow anybody, of any age, to understand and develop rudimentary mechanical systems
“The idea is we want people to understand the technology around them, because it runs our lives,”
The Synth Kit that just hit the market originated a year ago, at a TED conference where Bdeir and comedian/musician Reggie Watts met backstage after giving talks, and started discussing the idea of littleBits musical instruments.
The best part? The blocks can be interchanged like no other synthesizer
“Synthesizers are quite simple when you break them down,” says Tatsuya Takahashi, the hardware engineer at Korg who worked with developers at littleBits to build the kit. “Technologically, it’s just like the Monotron we’ve been developing recently, or like Korg models from 1978.”
“You can do some crazy, unconventional things you couldn’t do with a normal synth”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slideshow: 20 Great Technology Quotations
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1395&doc_id=269540&
Technology may be the lifeblood of engineers, but it’s the business of almost everyone. From the time we turn on the radio in the morning until we check our final email messages at night, we’re pushing buttons, turning keys, and answering electronic beeps.
That’s why virtually everyone has an opinion on technology.
Today, we offer insights, forecasts, and observations on technology.
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”
— John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States
(Quote source: Wikiquote)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slideshow: Kickstarter’s Latest & Greatest Inspire Us
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1395&doc_id=269725&
Kickstarter is on a roll these days. The company that calls itself “the world’s largest crowdfunding platform” is living up to its name. In 2012 alone, 2.2 million people pledged $319 million to kick-start more than 18,000 of its projects. Many of those projects involved technology, with 3D printing serving as one of the hottest categories.
We’ve gathered some of the best-funded technology projects at Kickstarter from 2012 and 2013. From 3D printers and 3G spacesuits, to underwater robots and electronic basketballs, we take a look at a few of the latest and greatest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wedding Spot: An idea so obvious it should already have been invented
http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/wedding-spot-an-idea-so-obvious-it-should-already-have-been-invented/
In Silicon Valley, if you’ve got a good idea chances are someone has already tried to build it. If they haven’t, it’s probably because it’s a tricky problem to tackle. But every once in awhile, there’s a diamond in the rough — an idea so obvious that it’s not totally clear why no one has built it yet.
That’s the case with newly launched Wedding Spot. Wedding Spot is a website that lets fiancees search for wedding venues by category — hotel wedding, vineyard wedding, ranch wedding.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst
by Sarah Green | 1:00 PM November 13, 2013
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-worst/
A full 30% of workers in cubicles, and roughly 25% in partitionless offices, were dissatisfied with the noise level of their workspaces.
The worst part, according to the data, is that these office workers can’t control what they hear — or who hears them. Lack of sound privacy was far and away the most despised issue in the survey, with 60% of cubicle workers and half of all partitionless people indicating it as a frustration.
Given that other studies have shown we only spend 35% of our time at our work stations, though, I it seems reasonable for a cost-minded manager to assume that we should just abolish the office, despite its popularity with workers. Make everything modular. Let the collaboration flow.
Not so fast. Previous research, cited by Kim and de Dear, has already shown that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction… was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices, and the tasks requiring complex verbal process” — the most important tasks, you might argue — “were more likely to be disturbed than relatively simple or routine tasks.”
In this paper, Kim and de Dear show that this loss of productivity is not offset by increased collaboration. “Ease of interaction” was barely an issue — less than 10% of all office workers cited it as a problem, no matter what kind of workspace they had. In fact, people in enclosed offices found it even less of an issue than workers in cubicles and workers in open layouts. (Perhaps because enclosed offices obviate the all-too-common challenge of finding a private place to talk.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Journal Covers Responsible Innovation
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=269817&
The nascent field known as “responsible innovation” now has its own publication. The Journal of Responsible Innovation will offer practitioners and scholars a place to articulate, strengthen, and critique perspectives about the role of responsibility in research and development. It intends to provide a forum for discussions of ethical, social, and government issues related to innovation.
David Guston, director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University and co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, is the journal’s founding editor-in-chief. The journal will publish three issues each year, beginning in early 2014
The term “responsible innovation” is often associated with emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geo-engineering, and artificial intelligence. These areas have a potentially revolutionary influence on society. Responsible innovation represents an attempt to think through the ethical and social complexities of these technologies before they become mainstream.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco’s reverse mentoring plan helps middle-aged managers grok Gen Y
Just what the world needs now: a One Direction router
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/cisco_reverse_mentoring/
Cisco has implemented a reverse mentoring program that sees its younger and less-experienced staff advise its managers, the better to help the latter develop strategy.
Sabrina Lin, Cisco’s veep for commercial business in Asia Pacific, Japan and China, revealed the program at the at the Canalys Channels Forum in Bangkok a while back, in response to a question from the floor about how Cisco engages with generation Y.
Others at Cisco, she said, “may not have Generation Y contact” and that may leave them without insights on “how to use social networks to engage Generation Y customers”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is the tide turning? Women filled 60% of tech jobs created this year
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/20/is-the-tide-turning-women-filled-60-of-tech-jobs-created-this-year/
Could America finally be making progress towards getting more women into the tech industry?
New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests we might be.
Of the 39,000 jobs created in tech this year, 60 percent of them were filled by women. Tech career Hub Dice found that this is the first time women have represented a majority of new hires in the past decade.
The tech industry undoubtedly has a gender problem, and the topic of women-in-tech topic has been debated for years. Women make up less than one-third of all employees in the tech sector. Only three percent of tech startups are formed by women and tech companies employ an average of 12.33% female engineers. Women contribute to just 1.2 percent of open source software and 5 percent of patents.
These numbers are dismal, but at last it seems that gains are being made.
The notion that women don’t like technology or aren’t interested in technology is absurd, and building a tech community with a more equal gender distribution is long overdue.
Yes, getting girls interested in STEM education is critical to achieving this goal, and yes, creating flexible work policies for employees with children is important for keeping women in tech as well. Sexism and sexual harassment need to stop, and women need to support each other.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slideshow: Tech Toys for Aspiring Engineers
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1395&doc_id=269804&cid=nl.dn14
Since before the days of Lincoln Logs, technical toys have helped kids develop spatial abilities and construction knowledge. From Lego bricks in the 1930s to Raspberry Pi single-board computers today, such toys have been laying an educational foundation for millions of lucky children.
Though it’s difficult to prove there is a link between the availability of these toys and a desire to join the engineering profession, we suspect there is one.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It all started with the poor results of the employee survey. I decided to try a new approach. I asked the managers to select the three most important problem, and then we used the analysis of the A3 problem-solving method.
The name comes from the fact that the results are documented on A3 size paper and put on the wall. In the first crack in the old business culture: a hard thing to be granted public.
Encouraged by the experiments then expanded my problem-solving skills learning the entire information management. The result has been a collective worry from a team of co-operation across borders.
I’ve learned a lot of thought patterns, beliefs, and barriers to employment. A3 leaflets about the I created a channel of communication with the staff explains important issues constructively to all necessary parties. Their work may be affected.
At first, the reception was incredulous. “It’s depressing, when the problems are visible all the time.” “Yes, experts know how to solve problems. What is this what is needed.? “” If I see problems, others see me as bad. ”
In fact, the opposite happened. On the wall, the story comes off a person’s identity, and the weather too co-workers to support rather than criticism: “Interestingly, I do not know of.” Sense of community and a sense of security will increase.
Still, many were of the opinion that they do not have a problem.
Today, the coffee room of encouragement: “it irritating? Does not successful? Create A3! ”
If you want to influence their own work, must be able to communicate the need for change to others. A3 model is the way to build a sales pitch.
Today, we briefings reserved for an example of the problem to tell about ten minutes. These presentations are invariably the best feedback. “Now I am able to understand and explain to the customer.”
The traditional management model, I assumed that the supervisor identifies and solves problems. Thus, my door was a constant string of asking you what to do.
When introduced to the Lean thinking, I moved my behavior. Now, the staff will tell you what problems we have, and supervisors to ensure that the problem is a professional and systematic.
A3 problem-solution model reveals that if the team is not enough to explain the current situation. Then the solution is not to go, but need to continue becoming familiar with.
Sometimes it is not considered why this is a problem, or whether the cost of the proposed solution to any problem in relation to the cost.
It is also important to think in advance about how we can later say, saw an improvement in the situation. The solution is only a hypothesis, until its effectiveness has been proven in practice.
Now I see that I am a problem-solving through organized learning.
The human is incredibly difficult to go in and talk to the other. If it were a natural expert, so no silos or misunderstandings should not be.
The idea is that the individual learns best by doing, and together with others. Team will learn by solving problems. The team talking here of the people the understanding of the problem and the need to resolve.
Quickly group expands its line outside the organization horizontally across different functions, and the hierarchy of up-and-down. The silos are broken, will improve the functioning and well-being will increase.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/blogit/CIO_100_blogi/harhaoppinen++tyohyvinvointia+ongelmakeskeisyydella/a949111
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wolfram’s new equation: Mathematica+RPi=child geniuses everywhere
Mathematica will be baked into future Raspbian releases
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22/mathematica_raspberry_pi/
Los Bros Wolfram have thrown their weight behind the Raspberry Pi and its mission to get more kiddies coding, by offering up their signature product Mathematica as a free inclusion in future versions of Raspbian.
Pi Daddy Eben Upton has offered up predictable praise for the offering, saying Wolfram and his mates in the computer-based maths movement are “trying to bring about the same sort of change in the teaching of other subjects that we’re aiming for in computing.”
It looks like Wolfram Research has ported Mathematica to the Pi
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top Educational Kids Gifts for 2013
http://toptech2014.tumblr.com/post/64320976266/top-educational-kids-gifts-for-2013
We’ve scoured the world looking for the absolute best gifts you can buy for your kids that will make them love you forever and maybe learn something at the same time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/187255/codeorg-more-money-for-cs-instructors-who-teach-more-girls
“The same cast of billionaire characters — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt — is backing FWD.us, which is lobbying Congress for more visas to ‘meet our workforce needs,’ as well as Code.org, which aims to popularize Computer Science education in the U.S. to address a projected CS job shortfall.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google claims MOOCs SOLVE code-for-kids teacher training problem
Shock finding as Big G learns free online stuff can attract, engage, lots of people
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/24/google_says_moocs_solve_codeforkids_teacher_training_problem/
Google’s latest contribution to the global movement that advocates teaching kids to code as the solution for every problem has discovered something revolutionary: if you put good content online, lots of people will read it and some of them may even engage with it.
The revelation comes from Google Research, which has run its eye over the numbers emerging from Harvard University’s Creative Computing Online Workshop, a six-week massively online open course (MOOC) “for educators who want to learn more about using Scratch and supporting computational thinking in the classroom and other learning environments.”
Google’s now touting the course as a tremendous success because it “… had 2600 participants, who created more than 4700 Scratch projects, and engaged in 3500 forum discussions, compared to the ‘in-person’ class held last year, which reached only 50 educators.
The findings are, however, a long way short of representing the “Unique Strategies for Scaling Teacher Professional Development” Google’s blog post claims
And of course let’s not imagine that just because teachers learn Scratch they’re ready to teach computational thinking to kids across several years of school, as will be required under Australia’s nearly-complete Digital Technologies Curriculum.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get Smart About Your R&D Spend
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=269929&
Few would argue that innovation can fuel business success. Companies that make the investment tend to generate bigger profits than those that don’t. But it’s also true that spending more on R&D doesn’t necessarily make your company more successful. Pouring more money into R&D, however small or large the company may be, doesn’t guarantee more profits.
There are a number of cases where a company has invested heavily in R&D but has gained only limited profitability. Other companies in the same industry spend much less and produce profits that are several times bigger.
So what’s going on at these companies to enable them to generate superior results with less investment? The first observation is that some 70% of R&D projects never make it into product development, and of those that do, only 50% ever make profits. The remainder enter the market as weak offerings that don’t press the customer buying buttons, or as quite often happens, the investment is used to bolster aging products by giving them a fresh coat of paint in the hopes that it’ll extend sales while saving costs.
The result is that about 85% of the R&D spend doesn’t generate a profit. In most business circles, a similar return on investment case with such poor returns would be shot down before it even started.
Consider Apple and Microsoft in 2010. Both companies were of a similar size and the industries they served substantially overlapped. The one difference that stood out was that Apple invested about 2% of its revenues in R&D compared to Microsoft’s 12-13%.
Apple grew 55% between 2010 and 2012, whilst over the same period, Microsoft displayed a modest growth of 7% per annum and received a flood of complaints from angry shareholders who were concerned about the extent of R&D investment with little new to show.
Microsoft had been investing a high percentage of its R&D into simply defending the PC business while the technology marketplace at that time was rapidly shifting to new platforms and opened up new lucrative opportunities, such as mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), cloud-based applications, and data access, and even gaming consoles.
There are several ways of measuring R&D effectiveness. A favored approach is to use a measure referred to as RORC (return on research capital), which can be calculated by dividing the current year gross profit by the previous year R&D spend.
it can provide a reasonable indication of a company’s year-on-year trend if measured in successive years to drive improvement
Tomi says:
Circuit Stickers
http://hackaday.com/2013/11/25/circuit-stickers/
One of our tipsters just sent an interesting crowd funding project our way. They’re called Circuit Stickers and are a very creative way to get basic electronics into children’s hands through arts and crafts.
this idea to bridge the gap that exists between electronics and the arts, and the stickers are a great start. They allow anyone to learn basic electronics in a very easy and friendly way, using skills we all learned as children, drawing and sticking stickers on everything.
The current offering includes LED stickers, effects stickers (to control the LEDs), sensors, microcontrollers, and even breakout boards. They are all in sticker form, and can be connected together using conductive fabric, thread, carbon-based paint, copper tape, pencil graphite, and really, anything conductive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Supermodel Lily Cole in Impossible partnership with Jimbo Wales, YOU
‘Impossible is something that has to happen’? Shurely something that can’t …?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/lily_cole_impossible/
Supermodel Lily Cole has launched a new social network, dubbed Impossible, that relies on the good nature of strangers to exchange “gifts” on the site for free.
A cursory glance at Impossible appears to bring forth a variety of people who are trustafarians, fashionistas, stalkers, Jimmy Wales or some peculiar hybrid of all the above.
Now that she owns a website/app thingy, the 25-year-old redhead has been labelled an intrepid tech entrepreneur even though she remains clueless about how Impossible might (possibly) make any money from the venture.
Impossible immediately nags you for your location upon entering the site for the first time. Although it freely displays the latest “wishes” to be posted on the network, anyone who wants to read the comments of others is required to create an account first.
“She had a deep understanding of what in fact makes up a huge part of human life: doing nice things for each other with no expectation of any particular return,” Wales told the Telegraph.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Super Awesome Sylvia’s WaterColorBot
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1894919479/super-awesome-sylvias-watercolorbot-0
Starting with vector artwork on your computer– or following along as you sketch in real time –the WaterColorBot dips its brush in water, goes and gets the right color of paint, and paints before your eyes.
While a robotic painting “printer” can be an incredibly fun thing on its own, the WaterColorBot is also a genuine (if simple and friendly) computer-automated, numerically controlled (CNC) machine– and that lets you do some amazing things.
Sylvia Todd, star of Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show, came up with the idea for the WaterColorBot because she wanted to create an art robot and enter it in the RoboGames competition. She approached us at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories about collaborating on the project, and we loved it.
The Making of the WaterColorBot
http://hackaday.com/2013/11/25/the-making-of-the-watercolorbot/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Art Makes You Smart
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/art-makes-you-smart.html
FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.
A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.
Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.
Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Surprise: Verkkokauppa.com – your products with a revolutionary way
Finland’s biggest online shop Verkkokauppa.com has revealed the project, which aims to revolutionize the development of new products. Interesting “set of development in the ‘products are built with customers. At the same time Verkkokauppa.com ‘business is changing.
Verkkokauppa.com says the establishment of the “innovation aquarium department,” which will begin to develop new products together with our customers.
The project will develop completely new way to innovate new products. The company says that the work is done for consumers, professionals and companies established in cooperation with the processing team.
Verkkokauppa.com be built in both physical and virtual innovation in the aquarium. The mode of development promises a high level of transparency. Innovaatioakvaariossa can be, for example, introduce new product ideas and ordinary consumers will be able to make suggestions for prototypes. Development work has also involved external experts.
The project will Verkkokauppa.com ‘operating experience significant change. The company is developing a new kind of action, a number of products in development. At the same time Verkkokauppa.com ‘business is expanding the distribution and importation in addition to its own products have made.
The goal is that the self-developed products would bring the company new sales of ten million euros by 2016.
Verkkokauppa.com gets help from a new kind of development the creation of Tekes. It funds innovative aquarium as part of the development of the feeling of money coming to me program.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/yllatys_verkkokauppa_comissa_omia_tuotteita_mullistavalla_tavalla
Tomi Engdahl says:
Code.org Wants Participating Students’ Data For 7 Years
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/28/1623205/codeorg-wants-participating-students-data-for-7-years
“As part of its plan to improve computer science education in the U.S., the Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates-backed Code.org is asking school districts to sign a contract calling for Code.org to receive ‘longitudinal student achievement data’ for up to seven academic years in return for course materials, small teacher stipends, and general support.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zuckerberg Shows Kindergartners Ruby Instead of JavaScript
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/12/01/013201/zuckerberg-shows-kindergartners-ruby-instead-of-javascript
“Code.org was able to switch the example Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses to illustrate Repeat Loops from JavaScript to what looks like Ruby”
“Khan Academy, on the other hand, is sticking with JavaScript for its Hour of Code tutorial”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Importance of Mentors
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=269945&cid=nl.dn14
During my several careers I had the good fortune to learn from three mentors, and as I wrap up my career, they deserve mention. I hope you have had equally good fortune to work for and with such good people.
These three men share characteristics of good mentors. They all provided guidance without issuing “orders” to do something, and they gave helpful advice and suggestions based on their experiences. My mentors had a solid moral and ethical foundation on which they based their actions. Good mentors also challenged me to continue learning new skills and to try new things, even though I might (and did) make mistakes. And instead of saying “this is wrong,” or something similar, they pointed out errors and problems, and helped me learn from them. My three mentors had excellent reputations, which made me and others admire them and want to live up to their expectations.
Mentoring goes beyond the work environment. My mentors became friends as we talked about family, education, astronomy, sailing, landscaping, home maintenance, flying, travel, and many other interesting subjects. Good mentoring requires a personality that puts people at ease talking about themselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon to be Every 12 Hours
http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950
Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
In a recent lecture at Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain, has calculated that several billion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. The Internet is currently estimated to be 5 million terabytes (TB) of which Google has indexed roughly 200 TB or just .004% of its total size. The numbers involved are astounding especially when considering the size of the human brain and the number of neurons in it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Space Engineers: out of This World Learning Game
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=269964&cid=nl.dn14
The effect video games have upon society has been up for debate for some time now. Some parents may consider video games as a waste of time or even a bad influence for their children. However, over the years there have been many studies that have shown the complete opposite. Video games can teach kids to follow instructions, increase problem-solving and logic skills, and increase hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.
Indeed, playing video games can give the brain a workout equivalent to that of a completing a crossword puzzle or learning to read
Since kids love video games so much, game designers have begun to aim some games toward education. This has had various results.
owever, Keen Software House, from the Czech Republic, recently released a game with a new twist on game play and learning. The game is Space Engineers. As the title implies, people play as engineers in space.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Education Performance Data Published: Asia Dominates
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/03/1849214/new-education-performance-data-published-asia-dominates
Tomi Engdahl says:
With a mix of Arduino, Raspberry Pi and fun, Maker Box hopes to bolster Africa’s future tech skills
http://www.zdnet.com/with-a-mix-of-arduino-raspberry-pi-and-fun-maker-box-hopes-to-bolster-africas-future-tech-skills-7000023770/
Summary: Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, microscopes and soldering lessons to help children teach themselves the STEM skills that are vital for economic development.
A new Indiegogo project, Afrimakers, is hoping to bring a program of computers and creativity to children across the continent by crowdfunding for 14 ‘Maker Box’ kits which will be distributed at seven tech hubs in seven countries, along with learning materials and training sessions, early next year.
The scheme is the brain child of Stephania Druga, a Romanian-born ex-Google engineer and founder of HacKIDemia, a network of schools and organisations across the world which teach children how to use low-tech tools to make computing fun, through hands-on practical sessions.
Each Maker Box contains a Raspberry Pi, an Adruino controller, an RFID starter kit, a soldering station and several sensors and other tools.
Tomi Engdahl says:
As engineers, we must consider the ethical implications of our work
Engineers are behind government spying tools and military weapons. We should be conscious of how our designs are used
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/05/engineering-moral-effects-technology-impact
One aspect of Edward Snowden’s revelations in the Guardian about the NSA’s surveillance activities has received less attention than it should. The algorithms that extract highly specific information from an otherwise impenetrable amount of data have been conceived and built by flesh and blood, engineers with highly sophisticated technical knowledge. Did they know the use to which their algorithms would be put? If not, should they have been mindful of the potential for misuse? Either way, should they be held partly responsible or were they just “doing their job”?
One could ask similar questions about engineers who build technologies of violence. Although in the west, we use the euphemism “defence” – and weapons often do serve this purpose – arms are just as likely to be used for furthering less-than-honourable goals
Technology as a means of social progress is arguably the common good that engineers pursue.
Today, our profession seems to have preserved the sense that technology is almost by necessity a force for good. We are focused on the technical and managerial sides of technology – how to design algorithms; how to build machines – but not so much on the context of its deployment or its unintended consequences. We are not very interested in the politics and social dynamics.
Engineers need the resources of government and industry to do their work, far more than doctors do.
In the US, freelance consultant engineers – who appear to have controlled the American Society of Civil Engineers in the late 19th century, and created a strong and autonomous professional identity – were swept away by a corporate model in which most engineers became paid employees of industry. Today, engineering in the English-speaking world largely sees itself as a tool of industry. There are many advantages to this of course, including more resources at our disposal to do our work. But one major drawback is that engineers, as a result, have far less intellectual and practical autonomy than they should.
Our ethics have become mostly technical: how to design properly, how to not cut corners, how to serve our clients well. We work hard to prevent failure of the systems we build, but only in relation to what these systems are meant to do, rather than the way they might actually be utilised, or whether they should have been built at all. We are not amoral, far from it; it’s just that we have steered ourselves into a place where our morality has a smaller scope.
There have been encouraging attempts in the engineering profession aiming for a bigger, less reductionist vision of engineering: some mission statements have been written, codes of ethics redrafted and engineering curricula redesigned. However, we are still essentially producing what industry requires: engineers able to carry out technically complex projects, rather than professionals with an in-depth understanding of the social complexity of technology. In fact, we need both.
Engineers have, in many ways, built the modern world and helped improve the lives of many. Of this, we are rightfully proud. What’s more, only a very small minority of engineers is in the business of making weapons or privacy-invading algorithms.
While there are no easy answers to the questions raised here, we can certainly do better.
Tomi says:
Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system
Physicist doubts work like Higgs boson identification achievable now as academics are expected to ‘keep churning out papers’
Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.
He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”
Tomi says:
Higgs isn’t alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity.
Eric Weinstein wrote that, “We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency.” [1]
Weinstein’s “deviants and delinquents” include “von Neumann [skirt chasing], Gamow [hard drinking], Shockley [bigoted], Watson [misogynistic], Einstein [childish], Curie [slutty], Smale [lazy], Oppenheimer [politically treacherous], Crick [incompetent], Ehrenfest [murderous], Lang [meddlesome], Teller [monstrous] and Grothendieck [mentally unstable].”
Higgs’s observation suggests that the systematic stamping out of non-conscientious non-conformists is a byproduct of over-scheduling them. (Scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. [2]) Weinstein’s deviants benefited from a historical period during which they had sufficient time and freedom to pursue their greatest work (von Neumann, who didn’t need any time, is an exception).
But I imagine that time is a luxury even for the deviants and delinquents who find themselves displaced from academia into startups. So what is really needed is a startup culture that provides for years of uninterrupted development and focus. (Not to mention a hiring process that actively selects for displaced deviants, but that’s another post.)
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864539
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside the Box
People don’t actually like creativity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html
In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue.
It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.
“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,”
Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.
Even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas, as demonstrated in a 2011 study from the University of Pennsylvania.
Uncertainty is an inherent part of new ideas, and it’s also something that most people would do almost anything to avoid. People’s partiality toward certainty biases them against creative ideas and can interfere with their ability to even recognize creative ideas.
“But they won’t, and so the system stays less efficient.”
This is a common and often infuriating experience for a creative person. Even in supposedly creative environments, in the creative departments of advertising agencies and editorial meetings at magazines, I’ve watched people with the most interesting—the most “out of the box”—ideas be ignored or ridiculed in favor of those who repeat an established solution.
“Everybody hates it when something’s really great,”
In fact, everyone I spoke with agreed on one thing—unexceptional ideas are far more likely to be accepted than wonderful ones.
Unfortunately, the place where our first creative ideas go to die is the place that should be most open to them—school. Studies show that teachers overwhelmingly discriminate against creative students
make sure children’s minds are not on the “wrong” path, even though adults’ accomplishments are linked far more strongly to their creativity than their IQ. It’s ironic that even as children are taught the accomplishments of the world’s most innovative minds, their own creativity is being squelched.
All of this negativity isn’t easy to digest, and social rejection can be painful in some of the same ways physical pain hurts
Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon—training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take.
To live creatively is a choice. You must make a commitment to your own mind and the possibility that you will not be accepted.