Thoughts on leadership based on an article I happened across yesterday. From Malcolm Gladwell (July 2002) – “The Talent Myth: Are smart people overrated?“ discussing the paper “The dark side of charisma” by Robert Hogan, Robert Raskin, Dan Fazzini: It [the paper] argued that flawed managers fall into three types. One is the High Likability Floater,… [Read more…]
Everyone knows about Yahoo’s patent suit against Facebook. The conspiracy theory In the Silicon Valley ecosystem, Facebook has far more to lose than Yahoo! has to gain. Line up the two sides fighting this battle – Facebook is NATO while Yahoo! has Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Hence the conspiracy theory – Facebook has a $100 billion… [Read more…]
The unemployment rate for teenagers in the US is about 25% currently, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is more than three times the unemployment rate of all workers, which is currently around 8.5%. I shared this video in my Labor Relations class tonight – it is an interview with the late Milton… [Read more…]
1/19/12 UPDATE: And now this article on TechCrunch about Bertelsmann’s University Ventures Fund. — The bigger promise of democratization and specialization of education is finally here, and it barely involves the public sector. Computer science undergrads have a standing employment offer from Google. Yet universities insist that taking Sociology 101 is important to a “well-rounded education.”… [Read more…]
Check out this video of North Koreans bereaving the loss of Kim Jong Il. (HT to Business Insider) Yes, it is unbelievable. When you get to 1:20 of the video, watch the kids in the background look around as if it say – “I guess we should do what everyone else is doing.” Throughout the video,… [Read more…]
Retail sales are up for the sixth straight month. But… 1. The average American lost $21,000 in net worth in Q3, 2011 according to the December 8, 2011 Federal Reserve Flow of Funds release. 2. Personal savings rates are on a marked decline after a predictable spike during the recession: 3. Disposable income is back… [Read more…]
In their paper – Cooperation, structure and hierarchy in multiadaptive games – Sungmin Lee, Petter Holme and Zhi-Xi Wu write: To epitomize, our work shows a generalization of spatial social dilemma models where hierarchies can emerge in a cooperative state. In our framework, these hierarchies need stable cooperating hubs to persist. In this sense, the… [Read more…]
Here’s the way I think of “The Cloud” - If I don’t have to worry about my data when I spill coffee on my laptop, then I’m using is The Cloud. In that vein, I’m in general agreement with Urquhart’s definition – “Cloud computing is an application-centric operations model.” (After my visit to the Silicon… [Read more…]
Seeing that I’m in the data business, thought it’d be interesting to check out the new Silicon Valley CloudCenter at a Meetup event - OpenStack Swift – The State of the Project - organized by Dave Nielsen, et al. Only in Silicon Valley can you pack a room with 60+ engineers to learn about these things.… [Read more…]
James Altucher, who wrote that Pearl Harbor caused the financial crash of 2008. Does that make the international hopes of Chinese consumer spending growth the signal the upcoming event horizon? With the global economy fighting the doldrums: The European PIIGS (and everyone thought the Euro would replace the US Dollar as the global currency) Downward revisions of… [Read more…]
April 12, 2012
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