basic "number sense", comfort at manipulating numbers (more)

Mark Lombardi's work is going around the country this year. It's nice that these are "artistic", but I wish they were online for free use (esp since he's dead now). I'd like to see software Graph Drawing software make it easy to generate this stuff (after using a Semantic Client or Wiki to track the notes). In 1994 I began a series of drawings I refer to as "narrative structures." Most were executed in graphite or pen and ink on paper. Some are quite large, measuring up to 5 x 12 feet. I call them "narrative structures" because each consists of a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event of interest to me, like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house. One of my goals is to explore the interaction of political, social and economic forces in contemporary affairs. I hadn't realized he'd died in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi cf Conspiracy Theory

Back in 2007 Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post about groups becoming more fanatical over time via Evaporative Cooling - where some event triggers the more reasonable/skeptical people into leaving a group, so that those left behind have discussions that have less skepticism to drawn on. My own theory of Internet moderation is that you have to be willing to exclude trolls and spam to get a conversation going. You must even be willing to exclude kindly but technically uninformed folks from technical mailing lists if you want to get any work done. A genuinely open conversation on the Internet degenerates fast. It's the articulate trolls that you should be wary of ejecting, on this theory - they serve the hidden function of legitimizing less extreme disagreements. But you should not have so many articulate trolls that they begin arguing with each other, or begin to dominate conversations. If you have one person around who is the famous Guy Who Disagrees With Everything, anyone with a more reasonable, more moderate disagreement won't look like the sole nail sticking out. This theory of Internet moderation may not have served me too well in practice, so take it with a grain of salt. (more)

Contractor, non-employee. Typically hired to either perform an ongoing task (Outsourcing), or achieve a specific result (Project). Different from a Consultant.

advisor to brands looking to leverage social media and technology to stand out in the competitive modern economy https://www.perell.com/

travelling every day between The Family and your DayJob (and 3rd point - shopping?) (more)

Turning VideoGames into Spectator Sports for the bukz.

Hugh C. Howey (born 1975) is an American writer, known best for the science fiction series Silo (incl Wool), part of which he published independently through Amazon.com's Kindle Direct Publishing system.[1][2] Howey was raised in Monroe, North Carolina and before publishing his books, he worked as a book store clerk, yacht captain, roofer, and audio technician.... He began the series in 2011... In mid-2015, Howey gave up his home in Florida, and moved to St Francis Bay, Eastern Cape, South Africa. He commissioned the construction of a sailing catamaran, on which he plans to live and sail the world while he continues to write. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Howey (more)

Ash Maurya: The Root Cause for Innovation Theater and How to Avoid It. sub-funnel optimization which, in this case, is one of the leading causes for Innovation Theater. (more)

HealthJoy raises $12.5M Series B to help employees make the most of their healthcare benefits. Healthcare in the United States is so complicated that even employees with good benefits might have a hard time navigating their options. HealthJoy wants to help with a health benefits platform that uses AI to answer questions. The Chicago-based startup announced today that it has raised $12.5 million in Series B. (more)

when a Project fails (to meet the expectations of the Gold Owner or Goal Donor?) (more)

an open and decentralised application Platform. For comparison, perhaps imagine a bastardised mix between Git, FaceBook, UNIX, IRC, Google App Engine, Xanadu and Wikis. (more)

John Cutler: Prioritizing (prioritize) Without Level of Effort? The reason I like using CoD (cost of delay, the $1,000,000/month in this example) is that it helps us have an apples-to-apples discussion about which opportunities to chase. It hopefully forces a meaningful discussion about value, ideally resulting in some kind of mental model / causal relationship diagram / belief network that everyone can see. In cases where I see CoD being difficult to calculate, it is almost always because this understanding is lacking. There is no shared understanding. Which means that figuring out CoD for each individual item is a huge drag. (more)

Christopher Lydon (born 1940 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American media personality and author. He is best known for being the original host of The Connection, produced by WBUR and syndicated to other NPR stations, and for Open Source, a weekly radio program on WBUR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lydon (more)

Bjørn Lomborg (Danish: [bjɶɐ̯n ˈlʌmbɒˀw]; born 6 January 1965) is a Danish author and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School as well as President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen... In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, a project-based conference where prominent economists sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methods based on the theory of welfare economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg (more)

Stephen Gordon anticipates that everything (College Education; Retail=ECommerce) will become a Coffee House. Eventually you could have local campuses becoming places where MITx students seek tutoring, network, and socialize – reclaiming some of the college experience they’d otherwise have lost... Between EBook-s and print-on-demand, Barnes And Noble-sized stores shrink down to just their coffee shops – or maybe StarBucks takes over their business. Either way, customers keep the experience of reading with coffee and those big comfortable chairs... Which is more enjoyable: Starbucks or WalMart? For the sane: Starbucks. So if you can accomplish your Walmart shopping at Starbucks, why do it any other way?.. Going forward the workplace will need the same sort of flexibility that I described for education. Groups for one project will form and then disband and then reform with new members for the next project (Group Forming, CoWorking). What will that workplace look like? Probably closer to Starbucks than Bob Par’s cubicle... What will remain other than coffee shops? Upscale retail will remain – people paying as much for the experience as for the goods purchased (Experience Economy). Restaurants remain. Grocery stores remain. Bricks And Mortar retail stores will be converted to Public Space-s. Multi-use space (Public Library, Hacker Space) will be in increasing demand as connectivity tools allow easy coordination of impromptu events. Some Big Retail stores will be converted to industrial 3D printer (Desktop Fab) factories. These heavy-duty fab labs will fabricate products that are too big or complicated to fabricate at home.

see Local Town Hall, Public Library, Self-Directed Learning Center

From Alexander Patterns: (more)

The biosphere (from Greek βίος bíos "life" and σφαῖρα sphaira "sphere") also known as the ecosphere (from Greek οἶκος oîkos "environment" and σφαῖρα), is the worldwide sum of all ecosystems. It can also be termed the zone of life on Earth, a closed system (apart from solar and cosmic radiation and heat from the interior of the Earth), and largely self-regulating... In a general sense, biospheres are any closed, self-regulating systems containing ecosystems. This includes artificial biospheres such as Biosphere 2 and BIOS-3, and potentially ones on other planets or moons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere

aka Beer Garden (more)