Author: Robin

I’m so excited that someone’s tried this! A video from The Atlantic describes the case for the 32-hour workweek:

Since 2006, Ryan Carson, the CEO of Treehouse, has maintained a four-day workweek for his employees. “There’s no rule that you have to work 40 hours, you have to work more to be successful,” says Carson. “We’ve proven that you can take it from an experiment into something that’s doable for real companies and real people in highly competitive markets.”

“People need more structured ways to talk and think about the learning of skills. Contemporary language is not sufficiently rich in this domain, [and] the field of education research has not worked in the direction of developing such formalisms. But another research community, that of computer scientists, has had (for its own reasons) to work on the problem of descriptive languages and has thereby become an unexpected resource for educational innovation.

“Getting a computer to do something requires that the underlying processes be described with enough precision to be carried out by the machine. Thus computer scientists have devoted much of their talent and energy to developing powerful descriptive formalisms. [Some of these] are exactly what are needed to get a handle on the process of learning.”

-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 98-100)

Last year I lived in Washington, DC, and the White House was on my way to work. I often took a photo as I passed by.

What to do with all those photos? A great talk about the intersection of photography and data visualization inspired me to create a photo montage.

“Newton ‘understood’ the universe by reducing whole planets to points that move according to a fixed set of laws of motion. Is this grasping the essence of the real world or hiding its complexities? Part of what it means to be able to think like a scientist is to have an intuitive understanding of these epistemological issues and I believe that working with [LOGO] can give children an opportunity to get to know them.”

-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 117)

“Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled. Can an adult and a child genuinely collaborate on elementary school arithmetic? A very important feature of work with computers is that the teacher and the learner can be engaged in a real intellectual collaboration; together they can try to get the computer to do this or that and understand what it actually does. New situations that neither teacher nor learner has seen before come up frequently. Sharing the problem and the experience of solving it allows a child to learn from an adult not “by doing what teacher says” but “by doing what teacher does.”

-Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (p. 115)

The modern construction site meets timeless human needs.

 

“Statistics is about protecting analysts from false conclusions based on data containing random error.”

-Leland Wilkinson

From a recent interview with Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO):

Tim Cook: “Steve [Jobs] felt that most people live in a small box. They think they can’t influence or change things a lot. And more than anybody I’ve ever met, Steve never accepted that. He got each of us to reject that philosophy. Through his actions, way more than any preaching, he embedded this nonacceptance of the status quo into the company. [And] his selection of people helped propel the culture.”

“He’s not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.”

Interviewer: Do you fear that your strategy of vertical integration is becoming too complex, too unmanageable, too big a job?

Tim Cook: “No, because we don’t live in the box. We are outside of that. What I see is that we have to continually have the discipline to define the problem so that it can be done. If you try to engineer to the complexity, then it does become the impossible dream. But if you step back and think about the problem differently, think about what you’re really trying to do, then I don’t think it becomes an impossible task at all.”

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Define the problem so that it can be done. See past the complexity. Think differently.

I think that’s a pretty good definition of leadership.

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“Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it.”

-Robert Twigger, Master of Many Trades

 

“The systems that best exemplify direct manipulation all give the qualitative feeling that one is directly engaged with control of the objects — not with the programs, not with the computer, but with the semantic objects of our goals and intentions.”

-Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman, “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” (1985)