Abraham Shafi's Blog

"We need to take a more customer centered approach to creating products that solve real problems for..."

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:12:40 -0400

“We need to take a more customer centered approach to creating products that solve real problems for real people.”

- Andy Budd::Blogography: The best products sell them selves (via hiten)

xkcd - Dreams

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:58:13 -0400

xkcd - Dreams

Feel now, think later, for more flowing creativity

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:44:15 -0400

Feel now, think later, for more flowing creativity :

psychotherapy:

Creating can be an emotional process. But there’s good emotional—even when you’re sad or the work epitomizes sorrow—and there’s bad emotional. That’s when your inner critic attacks you, calls you mean names, and causes you not to feel like creating anymore.

One of the ways you may slip out of flow when you’re creating something is if you don’t feel that what you’re producing—your internal feedback—matches what you had in mind originally, that is, your internal ideal. Of course, apprehension due to such non-matching is helpful when it warns you to go back and revise the substandard work. In fact, that’s an essential part of the flow process. It’s only dysfunctional when it makes you feel too bad to continue working, then or later…

…INNER-CRITIC ANESTHETIZING TIPS

Let it flow. Remind yourself regularly that, while you’re immersed in the creative process, there’s absolutely no sense in feeling embarrassed. Even if what comes out at first is crude, stiff, inappropriate, or simple-minded, tell your internal critic to take a hike, that he/she/it is simply getting in your way.

Write without thinking. According to New Yorker-published poet Stephen Perry , “If you just put down words, whatever pops into your head, meandering here and there, free-associating, allowing whatever sputters out to sputter out, amazingly, after a short interval, something takes hold, some comet wraps its tail around you like a kinetic Cheshire Cat, and you’re off.” Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, point-of-view, character, plot, any of the technical aspects of your particular art or craft. They can always be cleaned up later.

Write from your emotions. If you get emotionally involved enough with your subject, if you really feel it as you’re writing or creating something about it, you’ll forget to be self-conscious. If you’re not in an emotional mood, try putting yourself into one. Many artists say they listen to a particular piece of music that’s emotionally stirring as they begin creating. Experiment.

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:24:02 -0400

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.:

mikehudack:

ericmortensen:

tanya77:

britticisms:

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how they got away with these things:

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” It was defeated on a party-line vote.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

If these people were less organized and more concerned with beard length, we’d call them Taliban.

What is happening!? There is a violent regressive movement going on and it makes me uncomfortable.

hiten: Segmenting Unique Visitors in Google Analytics –...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:38:47 -0500

hiten:

Segmenting Unique Visitors in Google Analytics – Analytics Talk

"Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:21:06 -0500

“Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.”

- John Keats

jyamasaki:via i.imgur.com

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:53:17 -0500

jyamasaki:via i.imgur.com

"Failure is success if we learn from it."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:47:00 -0500

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

- Malcolm S. Forbes

"Failure" is a dirty word

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:41:00 -0500

but that’s because we don’t see it as a way station on the path to success.

- In his 2005 book, “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America,” the historian Scott Sandage offers an account of 19th-century economic hardships and the pitiable archetype they gave birth to: the dismal “plodder,” the man who was a “failure.” To make the loser feel even worse about himself, his glorious antithesis — the striver, the up-and-comer — was being defined at the same time. Writers promoting the secrets of success in the rough game of industrial capitalism rendered a verdict on economic failure that still endures: it’s never an accident. The success people have is determined by who they are — or rather, by who they aren’t — and not by circumstances. More Than a Numbers Game, By Walter Kirn, NY Times Magazine, 10 May2009

hiten: Slides from my talk at Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:36:58 -0500

hiten:

Slides from my talk at Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s Customer and Business Development MBA Class at Berkeley - Metrics for Startup Success and Failure

"Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:41:50 -0500

“Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

- Henry Ford (via hiten)

hiten:ianmain:The 22 minute meeting « Scott Berkun

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:09:34 -0500

hiten:ianmain:The 22 minute meeting « Scott Berkun

The Psychology of the Taboo Tradeoff: Surprising insights into “sacred values” and what they mean for negotiation (Scientific American)

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:05:26 -0500

The Psychology of the Taboo Tradeoff: Surprising insights into “sacred values” and what they mean for negotiation (Scientific American):

psychotherapy:

What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals…

Be Sad and Succeed

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:56:25 -0500

Be Sad and Succeed:

psychotherapy:

Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face—instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. Melancholy might just help you hit peak performance, reports Joseph Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales, in the journal Australasian Science. Forgas reviewed several of his studies in which researchers induced either a good or bad mood in volunteers. Each study found that people in a bad mood performed tasks better than those in a good mood. Grumpy people paid closer attention to details, showed less gullibility, were less prone to errors of judgment and formed higher-quality, persuasive arguments than their happy counterparts. One study even supports the notion that those who show signs of either fear, anger, disgust or sadness—the four basic negative emotions—achieve stronger eyewitness recall while virtually eliminating the effect of misinformation…

"The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence;..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:36:04 -0500

“The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it’s a topic like education. It’s that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don’t go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don’t go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.”

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter

"If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:24:00 -0500

“If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time.”

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter

"There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:22:00 -0500

“There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.”

- TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY- David Gelernter

"Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it...."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:37:54 -0500

“Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people’s code.”

- Edge: TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY By David Gelernter (via interestingsnippets)

"The devil is in the defaults."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:08:33 -0500

“The devil is in the defaults.”

- (via davemorin)

rahmin: Usability alone does not create great webservices…

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:01:44 -0500

rahmin:

Usability alone does not create great webservices…