Abraham Shafi's Blog

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

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

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…

hiten:Unconventional Marketing (via David Armano)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:26:30 -0500

hiten:Unconventional Marketing (via David Armano)

"Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I’ll understand."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:41:55 -0500

“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.”

- Native American proverb (via lisapark) (via quote-book) (via hiten) (via kareem)

"Does it still make sense for countless teachers to rewrite the same essential lecture about, say,..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:46:00 -0500

“Does it still make sense for countless teachers to rewrite the same essential lecture about, say, capillary action? Used to be, they had to. But not now, not since open curricula and YouTube. Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.”

- TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine (via rahmin)

"We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:26:24 -0500

“We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.”

- TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine (via kareem)

"Pandora’s success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:48:34 -0500

“Pandora’s success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense loyalty from users and a willingness to shift directions — from business to consumer, from subscription to free, from computer to mobile — when its fortunes flagged.”

- How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success - NYTimes.com (via brianoberkirch) (via mikehudack) (via infoneer-pulse)

rafer:nickdouglas:via Reddit Rafer sez:Live for the moment;...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:48:17 -0500

rafer:nickdouglas:via Reddit

Rafer sez:
Live for the moment; it’s all you’ve got.

Sun flower seed burger with avocado at Alive in sf

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:39:49 -0500

Sun flower seed burger with avocado at Alive in sf

Red curry avocado wrap at Alive in San Francisco

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:30:29 -0500

Red curry avocado wrap at Alive in San Francisco

infoneer-pulse:(via conradlisco)

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:05:58 -0500

infoneer-pulse:(via conradlisco)