Fulcra

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→ The basic principle for any incentive scheme is this: can you measure everything that matters? If you can’t, then high-powered financial incentives will simply produce short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness or outright fraud Jul 19, 2017 highlights The basic principle for any incentive scheme is this: can you measure everything that matters? If you can’t, then high-powered financial incentives will simply produce short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness or outright fraud. If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability — https://svpow.com/2017/03/17/every-attempt-to-manage-academia-makes-it-worse/

→ And yet we persist in doing idiot things that can only possibly have this result: Jul 18, 2017 highlights

And yet we persist in doing idiot things that can only possibly have this result:

Assessing school-teachers on the improvement their kids show in tests between the start and end of the year (which obviously results in their doing all they can depress the start-of-year tests).
Assessing researchers by the number of their papers (which can only result in slicing into minimal publishable units).
Assessing them — heaven help us — on the impact factors of the journals their papers appear in (which feeds the brand-name fetish that is crippling scholarly communication).
Assessing researchers on whether their experiments are “successful”, i.e. whether they find statistically significant results (which inevitably results in p-hacking and HARKing).

— https://svpow.com/2017/03/17/every-attempt-to-manage-academia-makes-it-worse/

→ No one has ever asked for release from research. Jul 18, 2017 highlights & Learning

”In universities, this requires a rebalancing from the current emphasis on research to teaching. (A dean at one of Ontario’s more highly ranked universities told me recently that virtually every day there is a request to grant teaching release to a professor, yet no one has ever asked for release from research.)” — http://blog-en.heqco.ca/2017/07/harvey-p-weingarten-the-evolution-of-learning-outcomes-now-comes-the-exciting-part/

→ 80/15/5 Jul 15, 2017 highlights 80/15/5. Spend 80% of your time on low-risk/reasonable-payoff work. Spend 15% of your time on related high-risk/high-payoff work. Spend 5% of your time on things that tickle you, regardless of payoff. Teach the next generation to do your 80% job. By the time someone is ready to take over, one of your 15% experiments (or, less frequently, one of your 5% experiments) will have paid off and will become your new 80%. Repeat — Mastering Programming

→ The theme here is scaling your brain Jul 12, 2017 highlights & Learns The theme here is scaling your brain. The journeyman learns to solve bigger problems by solving more problems at once. The master learns to solve even bigger problems than that by solving fewer problems at once. Part of the wisdom is subdividing so that integrating the separate solutions will be a smaller problem than just solving them together. — Mastering Programming

→ The corollary to this is to never solve the problem at the wrong level Jul 12, 2017 highlights & Design The corollary to this is to never solve the problem at the wrong level. It’s always a recipe for pain when you, say, have a data issue and you decide you’ll solve it with some clever code. Or perhaps you have a fundamental design problem, but maybe you can just tweak the data… — Mastering Programming | Hacker News

→ Here is one thing I gained from this Analysis. Jul 11, 2017 highlights & Design

Here is one thing I gained from this Analysis. At times we encounter ‘a Code problem’ partly caused by ′ a workflow problem’ and partly caused by ‘a Design problem’ .

We may do a CODE patch fix for time being (ex. production bug), but having it documented as ‘40% Workflow problem, 60% Design problem’ will help to consolidate all these ‘contributing percentages’ to come up with permanent fixes at a Later time.

— Mastering Programming Hacker News

→ I would call this as The hierarchy of ‘Troubleshooting Software Problems’ ( as a parallel to Maslow’s hierarchy of NEEDS) Jul 11, 2017 highlights I would call this as The hierarchy of ‘Troubleshooting Software Problems’ ( as a parallel to Maslow’s hierarchy of NEEDS). In order to fix a problem at certain Level, you have to go to ‘Bottom Most’ layer which is ROOT cause of the problem. — Mastering Programming | Hacker News

Carleton University and Shopify’s bachelor of computer science program is a great example of a work-integrated education initiative to foster homegrown talent Jul 9, 2017 tech & Education Innovation must involve all Canadians to succeed ▵ →

Multiple scales. Jul 9, 2017 tech, Design & Leadership Move between scales freely. Maybe this is a design problem, not a testing problem. Maybe it is a people problem, not a technology ▵ →

How can Canada expect to retain its engineers if the leadership in ideas takes place outside Canada? Jul 9, 2017 tech This is why three companies came together ▵ →

→ innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. Jul 8, 2017 highlights & Innovation

innovation doesn’t happen in isolation.

Great ideas come alive when groups of passionate people come together to inspire, support and collaborate. From Stockholm and Tel Aviv to Seoul and Berlin, and of course, Silicon Valley — we have seen, time and time again, the benefits that such rich ecosystems bring entrepreneurs.

— Innovation must involve all Canadians to succeed

→ YOU ARE NOT SAFE May 30, 2017 highlights

YOU ARE NOT SAFE

I, Ryan Ray, released the MacMillan Utility source code. I acted alone. No one helped me, and no one told me to do it. I did this because ‘security’ is a myth. Contrary to what you might have heard, my friends, you are not safe.

Safety is a story. It’s something we teach our children so they can sleep at night, but we know it’s not real.

Beware, baffled humans. Beware of false prophets who will sell you a fake future, of bad teachers, corrupt leaders and dirty corporations. Beware of cops and robbers… the kind that rob your dreams. But most of all, beware of each other, because everything’s about to change.

The world is going to crack wide open. There’s something on the horizon. A massive connectivity. The barriers between us will disappear, and we’re not ready.

We’ll hurt each other in new ways. We’ll sell and be sold. We’ll expose our most tender selves, only to be mocked and destroyed. We’ll be so vulnerable, and we’ll pay the price. We won’t be able to pretend that we can protect ourselves anymore.

It’s a huge danger, a gigantic risk, but it’s worth it. If only we can learn to take care of each other. Then this awesome, destructive new connection won’t isolate us. It won’t leave us in the end so… totally alone.

— Thanks to Redditor VERYstuck for capturing this.

→ As theory, the stack remains mostly a speculative exercise: What if we imagined the whole world as software? And as a popular term, it risks becoming an empty buzzword, used to refer to any collection, pile or system of different things May 10, 2017 highlights As theory, the stack remains mostly a speculative exercise: What if we imagined the whole world as software? And as a popular term, it risks becoming an empty buzzword, used to refer to any collection, pile or system of different things. (What’s your dental care stack? Your spiritual stack?) But if tech start-ups continue to broaden their ambitions and challenge new industries — if, as the venture-capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz likes to say, “software is eating the world” — then the logic of the stack can’t be trailing far behind, ready to remake more and more of our economy and our culture in its image. It will also, of course, be subject to the warning with which Daugman ended his 1990 essay. “We should remember,” he wrote, “that the enthusiastically embraced metaphors of each ‘new era’ can become, like their predecessors, as much the prison house of thought as they first appeared to represent its liberation.” — New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

→ In a 2016 book, “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty,” the professor and design theorist Benjamin Bratton sets out to, in his words, propose a “specific model for the design of political geography tuned to this era of planetary-scale computation,” by drawing on the “multilayered structure of software, hardware and network ‘stacks’ that arrange different technologies vertically within a modular, interdependent order May 9, 2017 highlights & Design In a 2016 book, “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty,” the professor and design theorist Benjamin Bratton sets out to, in his words, propose a “specific model for the design of political geography tuned to this era of planetary-scale computation,” by drawing on the “multilayered structure of software, hardware and network ‘stacks’ that arrange different technologies vertically within a modular, interdependent order.” In other words, Bratton sees the world around us as one big emerging technological stack. In his telling, the six-layer stack we inhabit is complex, fluid and vertigo-inducing: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. It is also, he suggests, extremely powerful, with the potential to undermine and replace our current conceptions of, among other things, the sovereign state — ushering us into a world blown apart and reassembled by software — New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

→ Ten years before that, you wouldn’t have been asked about your stack at all — though an obnoxious time traveler from the Silicon Valley of 2017 might insist that a phone system, a parcel service and credit-card companies composed, more or less, a mail-order stack May 7, 2017 highlights Ten years before that, you wouldn’t have been asked about your stack at all — though an obnoxious time traveler from the Silicon Valley of 2017 might insist that a phone system, a parcel service and credit-card companies composed, more or less, a mail-order stack. — New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

→ The stack isn’t just a handy concept for visualizing how technology works May 6, 2017 highlights The stack isn’t just a handy concept for visualizing how technology works. For many companies, the organizing logic of the software stack becomes inseparable from the logic of the business itself. The system that powers Snapchat, for instance, sits on top of App Engine, a service owned by Google; to the extent that Snapchat even exists as a service, it is as a stack of different elements. — New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

→ In 1990, when computers were still merely in the process of taking over the world, John Daugman, a computer scientist and researcher at Harvard University, published an article titled “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory,” noting a habit he had observed among his peers Apr 24, 2017 highlights In 1990, when computers were still merely in the process of taking over the world, John Daugman, a computer scientist and researcher at Harvard University, published an article titled “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory,” noting a habit he had observed among his peers. “Invariably,” he wrote, “the explanatory metaphors of a given era incorporate the devices and the spectacles of the day.” In other words: We describe everything as if it were technology — New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?

→ Decision rules of this sort are fast, in that decisions can be made quickly, without a computer; frugal, in that they require only limited information to reach a decision; and clear, in that they expose the grounds on which decisions are made Apr 23, 2017 highlights

Leadership is… Feb 7, 2017 systems sketching, systemics & leadership

Lessons learned from Memorial Student Leadership Conference (MSLC) 2017. These thoughts were spurred by Director of Student Life Dr. Jennie Massey’s ▵ →