Common Traits of A-Players. An unscientific observation of what A-Players have in common We often talk about this elusive "A-Player" – a person that everyone wants to hire but someone people can rarely find. In this article we'll attempt to discuss how to spot these people and see what they have in common. A few points up-front: 1. It is almost impossible to determine if someone is an A-Player until you've worked with them for 1-2 months.
The A-Player janitor When people think of an A-Player, they often think the person had have gone to Harvard. Each position in your company can have an A-Player. As a hiring manager, your goal is to fill each position with the very best person in that position. Relentlessly Resourceful Paul Graham has written that great entrepreneurs are "relentlessly resourceful". Great people are consistently finding ways to be great. Rules Encourage Mediocrity A-Players like to be creative. My guess is that you won't find an A-Player teacher that will agree to teach to a test. Getting Back to People. Disintermediated Education- Sonia Riahi's Blog. Nov 10th 09 Posted by Sonia Riahi in Featured Articles, TalentBridge, Thoughts & Opinions Last Friday Manu Sharma came in and gave us a review of Richard Florida’s talk in Ottawa. Manu came with high praise for Richard Florida as a speaker and a starter of thoughtful and controversial conversation, which is high praise coming from Manu as he is not easily impressed.
One of the points that hit home from Florida’s talk was that research universities as we know them today will become disintermediated. dis·in·ter·me·di·a·tion (d s- n t r-m d – sh n). n. “Disintermediation is giving the user or the consumer direct access to information that otherwise would require a mediator, such as a salesperson, a librarian, or a lawyer. While Florida was speaking mainly of research institutions, a similar point for post graduate education was made by Michael Wesch, an award winning professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas state university. The Blog » Blog Archive » A New Kid’s Perspective on Digg’s Engi.
We’re happy to report we have released an update to the Digg iOS app with full iOS 7 support, including a couple of interesting new features: Dynamic Type and Background App Refresh. We’re super excited about this release, as it brings the app up to date with the latest technology Apple has incorporated into iOS. With Dynamic Type, you can set your text size preference once in iOS Settings, then watch it take effect across all of your favorite apps. So, if you crave teeny tiny text or want more content on your screen, we can help you. On the other hand, if you prefer huge text or want to read Digg on the other side of the room, we can help you there as well. Background App Refresh lets iOS determine the best time for Digg to update with the latest content. You may also notice a few iOS 7-related design flourishes, such as the status bar blending in with the Digg interface or the toolbar at the bottom of articles adopting the semi-transparent blur effect.
iOS 7 is out now! Much love, Russian Math, the Poincare Conjecture and Perelman. The returns to entrepreneurship. I was at dinner the other night with a group of entrepreneurs. One told the story of a 27-year-old whiz kid whose company will likely exit for $500M – $1B – the business now being less than two years old. You can imagine the effect that this had on the brilliant, hardworking 35+ entrepreneurs in the group, who have had their share of hits, but not at that magnitude and not that quickly. These stories are getting more commonplace. It seems that the entrepreneurs who “hit” these days are doing it more quickly, making more money, and doing it at a younger age. Back in the 70s, it took a decade plus to build a company and $10M, even in today’s dollars, was a big victory for an individual.
Up until the late 90s dot-com boom, even though these stories existed, they were less common and took longer. The storyteller explained that this 27-year-old is more brilliant and more hard-working than the previous entrepreneurs he’s seen. That can’t be it. But the upside hasn’t gone down. Journal of Eivind Uggedal: NoSQL East 2009 - Summary of Day 1. An entry from 2009-10-29 in the Journal. After using a non-relational database while creating was it up? I've learned first hand that MySQL or PostgreSQL isn't always the best solution. Since was it up? Is a web monitoring service it needs to be distributed to minimize the likelihood of downtime. Tokyo Tyrant was therefore used with a master to master replication setup so that write operations still could be carried out if one node went down. But Tokyo Tyrant isn't the only database solution with a distributed nature for handling scaling or high availability demands.
Cambrian Explosion--John Willis John have done work on Ubuntu One which is Euqalyptus based. NoSQL was a great name to get the conversation started. John started with big data in the 70s when he worked on a backup system with a IBM 3850 which had 500GB of data. How did we get to todays world where big data is getting easier and cheaper than yesterday? Voldemort--Geir Magnusson--Gilt Groupe The client API is simply: Andrew Lih » Blog Archive » Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia. Blog Archive » Site or network? Own or join? I think it’s wonderful that The New York Times did a deal to bring Freakonomics under its wing — hosting it, selling ads on it, promoting it, but not buying it or hiring its creators and not treating it like so much freelance fodder to go through the Times’ editing mill.
That’s new. This follows my somewhat similar deal at PrezVid with the Washington Post and another big-media outlet to be named shortly, in which they also leave PrezVid as an independent entity (in this case, we keep our site and URL) but take up some of the content onto their sites. What I like about this is that we see big-media services starting to act like members of networks. They are beginning to realize that they can’t — and don’t want to — do everything themselves. But so long as these services still want to serve content from their own sites, there will be issues. And this leads me to suggest that syndication is still not the best relationship for big services and the new independent players.
WWGD. The dilemma: Hyperlocal news will open the floodgates of ad reve. When Understanding means Rewriting. If you ask a software developer what they spend their time doing, they'll tell you that they spend most of their time writing code. However, if you actually observe what software developers spend their time doing, you'll find that they spend most of their time trying to understand code: Peter Hallam explains: Why is 5x more time spent modifying code than writing new code? New code becomes old code almost instantly. I think the way most developers "understand" code is to rewrite it. What I cannot create, I do not understand. It's not that developers want to rewrite everything; it's that very few developers are smart enough to understand code without rewriting it.
Understanding someone else's code-- really comprehending how it all fits together-- takes a herculean amount of mental effort. Would Martians wishing to understand the rules of the World of Warcraft (WoW) be better off trying to read its source code or watching video of millions of hours of screen capture? Where Are All the Open Source Billionaires? Hugh MacLeod asks, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires? If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner stuff? I already know what Microsoft's detractors will say: "There's no reason whatsoever. $40 billion per year is totally wasted. " This, however is not a very satisfying answer, simply because it doesn't quite ring true. Otherwise there'd be a lot more famous Open Source billionaires out there, being written up in Forbes Magazine or wherever.
I can immediately think of one reason there aren't any open-source billionaires: Most competition for open source software comes from other open source software. Rajesh Setty responded to Hugh's question with a few additional reasons why it's difficult for open source businesses to make money: If open source is license free, the costs have to be low to work with open source.
The lack of open source software billionaires is by design. But there is a silver lining. The Hazards of Truth-Telling | The Foundation for Economic Educa. Cho Seung-Hui's Plays - News Bloggers. Cho Seung-Hui's Plays - News Bloggers.
Evolution and Religion - Darwin’s God - Robin Marantz Henig - Ne. Wikipedia (A) ROOT /Markets for your attention. ROOT is fascinating. ROOT is creating a vault and a market for your attention metadata. Get some context from CEO Seth Goldstein’s talk at ETech. The interface looks like Ajax-y Bloomberg, which shouldn’t be surprising. Goldstein’s blog tagline says it all: “Somewhere between Wall Street and Madison Avenue lies the future of both.”
Doc Searls added a new wrinkle in the attention economy discussion by looking for intention. ROOT probably couldn’t exist without AttentionTrust.org, which acts as a nonprofit organization to create trust around this new marketplace: Our PrinciplesWhen you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This vault of attention data appears at first glance to raise all sorts of privacy red flags that would make it ripe for abuse. It looks like ROOT is the first serious attempt at creating a market for attention that can support such a new marketing model. Technorati Tags: Attention, Web2.0.