Welcome to the 'weisure' lifestyle. (CNN) -- The line dividing work and leisure time is blurring right before our eyes, says one expert, and it's creating a phenomenon called "weisure time. " English cricket player Geraint Jones enjoys a "weisure" moment during an Australian fishing trip in 2006. Many who haven't already abandoned the 9-to-5 workday for the 24-7 life of weisure probably will do so soon, according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who coined the word. It's the next step in the evolving work-life culture.
"Increasingly, it's not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun," be it "in an office or at home or out in the street," Conley said. Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous, he says, as "all of these worlds that were once very distinct are now blurring together. " Conley used the 1950s as a point of reference. "Back then, there were certain rules, such as 'don't do business with friends, and keep those spheres separate.' What happened? 'The creative class' What I’m reading: Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg | Andrew Chen (@a.
Followup to Ning’s Viral Loop article I was recently sent a copy of Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg, which just came out. I was first introduced to Adam in early 2008, when Marc Andreessen wrote us both while Adam was starting to write an article about Ning and their viral loops. That article was ultimately published in April 2008 as Ning’s Infinite Ambition, which you should read if you haven’t. After the article, Adam subsequently spent more time researching the topic, ultimately resulting in the book. I finished it and wanted to share a high-level summary and also talk through some points that the book brings up. Summary The book mostly covers a series of case studies from both offline and online companies. Offline: Tupperware, Ponzi schemesAndreessen’s companies: Mosaic/Netscape, and NingBubble era companies: Hotmail, eBay, PayPal, HotOrNotWeb 2.0 startups: Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, Tribe, TaggedWidgets and apps, etc: Facebook, Slide, RockYou, Zynga Who am I missing?
Why experts are morons: a recipe for academic success « Finite A. This morning there was quite a bit of tweeting, back and forth, about this article and exactly how stupid it is. “If our attention span constricts to the point where we can only take information in 140-character sentences, then that doesn’t bode too well for our future,” said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University’s Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University. Yup, you read that right. Some guy with a Ph.D. who works at one of the best universities in the world (and who’s sufficiently good at his job that they made him director of a clinic) is talking — to all appearances quite seriously — about the idea that the human attention span might shrink to the length of a tweet. In other news, if the world were made of custard, global warming might lead to major dessertification, if we could just just bake an apple crumble big enough.
Maybe there’s a good explanation. Here’s my ill-conceived, half-baked thesis for the day: experts are morons. Why? Like this: When Quants Attack: Why Mathematical Mayhem is for the Birds | A. Totally Flocked by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + No Friend of Formula Marketing “… fear of the unknown and our desire for certainty lead us to throw ourselves into the arms of perceived ‘experts.’ … We trust quantitatively flavored constructs to escort us away from the gloomy reality of unmeasurable uncertainty.” — Pablo Triana, “Lecturing Birds on Flying” Quick quiz: What’s sillier than trying to predict human behavior?
That longer, sillier answer is the premise of Pablo Triana’s new book, “Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Markets?” Rant on, my brother! I don’t know enough finance to verify Triana’s assertions, but a compelling article in Wired explains why the much vaunted Gaussian copula model failed miserably: “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street.” What I can talk about is marketing, which has also been infiltrated by mathematical delusions. The Unholy Reign of Formula Marketing Bass Model of Confusion Pretty, isn’t it? VISIONS AND FRAMEWORKS IN MACROECONOMICS. Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet C.
Technology and the social » Blog Archive » Thesis - Social Bookm. Francisco Gutierrez & Unified Theory of Le. I was recently thinking about the commonalities between all systems that can learn. Neural networks learn by updating the strength of the connections between neurons. Groups of people and societies in general learn by leveraging the power of markets. Species learn through natural selection and evolution. The Page Rank algorithm that Google uses to analyze the links between all pages on the web learns by updating the weight of each page based on the pages that link to it. What do all these systems have in common? I will try to answer that question in this post. I first saw the connection between neural networks and markets when I was thinking about prediction markets. Now let's look at a market. From the previous paragraphs we can see how neural nets and markets are alike. We can now start to see some of the commonalities: 1) Both of these learning systems have a predicted signal and an actual signal, their objective is to make the predicted sinal equal to the actual signal.
Like this: Bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothi. Critticall home page. Cooking pot markets: an economic model for the trade in free goo.