Evgeny Morozov: The Naked And The TED
The new pamphlet—it would be too strong, and not only quantitatively, to call it a book—by Parag and Ayesha Khanna, the techno-babbling power couple, gallops through so many esoteric themes and irrelevant factoids (did you know that “fifty-eight percent of millennials would rather give up their sense of smell than their mobile phone”?) that one might forgive the authors for never properly attending to their grandest, most persuasive, and almost certainly inadvertent argument. Only the rare reader would finish this piece of digito-futuristic nonsense unconvinced that technology is—to borrow a term of art from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt—bullshit. No, not technology itself; just much of today’s discourse about technology, of which this little e-book is a succinct and mind-numbing example. At least TED Books—the publishing outlet of the hot and overheated TED Conference, which brought this hidden gem to the wider public—did not kill any trees in the publishing process.
amazon
Simple Rules for a Complex World
Artwork: Nuala O’Donovan, Pinecone Heart, 2008, porcelain, unglazed, 27 x 22 x 24 cm Photography: Sylvain Deleu A decade ago, in the course of studying why certain high-tech companies thrived during the internet boom, we discovered something that surprised us: To shape their high-level strategies, companies like Intel and Cisco relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. This was true even though they were in extraordinarily complex, challenging, and fast-moving industries. The rules were not only simple, we found, but quite specific. We reported our findings in HBR (“Strategy as Simple Rules,” January 2001). Simple Rules in Action The story of América Latina Logística (ALL) illustrates how simple rules can help companies shape strategy in an uncertain environment. In the late 1990s the government of Brazil privatized the country’s freight lines. ALL was spun off from the Brazilian railway authority in 1997 to manage one of the country’s eight freight lines.
Honeydew (secretion)
Honeydew puddle under a tree Honeydew drops on leaves Notice the 'bubbles' of honeydew on five of the aphids pictured. Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids and some scale insects as they feed on plant sap. Honeydew is collected by certain species of birds, wasps, stingless bees[3] and honey bees, which process it into a dark, strong honey (honeydew honey). Ants may collect, or "milk," honeydew directly from aphids and other honeydew producers, which benefit from their presence due to their driving away predators such as lady beetles or parasitic wasps - see Crematogaster peringueyi. In Madagascar, some gecko species in the genera Phelsuma and Lygodactylus are known to approach Flatid plant-hoppers on tree-trunks from below and induce them to excrete honeydew by head nodding behaviour. In Norse mythology, dew falls from the ash tree Yggdrasil to the earth, and according to the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, "this is what people call honeydew and from it bees feed
Why Many CEOs Can't Build Legacies Anymore - Thomas J. Saporito
by Thomas J. Saporito | 11:00 AM August 9, 2012 The success criteria for today’s corporate leaders are shifting. Executives no longer have the time necessary to develop the leadership skills for long-term success. As this CEO “high-wire” gets even higher and grows even more tenuous, corporate leaders are increasingly seeking roles outside of the public eye, or taking their companies private. 1. While great builders are certainly not obsolete (think Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway), the former leaders we often associate with building great corporate legacies — CEOs like Lee Iacocca of Chrysler or Andy Grove of Intel — are far and few between in today’s marketplace. 2. Although it has been repeatedly proven that inside hires outperform outside hires, shareholder pressure and the allure of the turnaround expert mean that companies often make hasty succession decisions that undervalue “fit.”
Afídio
Origem: Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre. A joaninha é um dos seus principais predadores2 . Existem por todo o mundo, embora a maioria prefira as regiões temperadas2 . São mais frequentes em regiões temperadas, onde também existem maior diversidade de espécies, ao contrário do que acontece com outros grupos taxonómicos de seres, que costumam apresentar maior biodiversidade em zonas tropicais3 . Podem migrar por grandes distâncias, principalmente através de dispersão passiva, levados pelo vento. Por exemplo, acredita-se que o piolho-da-alface (Nasonovia ribisnigri)4 ter-se-á dispersado a partir da Nova Zelândia para a Tasmânia desta forma.5 A sua dispersão a nível global deve-se também ao transporte, por parte de humanos, de materiais vegetais infectados. Taxonomia[editar | editar código-fonte] Os afídeos pertencem à superfamília Aphidoidea na divisão homóptera da ordem Hemiptera. Relação com filoxerídeos e adelgídeos[editar | editar código-fonte] Anatomia[editar | editar código-fonte]
Demonstrate Your Credibility as a Leader - HBR Tip
The Checklist Manifesto « Atul Gawande
Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world–and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking. Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande’s book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions.
