File this under “no really, your teachers aren’t just trying to be mean”:
If you’re working with a startup, odds are you’re wearing a half-dozen hats and doing too much with too little. Often, this means that founders are writing their own website copy, press releases and blog posts. Too often, that results in grammatical errors that reflect poorly on the startup.
Developers may not care, but other folks do.
12 Deadly Grammatical Errors Startups Must Avoid from Joe Brockmeier at ReadWriteStart.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on May 1, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/05/01/yes-students-grammar-does-matter/
Well, there you go. According to the New York Post, it looks like Hulu is going to be switching over to a new revenue system. The site, owned by News Corp., Disney, Comcast and Providence, has used an ad and subscription supported model that enabled people to watch cable and network shows without subscribing to cable. The problem is, people are leaving cable. So, Hulu is going change to an “authentication model” that will require you to enter your cable subscriber number before you watch. No cable, no Hulu.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/creative-industries/
A while back, I read Buckminster Fuller’s little 1962 book Education Automation. It’s a collection of presentations that he gave to scholars and administrators at Southern Illinois University about the future of education. It is pretty interesting, and includes a neat little prediction about a spherical, visual data stream machine that sounds a lot like the internet. Fuller had high hopes for the way we could innovate education using science. But his approach didn’t take off, perhaps because it reads like a treatise on widget production instead of human education.
Of course, the education automation dreams of yesteryear are still around. Unfortunately, some of today’s education technology pundits seem to be having as hard a time as Fuller understanding the thing they want to transform.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/being-out-of-touch-hurts-your-credibility-a-note-about-education-tech-coverage/
From President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner,
And plenty of journalists are here tonight. I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the Huffington Post on their Pulitzer Prize. (Applause.) You deserve it, Arianna. There’s no one else out there linking to the kinds of hard-hitting journalism that HuffPo is linking to every single day. (Laughter and applause.) Give them a round of applause. And you don’t pay them — it’s a great business model. (Laughter.)
When the President of the United States starts giving you crap about your strategy, you know something is wrong.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/all-the-awards-in-the-world-cant/
As a followup to the post about data, ReadWriteWeb had an article on Thursday by Jon Mitchell entitled “Here Are 20 Companies Who Sell Your Data (& How To Stop Them)”. Good overview information and some solid suggestions for those who want to avoid being a tool.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 28, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/28/solutions/
People who like to slag on Apple regularly complain about their use of the term “magical” to describe the iPad. For instance:
I’ll tell you what is magical. Harry Potter, unicorns and sawing women in half are magical. Making a computer or a bloody Mac takes no magic at all, it takes silicon and factories, and workers, and sweat, and designers, and marketing people.
Seems to me that Apple doesn’t mean that kind of magic. Rather, Apple is referencing Arthur C. Clarke’s widely known third law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So, Apple is really making a claim about how advanced their tech is, not about its supernatural powers. Actually, they probably meant it the way Gregory Benford restated it in Foundations End:
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
FWIW, it’s not such a jump to substitute “religion” for “magic”. . .
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 27, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/27/on-the-meaning-of-magic/
Rewiring Virtue 