Month: August 2008
Google Maps Ranking
a third party perspective on our ranking
Felicia Day on GTD
Felicia Day: I have been a Lifehacker addict for years, in fact, some of Vork’s (from the Guild) anal-retentive attitude is inspired by the site 🙂 I have tried every method imaginable to organize myself, to varying degrees of success, and I find that Remember the Milk and good old-fashioned daily post-it notes or my “Things to Do” notepads are the best way to get a handle on everyday tasks. And ruthless tagging of emails and bookmarks through del.icio.us saves me a lot of time and hassle.
felicia day++
Diplopedia
The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture”.
Avi Bar-Zeev joins VE
In this current job search, one of the big companies actually surprised and impressed me, not only in their offer, but throughout the process, the people and professionalism. The 2 days of on-site interviews weren’t as much about testing my coding skills as they were about vision, work styles, and that ever-elusive “fit.” Turns out, I actually had fun. And in the end, my bosses-to-be offered exactly the kind of role I wanted with the freedom to define it myself — new, challenging, and some potentially very big wins on the horizon, straddling both R&D and productization with the goal of adding value wherever I can Avi has contributed in big ways to some pretty well known software projects like Keyhole and Second Life. I’m looking forward to seeing what he sinks his teeth into next.
they need all the help they can get.
Hand Drawn Map Association
The Hand Drawn Map Association is a website and physical archive founded to collect directional maps people draw for one another. Over time, it has grown to include a wide variety of maps, diagrams, and other drawings documenting our experiences of places both real and imagined. To date, the association has collected over 400 digital assets and more than 350 works on paper.
Cell-Sorting Implants
1 usage of automation would be high-throughput screening of cancer cells in vivo. “If you can input devices and look for circulating tumor cells in blood cells, you can even think about screening out those tumor cells out. You can potentially use this as a way of slowing the spread cancers.”
implantable soon
Investing In Infrastructure
is this the next bubble (cf the concrete jungle in japan) or “the new deal“?
Emerging Entrepreneurship
Endeavor is a non-profit group based in New York dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Endeavor’s entrepreneurs—who collectively now control companies with combined revenues of $2.4b and 91k employees, earning on average 10x the minimum wage in their country—rarely say they would not have succeeded without Endeavor. But they all believe they got bigger much sooner thanks to its endorsement and support. Endeavor has “created islands of hope”. Now it must find ways to “change continents, not just little islands.” This has been recognized by Endeavor’s global board, which recently adopted an ambitious plan to expand to 25 countries by 2015. Endeavor is confident that it now knows how to adapt its model to new countries, having learnt from early stumbles in Chile, South Africa and Turkey. Fadi Ghandour, the Jordanian boss of Aramex, a logistics firm, believes there is much potential in the Arab world, which is full of young would-be entrepreneurs who have “discovered the new thing, that it pays to have an idea, not rely on land or investing.”
endeavor.org gets a nice write up.
Disease Theory of Religion
religious diversity causes people to keep themselves to themselves, and thus makes it harder for them to catch germs from infidels.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 