Here is a must-watch video from Eli Pariser discussing some of the themes from his new book The Filter Bubble (reviewed well here by Cory Doctorow). It’s only 9 minutes, and it is well worth your time: Pariser’s main point is that the primary filters on the internet these days are algorithmic, and that these […]
To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are: A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas. Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew […]
One of the weird trends in spam comments now is that through services like mechanical turk people are getting paid to make marginally relevant comments that link back to some spammy site. This makes getting rid of spam a lot harder. However, while I was running through a recent batch, I ran across a comment […]
Malcolm Gladwell retells the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the latest issue of the New Yorker (it’s readable behind a paywall here). The story of PARC is fascinating, and Gladwell provides a nice twist to it. One of the main threads in the story concerns their invention of the laser printer. […]
The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and it doesn’t look like we expect it to When scientists first started talking about Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the discussion centred around how to best create AI that would think like people do. This view of AI has dominated […]
If you want to get better at innovation, you have start innovating more. That probably sounds obvious, but in practice, not all that many people do it. I was reminded of this by an interesting post by John Gruber discussing Apple’s transition to cloud computing. It includes this section: Jason Fried had a good cover […]
One question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?” The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true. Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s […]
I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the […]
What happens when the people that are supposed to be creative and innovative in your organisation are neither? I ran across an interesting quote from one of the people interviewed in the new book Herding Cats: Being Advice to Aspiring Academic and Research Leaders by Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies: The biggest thing that I […]