goelp – wastedmonkeys

Procrastination: Thinking about thinking

goelp — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:30:28 +0000

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

Read this article: Procrastination [You are not so smart]

The ‘Busy’ Trap

goelp — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:42:42 +0000

“I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know… Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.”

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. – Sir Arthur C. Clarke”

Read the article: The ‘Busy’ Trap [New york Times]

What do people look for in employers?

goelp — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:31:45 +0000

Take or view the survey on LinkedIn

Google on its transparency and not-so-secret formula

goelp — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:39:35 +0000

Recently the European Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints. Part of the complaint alleges that Google operates without sufficient transparency into how and why web sites rank in our search results. The notion that Google isn’t transparent is tough for me to swallow. Google has set the standard in how we communicate with web site publishers. Let me tell you about some of the ways we explain to sites how we rank them and why.

One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google’s scoring has always been PageRank. That “secret ingredient” is hardly a secret. Here it is. That early paper not only gave the formula for PageRank, but mentioned many of the other signals in Google’s ranking, including anchor text, the location of words within documents, the relative proximity of query words in a document, the size and type of fonts used, the raw HTML of each page, and capitalization of words. Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the “secret formulas” for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses. Some of these papers have spurred not only open-source projects but entire in their own right.

Read the article: European Public Policy Blog: Google, transparency and our not-so-secret formula

The Millenials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

goelp — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:47:52 +0000

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials – the American teens and twenty-somethings currently making the passage into adulthood – have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and receptive to new ideas and ways of living. [pewsocialtrends.org]

Comment: Personally, I think being around 75% Millenial is good any above that may actually be deteriorating, but that’s just a perspective, take the quiz yourself to know how ‘Millenial’ you are.

Read the article: Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next – Pew Research Center

Google’s Nexus One Mobile Phone Launched

goelp — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:49:37 +0000

Nexus One: “Web meets phone”

‘Younger wife’ for marital bliss

goelp — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:56:39 +0000

The secret to a happy marriage is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than the man, say Bath University (UK) experts.

The story lacks to report the reasons why this is so. Do you think its because it is believed that women are, in general, more mature than same aged men? But then why smarter AND younger?

Read the article: ‘Younger wife’ for marital bliss (BBC)

Serious Taction: Twitter became a legal instrument

goelp — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:11:36 +0000

Britain’s High Court ordered its first injunction via Twitter on Thursday, saying the social website and micro-blogging service was the best way to reach an anonymous Tweeter who had been impersonating someone.

Read the article: UK court orders writ to be served via Twitter | Reuters

The Cone of Learning

goelp — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:40:55 +0000

Something very interesting, slightly questionable, but beautifully summarises how different ways of learning can affect retention of information. Taken from Robert Kiyosaki‘s book ‘Financial IQ’, the diagram is inspired by but a highly convoluted version of the second graph below known as the ‘Cone of Experience’ originally conceived by Edgar Dale in 1969 (notice that it did not have any numbers).

The Cone Of Learning (source Financial IQ by Robert Kiyosaki)

‘Cone of Experience’ originally conceived by Edgar Dale:

Original Cone of Experience Edgar Dale

Verbal Symbols < Visual Symbols < Recordings Radio Still Pictures < Motion Pictures < Educational Television < Exhibits < Study Trips < Demonstrations < Dramatized Experiences < Contrived Experiences < Direct Purposeful Experiences.

Moon landing tapes got erased, not lost

goelp — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:15:37 +0000

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

“The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.”

Read the article: NewsDaily: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits