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Showing posts from August, 2010

Attributes

A nice post from an engineering manager within Facebook of what makes him stick there longer. Think these are attributes every team must shoot and is a sure shot recipe for a high performing group. Autonomy and Responsibility Focus on Impact A place run by Hackers i.e. folks who are passionate to build something and share the same leading much bigger innovation Growth and Coaching http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=415679363919

Econophysics

As everyone ponders why could we not have seen the financial crisis one line of thought is can physics help us and so the rise of the new field called econophysics - the use of tools of physics in economics. However Rick Bookstaber thinks no . Nice post around this newest avataar. Excerpts " during an earthquake things shake around and fall, and during a market crisis things shake around and fall. Seismology predicts the former, so why not the latter? " "...fledgling discipline of econophysics. The reason it persists is first of all, there are not many jobs for physicist in physics, and most of finance is child’s play once you have gone through the rigors of a physics degree, so a lot of physicists end up in finance." :-) " while physics can generate useful models if there is well-parameterized uncertainty, where we know the distribution of the randomness, it becomes less useful if the uncertainty is fuzzy and ill-defined, what is called Knightian uncertainty....

GDP

A nice graph showing the history of the world GDP.

Power

With the recent resignation of a very successful HP CEO, Mike Hurd on charges of fudging expenses one wonders how can accomplished people like him be so dumb . A nice post on tries to explain what happens to people in power and and possibly a solution. A few excerpts " Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity." "Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, has observed that the size and strength of male chimps is an extremely poor predictor of which animals will dominate the troop. Instead, the ability to forge social connections and engage in "diplomacy" is often much m...

Collaboration

Interesting post on how the true collaborative power of web is used to solve age old problems.. The format is simple. By linking questions and answers from hands-on participants, each small solution builds toward a larger understanding, accelerating research. And it proves that mass collaboration can greatly expand human problem-solving abilities. "The idea is to have a place that is a repository of global knowledge," said Stanford professor Ravi Vakil, " http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_15713739?source=email&nclick_check=1