The insights of a Quirky Tech Enthousiast on his journey through the fast paced IT landscape.
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William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.
Physics and marketing don’t seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
I especially like the reference to the matter where the mass influences the acceleration. So big company names have bigger time moving (changing), where smaller parts (for instance, the brands from unilever) have it more easier. It supports my theory that it’s better to divide your company into a lot of smaller parts, as it becomes more transparent for both the consumer as your internals.
Check out the following article “Economic Theory and IT” at “Pivot Point”.
It’s a nice comparison between the old ways in the Soviet Union and the reluctance to change within our current IT market.
Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.
A while back Garr Reynolds posted an article about the “Tips for creative success from Pixar“.
An interesting quote from this article is the following statement :
Accept every offer. Don’t judge it, you’ll stop it. It becomes a dead end if you judge it, but unlimited possibilities if you go with it.
To be honest, when being a junior engineer, you accept a lot more tasks without judging it. It’s a zen saying that one must approach things with the child’s mind. So approach it without judgement. Creativity & openness is something we have to maintain, as it’s something we loss over the year due to our prejudices & the context we’re accustomed too.
A year and two months after posting it here, google wave says goodbye.
Karim Vaes 