papa, remember buy me cookies.....
Saturday, December 31, 2011
myWish for 2012
“我希望我们是一个自由的国家。每个人不需要违背良心，只要靠自己的才能和品德就能找到合适的位置；一个简单而幸福的社会。人性的的善得到最大的张扬，恶得到最大的抑制；诚实，信用，友爱，互助将成为我们生活的常态，没有那么多烦恼和愤怒，每一个人脸上是纯真的笑容。”
Friday, December 30, 2011
喜欢就分享吧_拿图请留言..
Thursday, December 29, 2011
The Top Five Social Media Mistakes | Entrepreneur.com
The Top Five Social Media Mistakes | Entrepreneur.com:
No matter how you slice it, reaching out, connecting and having conversations with customers online costs a business owner time and money. Could your social-media efforts be yielding better results?
Here's a list of the biggest mistakes I've seen business owners make with social media and how to avoid them
'via Blog this'
问题的关键
某N虽然还未失去权力，但正在失去它的人民。改良之难在何处？一个自我服务型的自利型政治集团，其特点就是政府有如一架正在按惯性运作的巨大机器，每个成员只是机器上的一个部件。集团内部的清醒者虽意识到危机逼近，也知道根源在哪里，却没有足够的能力去阻止机器的惯性运作。
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Room to Read
“Literacy unlocks the door to learning throughout life, is essential to development and health, and opens the way for democratic participation and active citizenship.
Room to Read:
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
Saturday, December 24, 2011
8 Amazing Superfoods That Taste Great - ABC News
After January 1 rolls around, it’s time to start eating foods that are a little more nutritious than champagne and cheesecake. Keith Ayoob, associate professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, gives his top foods that pack a punch. From preventing blindness to avoiding the common cold, these foods do double duty. Who knew oysters and low-fat chocolate milk were actually good for you?
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Planned MIT Courses May Advance Front on Elite Open Education | Inside Higher Ed
Forget free content repositories; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to deliver “interactive” elite education to the masses, complete with credentials certifying “mastery” of MIT-grade coursework
Tech 2012: Please Don’t Call These Predictions | Techland | TIME.com
A few best- and worst-case scenarios for the year ahead, on Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and more.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
What Rising Temperatures May Mean for World’s Wine Industry by John McQuaid: Yale Environment 360
Today, there are about 400 commercial vineyards. English sparkling wines are beating their French rivals in international competitions. “We’ve noticed the climate has improved consistently. The weather has improved, the ripening period has become longer, and year after year we’re getting quality fruit,” says Chris White, the general manager of the Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking, England’s largest vineyard at 265 acres. Denbies is anticipating an even warmer future. In 2010 it planted seven acres of Sauvignon Blanc vines, a grape originating from the warmer Bordeaux region of France.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
立党为公、执政为民
以人为鉴，可以明得失；以史为鉴，可以知兴替 ..
领导干部不管处在哪个层次和岗位，都应该读点历史，从中汲取有益于加强修养、做好工作的智慧和营养，不断提高认识能力和精神境界，不断提升领导工作水平。今天，我们或许不需要“青天”们一言兴邦、片言折狱，但每一名公务员应该恪守最起码的行政伦理和法治精神，以良好的职业道德风貌，做好自己的分内之事。
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Editor's Note..
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him @jaltucher
10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College.
To me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.
1. How to Program - I spent $100,000 of my own money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs. Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend with a new feeling of gratefulness—we were going to break up once I moved. I knew it. In other words, life was going to be great. My mom even told me, “you’re going to shine at your new job.”
Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.” And what’s worse is that I was in a cluster of cubicles so everyone around me could here that whisper also. So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. If you’ve never been in an AT&T complex it’s like being a stormtrooper learning how to go to the bathroom in the Death Star where, inconceivably, in six Star Wars movies there is no evidence of any bathrooms. Seriously, you couldn’t find a bathroom in these places. They were mammoth but if you turned down a random corner then, whallah!—there might be an arts & crafts show.
The next corner would have a display of patents, like “how to eliminate static on a phone line – 1947″. But I did finally learn how to program. I know this because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at the same place I used to work at. “Man,” he says, “they still use your code.” And I was like, “really?” “Yeah,” he said, “because its like spaghetti and nobody can figure out how to modify it or even replace it. So, everything I dedicated my academic career to was flushed down the toilet. The last time I programmed a computer was 1999. It didn’t work. So I gave up. Goodbye C++. I hope I never see you and your “objects” again.
2. How to Be Betrayed. A girlfriend about 20 years ago wrote in her diary. “I wish James would just die. That would make this so much easier. Whenever I kiss him I’m thinking of X”. Where X was a good friend of mine. Of course I put up with it. We went out for several more months. It’s just a diary, right? She didn’t really mean it! I mean, c’mon. Who would think about someone else when kissing my beautiful face? I confronted her of course. She said, “why would you read through my personal items?” Which was true! Why would I? Don’t have I have any personal items of my own I could read through? Or a good book, for instance, to take up my time and educate myself? Kiss, kiss, kiss
Why can’t they have a good college course called BETRAYAL 101. I can teach it. Topics we will cover: Betrayal by a business partner, betrayal by investors, betrayal by a girlfriend (I’d bring in a special lecturer to talk about betrayal by men, kind of like how Gwynneth Paltrow does it in Glee), betrayal by children (since they cleverly push the boundaries right at the limit of betrayal and you have to know when to recognize that they’ve stepped over the line, betrayal by friends/family (note to all the friends/family that think I am talking about them, I am not—this is a serious academic proposal about what needs to be taught in college)—you help them, then get betrayed – how to deal with that?
Then there are the more subtle issues of betrayal – self-sabotage. How you can make enough money to live forever and then repeatedly find yourself in soup kitchens, licking envelopes, attending 12 step meetings, taking medications, and finally reaching some sort of spiritual recognition that it all doesn’t matter until the next time you sink even lower. This might be in BETRAYAL 201. Or graduate level studies. I don’t know. Maybe the Department of Defense needs to give me a grant to work on this since that’s who funds much of our education.
3. Oh shoot, I was going to put Self-Sabotage into a third category and not make it a sub-category of How to Be Betrayed. Hmmm, how do I write myself out of this conundrum. College, after all, does teach one how to put ideas into a cohesive “report” that is handed in and graded. Did I form my thesis, argue it correctly, conclude correctly, not diverge into things like “Kim Kardashian will never be the betrayer, only the betrayed.” But this brings me to: Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing.
And what is good writing? It’s not an opinion. Or a rant. Or a thesis with logical steps, a deep cavern underneath, beautiful horizons and mountaintops at the top. It’s blood. It’s Carrie-style blood. Where everyone has been fooling you until that exact moment when now, with the psychic power of the written word, you spray pig blood everywhere, at everyone, and most of all you are covered in blood yourself, the same blood that pushed you out of your mother’s womb, until just the act of writing itself is a birth, a separation between the old you and the new you—the you that can no longer take the words back, the words that now must live and breathe and mature and either make something of themselves in life, or remain one of the little blips that reminds us of how small we really are in an infinite universe.
4. Dinner Parties. How come I never learned about dinner parties in college. Sure, there were parties among other people who looked like me and talked like me and thought like me—other college students of my age and rough background. But Dinner Parties as an adult are a whole new beast. There are drinks and snacks beforehand where small talk has to disguise itself as big talk and then there’s the parts where you know that everyone is equally worried about what people think about them but that still doesn’t help at those moments when you talk and you wonder what did people think of me? Nobody cares, you tell yourself, intellectually rifling through pages of self-help blogs in your mind that told you that nobody gives a sh*t about you. But still, why don’t we have a class where there’s Dinner Party after Dinner Party and you learn how to talk at the right moments, say smart things, be quiet at the right moments, learn to excuse yourself during the mingling so you can drift from person to person. Learn how to interrupt a conversation without being rude. Learn how to thank the host so you can be invited to the next party. And so on. Which brings me to..
5. Networking. Did it really take 20 years after I graduated college before someone wrote a book, “Never Eat Alone.” Why didn’t Jesus write that book. Or Plato. Then we might’ve read it in religious school or it would’ve been one of those “big Thinkers” we need to read in college so we can learn how to think. I still don’t know how to network properly so this paragraph is small. I’m classified under the DSM VI as a “social shut-in”. I’d like to get out and be social but when the moment comes, I can only make it out the door about one in ten times. I always say, “I’d love to get together” but then I don’t know how to do it. Perhaps because not one dollar of my $100,000 spent on not learning how to program a computer was also not spent on learning how to network with people.
6. Politics. My very first girlfriend, the girl who first laughed hysterically when I showed her a piece of chewing gum I found on the ground that had sculpted itself into the muddy shape of a heart, took me to a movie called “Salvador”. Then there was a discussion group afterwards about how the Contras are bad, or good, I forget, and everyone was nodding and speaking in a Spanish accent. And afterwards my girlfriend was upset, “why aren’t you talking?” Because truth was I was so tired I couldn’t think but nobody ever taught me how to tell the truth so I lied and said, “it moved me so much I’m still absorbing it” and my girlfriend said, “yeah, I can see that.” And nobody ever taught me that there’s more than one acceptable opinion on a college campus. My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan is definitely getting impeached this time.” And I visited his dad’s mansion over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A) graduate early and B) pay my personal expenses and when I would run into him he had long hair and would nod about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest treated ones—the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And that’s politics in college. What about the real politics of how people try to backstab you at the corporate workplace or VCs never properly explained the “ratchet” concept to you before they kicked you out of the company and then re-financed. Nobody told me a thing about that in three years of college and two years of graduate school. I wish I would’ve known that for my $100,000.
7. Failure. Goes without saying they don’t teach you this. If you are going to pay $100,000, why would you fail? You might think you were wasting your money if the first mandatory elective you had to take was about failure. About wondering how you were going to feed your family after you got fired when something that was not your fault: Post-Traumatic-Lehman-Stress Syndrome, a common medical condition coming up in the DSM VII.
8. Sales.When I was busy learning how to “not program” nobody ever taught me how to sell what it was I was programming. Or sell myself. Or sell out. Or sell my ideas and turn them into money. Or sell a product to someone who might need it. Or even better, sell it to someone who doesn’t need it. Some business programs might have courses on salesmanship but those are BS because everyone automatically gets As in MBA programs so that the schools can demonstrate what good jobs their students get so they then get more applicants and the scam/cycle continues. But sales: how to demonstrate passion behind an idea you had, you built, you signed up for, so that people are willing to pay hard-earned after-tax money for it, is the number one key to any success and I have never seen it taught (properly) in college.
9. Negotiation.You’ve gotten the idea, you executed, you made the sale and now…what’s the price. What part of your body will be amputated in exchange for infinite wisdom. Will you give up one eye? Or your virility? Because something has to go if you are up against a good negotiator? What? You already thought (like most people without any experience do) that you were already a good negotiator. A good negotiator will skin your back, tattoo it with “SUCKA” and hang it up above the fireplace in his pool house if you don’t know what you are doing. The funny thing is, the best sales people (who are just aiming for people to say “Yes!”) are often the worst negotiators (“it’s very hard to say “No” when you are trying to get people to “Yes”). These are things I wish I had learned in school. I’ve been beaten in negotiations on at least five different occasions, which fortunately became five valuable lessons I’ve learned the hard way, instead of studying examples and being forced to think about it for the $100k in debt I got going to college. People will say, “well, that’s your experience in college. Mine was very different.” And it’s true. You joined the sororities and learned how to network and dinner party and be political and know everything there is to know about betrayal. My college experience was sadly unique and probably different from everyone else’s so you would be completely right to quote me that inane statistic about how college graduates earn 4% more than high school graduates and are consequently 4% happier .
Another thing>10. Happiness. outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">We never learn how it’s a combination of the food we eat, our health, our ability to be creative, our ability to have sound emotional relationships, our ability to find something bigger than ourselves and our egos to give up our spiritual virginity to.) So I can tell you what I wish I did. I wish I had gone to Soviet Russia, and played chess, and then gone to India and learned yoga and health, and I wish I had gone to South America and volunteered for kids with no arms, and did any number of things. But people then say, “haha! but that cost money.” And they would be right. It would cost less than $100,000+ but would still cost some money. I have no idea how much. But one of these days when the scars of college go away and I truly learn how to think. I might have better comebacks for these people. Or if I truly learn, I would learn not to care at all.
10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College.
To me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man.
1. How to Program - I spent $100,000 of my own money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs. Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend with a new feeling of gratefulness—we were going to break up once I moved. I knew it. In other words, life was going to be great. My mom even told me, “you’re going to shine at your new job.”
Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.” And what’s worse is that I was in a cluster of cubicles so everyone around me could here that whisper also. So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. If you’ve never been in an AT&T complex it’s like being a stormtrooper learning how to go to the bathroom in the Death Star where, inconceivably, in six Star Wars movies there is no evidence of any bathrooms. Seriously, you couldn’t find a bathroom in these places. They were mammoth but if you turned down a random corner then, whallah!—there might be an arts & crafts show.
The next corner would have a display of patents, like “how to eliminate static on a phone line – 1947″. But I did finally learn how to program. I know this because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at the same place I used to work at. “Man,” he says, “they still use your code.” And I was like, “really?” “Yeah,” he said, “because its like spaghetti and nobody can figure out how to modify it or even replace it. So, everything I dedicated my academic career to was flushed down the toilet. The last time I programmed a computer was 1999. It didn’t work. So I gave up. Goodbye C++. I hope I never see you and your “objects” again.
2. How to Be Betrayed. A girlfriend about 20 years ago wrote in her diary. “I wish James would just die. That would make this so much easier. Whenever I kiss him I’m thinking of X”. Where X was a good friend of mine. Of course I put up with it. We went out for several more months. It’s just a diary, right? She didn’t really mean it! I mean, c’mon. Who would think about someone else when kissing my beautiful face? I confronted her of course. She said, “why would you read through my personal items?” Which was true! Why would I? Don’t have I have any personal items of my own I could read through? Or a good book, for instance, to take up my time and educate myself? Kiss, kiss, kiss
Why can’t they have a good college course called BETRAYAL 101. I can teach it. Topics we will cover: Betrayal by a business partner, betrayal by investors, betrayal by a girlfriend (I’d bring in a special lecturer to talk about betrayal by men, kind of like how Gwynneth Paltrow does it in Glee), betrayal by children (since they cleverly push the boundaries right at the limit of betrayal and you have to know when to recognize that they’ve stepped over the line, betrayal by friends/family (note to all the friends/family that think I am talking about them, I am not—this is a serious academic proposal about what needs to be taught in college)—you help them, then get betrayed – how to deal with that?
Then there are the more subtle issues of betrayal – self-sabotage. How you can make enough money to live forever and then repeatedly find yourself in soup kitchens, licking envelopes, attending 12 step meetings, taking medications, and finally reaching some sort of spiritual recognition that it all doesn’t matter until the next time you sink even lower. This might be in BETRAYAL 201. Or graduate level studies. I don’t know. Maybe the Department of Defense needs to give me a grant to work on this since that’s who funds much of our education.
3. Oh shoot, I was going to put Self-Sabotage into a third category and not make it a sub-category of How to Be Betrayed. Hmmm, how do I write myself out of this conundrum. College, after all, does teach one how to put ideas into a cohesive “report” that is handed in and graded. Did I form my thesis, argue it correctly, conclude correctly, not diverge into things like “Kim Kardashian will never be the betrayer, only the betrayed.” But this brings me to: Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing.
And what is good writing? It’s not an opinion. Or a rant. Or a thesis with logical steps, a deep cavern underneath, beautiful horizons and mountaintops at the top. It’s blood. It’s Carrie-style blood. Where everyone has been fooling you until that exact moment when now, with the psychic power of the written word, you spray pig blood everywhere, at everyone, and most of all you are covered in blood yourself, the same blood that pushed you out of your mother’s womb, until just the act of writing itself is a birth, a separation between the old you and the new you—the you that can no longer take the words back, the words that now must live and breathe and mature and either make something of themselves in life, or remain one of the little blips that reminds us of how small we really are in an infinite universe.
4. Dinner Parties. How come I never learned about dinner parties in college. Sure, there were parties among other people who looked like me and talked like me and thought like me—other college students of my age and rough background. But Dinner Parties as an adult are a whole new beast. There are drinks and snacks beforehand where small talk has to disguise itself as big talk and then there’s the parts where you know that everyone is equally worried about what people think about them but that still doesn’t help at those moments when you talk and you wonder what did people think of me? Nobody cares, you tell yourself, intellectually rifling through pages of self-help blogs in your mind that told you that nobody gives a sh*t about you. But still, why don’t we have a class where there’s Dinner Party after Dinner Party and you learn how to talk at the right moments, say smart things, be quiet at the right moments, learn to excuse yourself during the mingling so you can drift from person to person. Learn how to interrupt a conversation without being rude. Learn how to thank the host so you can be invited to the next party. And so on. Which brings me to..
5. Networking. Did it really take 20 years after I graduated college before someone wrote a book, “Never Eat Alone.” Why didn’t Jesus write that book. Or Plato. Then we might’ve read it in religious school or it would’ve been one of those “big Thinkers” we need to read in college so we can learn how to think. I still don’t know how to network properly so this paragraph is small. I’m classified under the DSM VI as a “social shut-in”. I’d like to get out and be social but when the moment comes, I can only make it out the door about one in ten times. I always say, “I’d love to get together” but then I don’t know how to do it. Perhaps because not one dollar of my $100,000 spent on not learning how to program a computer was also not spent on learning how to network with people.
6. Politics. My very first girlfriend, the girl who first laughed hysterically when I showed her a piece of chewing gum I found on the ground that had sculpted itself into the muddy shape of a heart, took me to a movie called “Salvador”. Then there was a discussion group afterwards about how the Contras are bad, or good, I forget, and everyone was nodding and speaking in a Spanish accent. And afterwards my girlfriend was upset, “why aren’t you talking?” Because truth was I was so tired I couldn’t think but nobody ever taught me how to tell the truth so I lied and said, “it moved me so much I’m still absorbing it” and my girlfriend said, “yeah, I can see that.” And nobody ever taught me that there’s more than one acceptable opinion on a college campus. My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan is definitely getting impeached this time.” And I visited his dad’s mansion over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A) graduate early and B) pay my personal expenses and when I would run into him he had long hair and would nod about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest treated ones—the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And that’s politics in college. What about the real politics of how people try to backstab you at the corporate workplace or VCs never properly explained the “ratchet” concept to you before they kicked you out of the company and then re-financed. Nobody told me a thing about that in three years of college and two years of graduate school. I wish I would’ve known that for my $100,000.
7. Failure. Goes without saying they don’t teach you this. If you are going to pay $100,000, why would you fail? You might think you were wasting your money if the first mandatory elective you had to take was about failure. About wondering how you were going to feed your family after you got fired when something that was not your fault: Post-Traumatic-Lehman-Stress Syndrome, a common medical condition coming up in the DSM VII.
8. Sales.When I was busy learning how to “not program” nobody ever taught me how to sell what it was I was programming. Or sell myself. Or sell out. Or sell my ideas and turn them into money. Or sell a product to someone who might need it. Or even better, sell it to someone who doesn’t need it. Some business programs might have courses on salesmanship but those are BS because everyone automatically gets As in MBA programs so that the schools can demonstrate what good jobs their students get so they then get more applicants and the scam/cycle continues. But sales: how to demonstrate passion behind an idea you had, you built, you signed up for, so that people are willing to pay hard-earned after-tax money for it, is the number one key to any success and I have never seen it taught (properly) in college.
9. Negotiation.You’ve gotten the idea, you executed, you made the sale and now…what’s the price. What part of your body will be amputated in exchange for infinite wisdom. Will you give up one eye? Or your virility? Because something has to go if you are up against a good negotiator? What? You already thought (like most people without any experience do) that you were already a good negotiator. A good negotiator will skin your back, tattoo it with “SUCKA” and hang it up above the fireplace in his pool house if you don’t know what you are doing. The funny thing is, the best sales people (who are just aiming for people to say “Yes!”) are often the worst negotiators (“it’s very hard to say “No” when you are trying to get people to “Yes”). These are things I wish I had learned in school. I’ve been beaten in negotiations on at least five different occasions, which fortunately became five valuable lessons I’ve learned the hard way, instead of studying examples and being forced to think about it for the $100k in debt I got going to college. People will say, “well, that’s your experience in college. Mine was very different.” And it’s true. You joined the sororities and learned how to network and dinner party and be political and know everything there is to know about betrayal. My college experience was sadly unique and probably different from everyone else’s so you would be completely right to quote me that inane statistic about how college graduates earn 4% more than high school graduates and are consequently 4% happier .
Another thing>10. Happiness. outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">We never learn how it’s a combination of the food we eat, our health, our ability to be creative, our ability to have sound emotional relationships, our ability to find something bigger than ourselves and our egos to give up our spiritual virginity to.) So I can tell you what I wish I did. I wish I had gone to Soviet Russia, and played chess, and then gone to India and learned yoga and health, and I wish I had gone to South America and volunteered for kids with no arms, and did any number of things. But people then say, “haha! but that cost money.” And they would be right. It would cost less than $100,000+ but would still cost some money. I have no idea how much. But one of these days when the scars of college go away and I truly learn how to think. I might have better comebacks for these people. Or if I truly learn, I would learn not to care at all.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The Racism And Meritocracy..
Editor’s note: Guest contributor Eric Ries is a consultant and the author of The Lean Startup. Follow him @ericries.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.”
I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules.
I want to make an argument, step by step, that I hope will convince you to care about this issue, but that doesn’t presuppose that you already agree that diversity is important. And it will explain how it is possible for both sides to be mostly correct – and that we still have a problem.
So the rules are:
1> No political correctness. Let’s speak the truth no matter where it leads.
2>You don’t have to believe that diversity is an end in itself. In fact, I will argue that is important as a means to an end.
3>Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities. We should use science, whenever possible, rather than anecdotal evidence.
4>No hand-wringing. There’s no point discussing this problem if we can’t do anything about it.
So – no hippies, no whiners, no name-calling, and no BS. If you want to make Silicon Valley – and startup hubs like it – as awesome as possible, pay attention.
What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley? We have two competing theories. One is that deliberate racisms keeps people out. Another is that white men are simply the ones that show up, because of some combination of aptitude and effort (which it is depends on who you ask), and that admissions to, say Y Combinator, simply reflect the lack of diversity of the applicant pool, nothing more.
The problem with both of these theories is that the math just doesn’t work.
It’s a fact that the applicant pool to most Silicon Valley startup schools and VCs is skewed. Could this be the result of innate differences between white men and other groups? The math simply doesn’t hold up to support this view. Think about two overlapping populations of people, like men and women. They would naturally be normally distributed in a bell curve around a mean aptitude. So picture those two bell curves. Here in Silicon Valley, we’re looking for the absolute best and brightest, the people far out on the tail end of aptitude. So imagine that region of the curve. How far apart would the two populations have to be to explain YC’s historicaladmission rate of 4% women? It would have to be really extreme.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.”
I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules.
I want to make an argument, step by step, that I hope will convince you to care about this issue, but that doesn’t presuppose that you already agree that diversity is important. And it will explain how it is possible for both sides to be mostly correct – and that we still have a problem.
So the rules are:
1> No political correctness. Let’s speak the truth no matter where it leads.
2>You don’t have to believe that diversity is an end in itself. In fact, I will argue that is important as a means to an end.
3>Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities. We should use science, whenever possible, rather than anecdotal evidence.
4>No hand-wringing. There’s no point discussing this problem if we can’t do anything about it.
So – no hippies, no whiners, no name-calling, and no BS. If you want to make Silicon Valley – and startup hubs like it – as awesome as possible, pay attention.
What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley? We have two competing theories. One is that deliberate racisms keeps people out. Another is that white men are simply the ones that show up, because of some combination of aptitude and effort (which it is depends on who you ask), and that admissions to, say Y Combinator, simply reflect the lack of diversity of the applicant pool, nothing more.
The problem with both of these theories is that the math just doesn’t work.
It’s a fact that the applicant pool to most Silicon Valley startup schools and VCs is skewed. Could this be the result of innate differences between white men and other groups? The math simply doesn’t hold up to support this view. Think about two overlapping populations of people, like men and women. They would naturally be normally distributed in a bell curve around a mean aptitude. So picture those two bell curves. Here in Silicon Valley, we’re looking for the absolute best and brightest, the people far out on the tail end of aptitude. So imagine that region of the curve. How far apart would the two populations have to be to explain YC’s historicaladmission rate of 4% women? It would have to be really extreme.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Kecuali saya :o)
家，可以大、可以小；能夠遮風避雨就好。
家，可以吵、可以鬧；沒有恩怨情仇就好。
家，可以哭、可以笑；一家和樂開心就好。
家，可以窮、可以富；家人陪伴溫暖就好。
家，可以遠、可以近；記得回家的路就好。
家，可以老、可以舊；常回家陪爸媽就好。
仁者樂山，智者樂水
仁者樂山，智者樂水
台法科学家共同揭示针灸的奥秘 | RFI
台法科学家共同揭示针灸的奥秘 | RFI:
2011年台法科技奖颁奖仪式于11月23日在驻法国台北代表处举行。今年获奖的是台湾大学量子科学与工程中心副主任许文翰教授与法国国家科学研究中心研究院 Marc Thiriet 博士。
2011年台法科技奖颁奖仪式于11月23日在驻法国台北代表处举行。今年获奖的是台湾大学量子科学与工程中心副主任许文翰教授与法国国家科学研究中心研究院 Marc Thiriet 博士。
Thursday, December 1, 2011
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