Month: December 2013

December 23, 2013

The Problem With Youth Activism:

Students are surrounded by professors reminiscing about the glory days of youth activism, when groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party really ignited social change. But the professors don’t seem to make the connection that none of these were school-sanctioned organizations.

The post is from 2007, though is probably no less relevant in 2013. Also does a good job of articulating the problem without just laying blame at the feet of college kids.

December 23, 2013

The Difference Between Confidence and Arrogance is Empathy. Great anecdote from Cody Brown.

December 18, 2013

Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology:

If Bitcoin’s strength comes from decentralization, why pour millions into a single company? Ah, because Coinbase provides an “accessible interface to the Bitcoin protocol”, we’re told. We must centralize to decentralize, you see; such is the perverse logic of capital co-opting power.

December 18, 2013

Status

I just started reading The Birth of the Museum by Tony Bennett. I’ve been fascinated by museums for a while now and lucked out in getting a reading list from a friend’s course at Cambridge. Slow reading so far but good stuff.

December 18, 2013

The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder:

The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous…This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.

December 16, 2013

Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab. Science relies on the replication of experiments. The concern is that a startlingly small number of published papers hold up to attempts to reproduce the results. The Economist looks at what that means for the field and for academic research more broadly.

December 16, 2013

Support as creation

Too many companies pigeonhole customer support as just answering questions. It’s a cost center they believe exists only to maintain the status quo of customer happiness. This definition misses something powerful. Great support is an act of creation.

Whether you focus on the practical elements, or prefer the intangible values, support has more to offer when viewed through the lens of creation. From documentation to personal experiences, support turns a faceless product in to a product that these people made for me.

Your goal is to craft joy. Out of a frustrating customer experience your team will create a memory of happiness, helpfulness, and appreciation. Instead of a cost center your support team becomes a department which creates and educates loyal customers. Where once resided a team just answering questions now lives the frontlines for creating your tribe of happy, repeat, and profitable customers.

December 15, 2013

Don’t Lie. You Don’t Care.

In the drive to derive value from each customer, we are forgetting that our goal as entrepreneurs is to solve problems for life, not for the first $10.

December 15, 2013

The secrets of the world’s happiest cities:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

December 14, 2013

Status

Put together a quick theme idea tonight and pushed it live to this site. Possibly a few rough areas around the edges. Overall I’m pretty happy with it, though. Really simple to put together; though I did miss my goal of keeping it under 1,000 lines of CSS. Will need to find a way to trim 50 lines. 🙂