San Quentin, the prison featured, has also partnered with HackReactor do help teach web development to students. Innovative program. Would like to see data from post-prison life to see how / if it's working.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Prison Yoga Is Helping Inmates Transcend Their Cells
San Quentin, the prison featured, has also partnered with HackReactor do help teach web development to students. Innovative program. Would like to see data from post-prison life to see how / if it's working.
Save for Later
[Pinterest is] “a repository of things that people would like to have or do,” he continued, Pinterest constitutes “a database of intentions.”
...The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.Read more in Medium.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Close at Hand
+Diana Kimball published a rich piece on the history of pockets and pocketbooks in Medium. You'll never look at them the same way again.
Why I Left the Best Job in the World to Pursue Software Engineering
Read more in Women 2.0 (originally posted in LinkedIn). I'm biased, but think she was spot on.
Thanks, +Cong Ding
Rent the Runway launches accelerator program for women
Read more in FastCompany.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift
Read more in the New Statesman.
Forbes' 'Masters Of The New Universe' 14 Years Later
Although this piece is old, it is somewhat surreal to think about what a piece might look like on ourselves 14 years from now. Would success be defined in the same way?
Read more in Forbes.
Is there a shortage of marriageable men?
Over the past several decades, marriage rates have fallen dramatically in the U.S. Many believe that a shortage of ‘marriageable’ men is the primary culprit. That turns out to be at the very most only half of the picture, as we show in our new CCF policy brief, “Is There a Shortage of Marriageable Men?” If there a shortage of marriageable men, it is only among African Americans and well-educated whites.Read more in the Brookings Institute.
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
The 1 per cent? Not for my kids
Thanks, +Zuhair Khan
Where Tiny Houses and Big Dreams Grow
Yes! Someone made my dream a reality. One day we'll build one, too. Read more about the forrest commune in the NYT.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
A Critique of VC, Founders, and Tech
Fred Wilson writes about Maciej Ceglowski's talk at the Friemtidens Internet in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Think some of Maciej's views take another lens on Silicon Valley:
Thanks, +Megan Gardner
Think some of Maciej's views take another lens on Silicon Valley:
Our venture capitalists have an easy answer: let the markets do the work. We’ll try crazy ideas, most of them will fail, but those few that succeed will eventually change the world.
But there’s something very fishy about California capitalism.
Investing has become the genteel occupation of our gentry, like having a country estate used to be in England. It’s a class marker and a socially acceptable way for rich techies to pass their time. Gentlemen investors decide what ideas are worth pursuing, and the people pitching to them tailor their proposals accordingly.
The companies that come out of this are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they’ve convinced people to tell them they’re worth.
There’s an element of fantasy to the whole enterprise that even the tech elite is starting to find unsettling.
We had people like this back in Poland, except instead of venture capitalists we called them central planners. They too were in charge of allocating vast amounts of money that didn’t belong to them.
They too honestly believed they were changing the world, and offered the same kinds of excuses about why our day-to-day life bore no relation to the shiny, beautiful world that was supposed to lie just around the corner.
Even those crusty, old-fashioned companies that still believe in profit are not really behaving like capitalists. Microsoft, Cisco and Apple are making a fortune that just sits offshore. Apple alone has nearly $200 billion in cash that is doing nothing.
We’d be better off if Apple bought every employee a fur coat and Bentley, or even just burned the money in a bonfire. At least that would create some jobs for money shovelers and security guards.
Everywhere I look there is this failure to capture the benefits of technological change.
So what kinds of ideas do California central planners think are going to change the world?
Well, right now, they want to build space rockets and make themselves immortal. I wish I was kidding.Read more in AVC.
Thanks, +Megan Gardner
6 Things the Happiest Families All Have in Common
Read the rest in TIME.
Thanks, Megan
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Giving Gendered Communication Feedback
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
Whoa:
Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.Read more in the NYT.
What My Uterus Can Teach You About Being a Tech Leader
Spoiler alert: my uterus doesn’t have much to say on the matter of technology and how it can improve people’s lives, though my brain has quite a bit to offer.
Read more in Medium.
Thanks, +Andrea Sparrey
Read more in Medium.
Thanks, +Andrea Sparrey
What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities
See the data and school break-down in the Washington Post.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Guidance for the negative thinker in all of us
Favorite excerpt: "I don’t think the whole no-regrets style of living is brave. I think it means you’re living a life of no reflection."
How Elementary School Teachers’ Biases Can Discourage Girls From Math and Science
I'm cringing: If teachers grade tests with student names anonymized, girls score higher in math.
Read more in the NYT.
Read more in the NYT.
Why I Put My Wife’s Career First
Three years later, Slaughter's husband, Andrew Moravcsik, weighs in on the debate. He argues "the well-being of children, the status of women, and the happiness of men will depend on whether more fathers are willing to take on primary parenting roles."
Read his essay on the "lead" parent in the Atlantic.
Thanks to all of you who emailed me this essay -- +Elizabeth Slavitt, +Andrea Sparrey, +Claire Packer and many others.
Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard Kill You With Cuteness in Their Latest Samsung Ads
Who knew that co-parenting + an adorable couple would be the basis for a Samsung ad?
See more of the ads in AdWeek.
See more of the ads in AdWeek.
"Bad" Feminist
If you haven't read it, "Bad Feminist" is an old (2012) but classic essay by Roxane Gay.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Six Steps to Gracefully Say No and Not Feel Guilty
Take one look at my calendar and you can tell it’s been a busy year. I’ve had more blind reach-outs come my way than ever before. Some write because there are job openings on my team and they want to know more before applying. Others write after reading a piece of mine online that resonated. Still others are from folks who have seen me speak at conferences and want my feedback on something they’re building.
At first, I said yes to everything. Yes, I’ll help you find a job! Yes, I’ll give you product feedback! Yes, I’ll grab coffee and tell you about my career path! This was in part because I remember being in the other person’s shoes (writing to someone whose work I admired, hoping to catch a little more wisdom by meeting them in person), and in part because I really love meeting new people, I found it hard to say no.
But after a while I realized that saying yes to everything wasn’t scalable (or, I had to admit, even very fun). All my yesses to strangers or friends of friends meant I was busy all the time. I saw my boyfriend less. I called home less frequently. I missed team outings. I had to say no to things I really wanted to say yes to, because I’d said yes to things I wasn’t certain I could say no to.Read her solution in FastCompany.
#NoMoreFOMO
... #JOMO
Thanks +Julia Chou
Wearables: A Pandora’s Box For Security?
My view is that the weakest link is your mobile phone, not the actual wearable device itself. That’s because wearables tend to link to your mobile device over a short-range wireless spectrum known as “Bluetooth” (used to wirelessly send and receive data between your wearable device and your smartphone), and typically only collects a rather small set of data. However, contrast that with your smartphone, where your data is stored and synthesized from numerous sources, which makes that device a prime target for hackers.
To even a novice thief, the potential for abuse is substantial, from simple credit card or identity theft to various forms of fraud. To a seasoned criminal, however, such data could be catastrophic to a victim, leading to high-scale extortion or even physical threat of robbery, stalking or worse. In fact, the data collected and stored on your mobile device can be worth 10 times the value of a credit card on the black market.Read more in TechCrunch.
HBR Management Tip: Beware of Humblebragging About Yourself
An excerpt:
We all want to make a good impression on other people, whether it’s during a job interview, a meeting with a new client, or a first date. But our intuition about what creates a positive impression is often wrong. For example, “humblebragging” is a common way to respond to interview questions such as “What’s your greatest weakness?” (“I’m bad at saying no, so I end up helping other people too often.”) But researchers have found that humblebraggers are viewed as less likeable than people who straightforwardly brag or even people who complain. When someone humblebrags, he sounds inauthentic, like he’s saying something strategic instead of something honest. We evaluate other people more positively when they try to be themselves, so the best strategy is just to be honest about yourself – even if what you’re being honest about is how great you are.Read more in HBR.
In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another
Members of a Marine battalion that served in a restive region in Afghanistan have been devastated by the deaths of comrades and frustrated by the V.A.
Of about 1,200 Marines who deployed with the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment in 2008, at least 13 have killed themselves, two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. The resulting suicide rate for the group is nearly four times the rate for young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans.Read more in the NYT.
As Coding Bootcamps Grow the Skills Gap Could Shrink
Based on gender inferred from a member’s profile, 38% of bootcamp alumni are women, a significant improvement over the 20% average for female representation of Software Engineers in the Technology industry indicated by previous LinkedIn Economic Graph research.Read more in LinkedIn.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Tech upstarts seek to disrupt gender bias in finance
New York-based StockFuse has developed a platform that enables students or others seeking a job in finance to compete in virtual portfolio management games. Without having to invest any actual money, candidates can show off their skills by trading real stocks in real time with real prices. Games are hosted by financial institutions who can then invite the top performers for interviews or meetings.
Sean McCormack, the chief executive of StockFuse, used to be a trader at Deutsche Bank. He believes the platform allows banks to widen their applicant pool by reaching talented candidates they might otherwise have missed – for example, because they were at universities from which the banks do not generally recruit.
“We want to use gaming technology to help level the playing fields from people of different backgrounds, gender and race,” McCormack said.Read more in Financial News.
Monday, September 14, 2015
“Dropping Out” - A Beginner’s Guide
The new "dropping out" requires a lot of privilege and luck, and isn't nearly as cool as the media makes it seem.
Read Ellen Chisa's post in Medium.
Read Ellen Chisa's post in Medium.
LinkedIn Is Not a Dating Site
Read more in the Atlantic.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
The Secret Life of Passwords
Read more in NYT Magazine.
Thanks, +Ryan Au
Once seen as bulletproof, 11 million+ Ashley Madison passwords already cracked
Thanks, +Ryan Au
Why you should be the technical founder of your start-up
An excerpt:
Thanks, +Bikram Virk
However, if you do learn to program, you—not your technical cofounder, not your first engineering hire, but you—will have a good sense of the answer. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you will have a far better sense of how long it would take for a professional. You will know what software costs. And in the startup business, the people who know what software costs tend to be the biggest winners.
Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Larry Page. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. By the time they were billionaires, they were each likely as useful committing code as they were mopping the floor. But when any of them were presented with a feature, they knew about how much development time it should take. And the knowledge of that cost coupled with their singular intuition for their customers' needs and vision for the market propelled them to the decisions that would build world-changing companies.Read more in FastCompany.
Thanks, +Bikram Virk
Museum looks at the surprising partnership of Dali and Disney
Surrealistic artist Salvador Dali, left, and Walt Disney at a beach in Spain in 1957.
Read more in the Detroit Free Press.
Thanks, Sam
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Nothing Is Wrong With Your Sex Drive
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Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were
"It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness, competition and deeply rooted barriers." Read more in the NYT .
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"Why I don’t talk about race with White people." Read more in Medium .
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Even women who earn overwhelmingly positive performance reviews are told that they have ‘personality flaws,’ a new study finds. The double...
