reality dysfunction

The web is becoming increasingly personalized and this risks creating mental walled gardens, or so called “filter bubbles”. These bubbles limit what opinions and content we get exposed to and can potentially threaten democracy.

Ask any politician or influential business person about their vision for the economy and chances are they will tout the value of entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s a bland and safe answer that will resonate with a lot of people. It’s also true to some extent. Creative thinking coupled with the ability to act and implement can lead to successful businesses. Problem is, very few understand where this innovative power comes from and far too many believe STEM subject teaching is the only important factor.

I tend to write a lot about customer service and how (poorly) companies handle customer dissatisfaction because it’s such a source of success and failure. Customer experience is something I try to excel at as a business owner. Unfortunately, not every business shares my priorities, as this case shows.

Something that caused quite a bit of a stir a while ago was the revelation that Sweden had dropped considerably in OECD’s international PISA school rankings. Politicians were eager to get media attention, pointing fingers at the opposition for this and that, turning it into yet another left versus right blame game. A common theme was a call for more order and a more strict school. I think the explanation is not whether teachers need to seen as authoritarian figures but rather as to whether they help students believe in themselves.

One of the things that can relatively easy make your company stand head and shoulders above the competition is great positive customer service. I was reminded of this the past weekend. Cued by the terms in a car rental contract, I immediately thought of the same mechanism could be achieved with less agony for the customer.

The challenges of hiring developers and technical team members keep vexing more and more people. It’s a natural development as technology becomes a more and more integral part of our lives and businesses are more dependent than ever on skilled technical staff. But if you’re not a programmer yourself, hiring one can be a daunting task, whether you’re looking for a technical co-founder or a new developer for your product team.

In its latest version, Google Docs spreadsheets now support using formulas for conditionally formatting cell font and background colors. What this means is that you can make your sheets much easier to read. Here are some useful formulas for sprucing up your sheets.

During my session in Prague on September 26th, I talked about result-only web investments. If you want to learn more about working results-only, here are some links and books.

Anyone who’s worked with text has been in the situation where something needs to be changed but the changes are too complex for the standard search and replace function to do any good, resulting in hours of manual work. For these situations, learning regular expressions is a worthwhile investment. Though regular expressions may look scary, just understanding the basics will save you hours of time.

So it turns out you have a Saturday available and it’s unplanned and you wonder what to do with it. It’s a perfect opportunity to pick up new knowledge and skills. In this series of posts, I’ll introduce technologies and tools that save time and that you can learn in a day. Some of these tools are useful for web developers and some will be of benefit to people who just use computers a lot.

I’m doing more and more writing in Scrivener, including blog posts, and I use Markdown for formatting. Working on a longer post, I had to find a way to integrate tables nicely and still get Markdown output. Luckily, I’ve found a workflow that works.

This is a paper I wrote back when I was studying cognitive science as part of a course in artificial intelligence. Unlike my classmates who wrote on algorithms and research in "fuzzy logic", I wrote about the philosophical implications of AI. It's almost ten years old but I believe many of the ideas presented regarding cyborgs and the definition of intelligence still hold water and are as relevant as ever.