By Margaret Andrews. Steve Jobs famously mentioned a poster he saw as a young boy and how the message stayed with him throughout his life, helping him to know when it was time to make a change. The poster Jobs remembered said something to the effect of “If you live each day as if it were your last, one day you’ll most certainly be right.” Read more...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. How is it that it’s already mid-November?
By Jackie Vetrano. Four ladies, 45 minutes. Can it be done? We’ll find out. The Penn State Design team looked at MOOCs, specifically the Epidemics MOOC at Penn State.
What’s a MOOC? It’s a Massive Open Online Course. But, what is massive? The average enrollment for a MOOC is 43,000, but it can greatly change based on course material. MOOCs are “open” because they’re free; but you get what you pay for. More...
By Kevin A. Schulman, Margo Selzter and Regina E. Herzlinger. A computer scientist, doctor, and business professor all walked into a MOOC…
Well, not exactly, but it is not far off from the HarvardX MOOC on healthcare innovation organized by Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and featuring domain experts such as Dr. Kevin Schulman of Duke and me. More...
By Barbara Fister. As usual, after I rant about some big systemic issue – last week it was the pointlessness of paying so much attention to polishing the surface of things in competition against one another while the core of who we are and what we do empties out – people ask “so what? What are we supposed to do about it?” Pointing at problems is always easier than coming up with solutions. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I’m trying to read a book titled The Triumph of Emptiness because it sounds as if it channels so much of what I’ve been mumbling to myself incoherently for years. In it Mats Alvesson connects the dots between consumerism, the fact that having more doesn’t make us happy (by design – how else will you encourage more consumption except by ensuring we aren’t satisfied?) and how this plays out in higher education and the way organizations generally work today. Read more...
By G. Rendell. The economy exists to serve society, not the other way around. Thus, maintain an economy which is sufficient to provide the goods and services required to support happy, healthy living for all members of society. And do it in such a manner that the resources consumed by economic activity don't exceed the levels which the planet can supply indefinitely.
This third sustainability commandment consists in two parts -- meet needs, and don't exceed resource supply. The latter portion is largely a corollary to the first commandment (the one about there being only one planet's worth of planet); the generalities are pretty simple, and the specifics will be detailed in future posts. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. My brother Max sent me this piece by Dustin Curtis on why Amazon Has No Taste.
Dustin writes that:
"[A]s Amazon has released more and more pieces of junk over the past couple of years, I’ve lost faith. The Fire Phone, for example, is not just bad; it’s so terrible that it’s dishonest of Amazon to sell it to anyone. There are zero people on Earth who would be better off owning a Fire Phone instead of an Android phone. I’m not exaggerating–go find one to play with, and you’ll understand. The hardware is abysmal and the software is embarrassing. You would have to be delusional as a manager to launch it and tell people that it is a well-made phone.”
Why is the Fire Phone such a disaster, and most of the other Amazon devices like the Kindle Fire “pieces of junk”. Dustin blames Amazon’s insularity. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family
by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn
Published in May of 2014.
This is the sort of book that reminds me why I became a sociologist (now lapsed). Carbone and Cahn, a couple of law professors, draw on a wide body of sociological literature to explain how trends in economic inequality and changing family formation patterns reinforce each other. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. By Nicholas Carr.
Published in September of 2014.
The problem with the The Glass Cage is not that Nicholas Carr is a technology skeptic. We need more skepticism when it comes to the use of digital tools. Read more...
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