The simple idea here is that it is the job of the faculty to set up a reasonable story and a set of goal- based scenarios within that story and to be available to help as needed, but it is not the job of the faculty to provide information that is readily available elsewhere. Thus, the CMU faculty need not teach how to create a financial plan since this has been written about in many places. The job of the faculty is to look at the financial plans created by the students and help them make right.

First and foremost: When learning isn't engaging, it's not learning. The movies, for all their faults, usually get this idea right. In the film Dead Poet's Society, Robin Williams plays a teacher who jumps on top of desks, makes the class laugh, tells great stories, and gets the class involved in what he's teaching. The educational establishment at the school hates the way Williams teaches, based on the premise that if students are having fun, something must be wrong. Listening to lectures and memorizing countless facts and figures aren't engaging activities for most people. Minds wander; real goals take over.

So what's wrong with training? Everything that's wrong with training can be stated in four words: it's just like school. The educational model in school does not work. That fact, however, hasn't deterred business from adopting this model, which is based on the belief that people learn through listening. Memorize the teacher's words; memorize the training book's policies and procedures. It's at this point in my public talks that audience members rise up in protest.

Our answer was, "We don't know if we can, but yes, we can certainly try, and here's how..."

we're 100% clear that our books are learning experiences, not references.

You get the feeling the only time Adobe's separate package user interface people meet is to laugh in the cafeteria about how many crushed souls are going to freak when they see what the button they've been pressing for nine years now does.

Marsha: "Hey, remember that time we changed the airbrush from 'j' to 'a' and then to 'b' in the next version?"
Steve (now with milk flying out of his nose): "Pfffffff ahahaahahahahahaha."
Steve (cleaning up): "What's your group gonna make toggle item and group selection?"
Marsha: "We're switching it to command-option tab."
Steve: "Nice. I guess we'll go back to control-tab."
Marsha: "Heh...I can almost see their eyes twitching. Then the brain melts as they manage to belt out a last 'Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.'"
(Steve and Marsha fall to floor laughing, curtain falls)

If Adobe is really trying to sell us a suite, they should be doing a better job unifying the package at the most basic level. And hey, I'm not bitter. It's just that I've been hurt before.

Care ONLY about what your users think of themselves as a result of interacting with your creation.

he instructors wanted the scores to be all about them. And that's the problem. It's the same one we have sometimes with tech book authors. What we tried to tell the instructors was this: "Most of the time students don't CARE how smart you are. They come in assuming that you're supposed to be here, so stop trying to prove how smart you are and get on with helping them get smarter."

you start the class with a pre-established credibility balance. Points will be deducted if you do or say something stupid, and most especially--if you get caught LYING by pretending to know something that you don't, or failing to admit when you're guessing.

What I needed to prove was that by working hard during the class to make sure the students know how smart you are, you have a negative impact on the students' experience. They end up recognizing how smart you are, sure, but that's not why they took the class! They took the class so that THEY could be smarter, and with very few exceptions, they couldn't give a crap about you.

Somewhere, usually during the first day of class, some student would ask my name because they needed to ask me for help during a lab. When that happened, I would walk over to the board and say to everyone, "Oops -- sorry, guys--I forgot to tell you my name", and I'd write my email address on the board (which was then kathy.sierra@sun.com). So even when I did give them my name, it was in the context of a way in which they could contact me for help. I made even my own introduction about what it meant to them.

The year-long experiment was a success, and I won a nice bonus from Sun for being one of only four instructors in north America to get the highest possible customer evaluations. But what was remarkable about this is that this happened in spite of my not being a particularly good instructor or Java guru. I proved that a very average instructor could get exceptional results by putting the focus ENTIRELY on the students. By paying no attention to whether they thought I "knew my stuff", etc.

Assuming you meet some very minimal threshold for teaching, all that matters is that you help the students become smarter.

You help them learn... by doing whatever it takes. And that usually has nothing to do with what comes out of YOUR mouth, and has everything to do with what happens between their ears.

When compared to our competitors, far MORE readers use first-person language to talk about themselves in relation to the content. In other words, they talk about THEIR new understanding, etc.

hen an author or instructor is worried about whether he'll come across as smart, he'll tend to include things that get in the way by adding cognitive overhead. It takes a certain amount of bravery to leave things out, but by ignoring what critics will do to us, and thinking only about what's good for the learner, the decision is easy. If it doesn't support the learner, cut it. And that goes not just for topics, but for the kind of language we use as well.

You know it's true. The better you get at something, the better it feels. Snowboarding. Programming. Writing. Learning Japanese. Chess. Painting. Building cars. Cooking. Designing a web page. Skateboarding. Teaching. Marketing. Being a parent. Being in love.

My running coach told me a few years ago, "It's just more fun when you're faster." I wasn't sure what he meant; I was just trying to get back in shape and do a decent 10K. But once I started training with much better runners, and began pushing myself and keeping my splits and timing my speed work... it was more fun. And it wasn't like I had any illusion of being competitive. Being better is just more fun.

The more we analyze and reverse-engineer passion, the more we see learning and growth as a key component. No, not a key--the key. The more knowledge and skill someone has, the more passionate they become, and the more passionate they become, the more they try to improve their knowledge and skills.

Just about every time someone justifies college -- many (not all) of the things they point to could be met in other ways. Do you really need four--or usually five--years of sitting in classrooms listening to lectures (weak - weak - weak)? Think very seriously about how many of your teachers and classes really were exceptional? How many do you really remember? It'll be hard to convince me that there's no other way for a young person to gain an appreciation for thinking.

So this isn't a college vs. no college argument; one can certainly *take college courses* without going for the full monty degree thing. I wouldn't trade quite a few of my college courses for anything (including a few when I was in real college on the four-year degree path). BUT... and this is the big one... I can say that about only a handful. I will never get the rest of those years back.

school isn't really about learning at all. It's about certification.

College students today attend school to get a degree that they hope will get them something they want...
... we never ask a student if he learned a lot, we ask how well he or she did.

He points out the irony when he asked that all cognitive science professors commit to never giving multiple choice tests:

"Now, every cognitive scientist knows that there is no value in such tests; nevertheless the faculty objected. "Who will grade all the papers that students turn in?" they asked. "We don't have the money for more teaching assistants, and I want to do my research."

It's interesting to me that many of the previous comments refer to a degree as a "piece of paper", or even more anachronistically, "the sheepskin". To me it's more of a check box. I will check a bunch of boxes in exams, then someone else will check more boxes based on the sum of my check boxes. If all the numbers add up, I will get a degree, which is really just a check box on an HR application or SBA loan form. Not highly meaningful, but apparently necessary.

They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product.

Dr. Raphael "Ray" Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, "A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral." That is, they're sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: "Even as far back as when I was in medical school" -- he enrolled at Harvard in 1955 -- "many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues." Levey didn't bother to name them, but you don't need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise.

The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish's diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes -- and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.

Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways.

The patients lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. "Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they're going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating," Ornish says. "Who wants to live longer when you're in chronic emotional pain?"

So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.

"When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience," he says, "the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences."

In his memoir, Gerstner writes that he realized he needed to make a powerful emotional appeal to them, to "shake them out of their depressed stupor, remind them of who they were -- you're IBM, damn it!"

Of course, radical change often isn't possible in business situations. Still, it's always important to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard's Kotter believes in the importance of "short-term wins" for companies, meaning "victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems."

"People need a sense of confidence that the processes will be aligned internally," Firestone says. "For large companies, this is where change usually fails." Even if change starts at the top, it can easily die somewhere in the middle.

What happens if you don't work at mental rejuvenation? Merzenich says that people who live to 85 have a 50-50 chance of being senile. While the issue for heart patients is "change or die," the issue for everyone is "change or lose your mind." Mastering the ability to change isn't just a crucial strategy for business. It's a necessity for health. And it's possibly the one thing that's most worth learning.

To get the answers to these and other questions, MOTHER sent staffer (and former schoolteacher) Pat Stone up to talk with John Holt in his tightly cluttered office in Boston, Massachusetts . . . where, in his scant spare time, John puts one of his central educational beliefs--that a learner should be responsible for her or his own learning--into practice by teaching himself to play the cello.

PLOWBOY: You must have been a good classroom student.

HOLT: Well, I knew how to "play the game", so I never had any difficulty with school. But I got bored with it as I got older, and --by the time I reached high school--I wouldn't read a book unless it had been assigned. I didn't start reading for my own pleasure again until eight or nine years after I got out of the Navy.

PLOWBOY: How could going to school have changed you so much?

HOLT: That's easy to figure out. It's a well-established principle that if you take somebody who's doing something for her or his own pleasure and offer some kind of outside reward for doing it-and let the person become accustomed to performing the task for that reward--then take the reward away, the individual will stop that activity. You can even train nursery school youngsters who love to draw pictures to stop drawing them, simply by giving them gold stars or some other little bonus for a couple of months . . and then removing that artificial "motivation".

In fact, I think that our society expects schools to get students to the point where they do things only for outside rewards. People who perform tasks for their internal reasons are hard to control. Now, I don't think that teachers get up in the morning and say to themselves, "I'm going to go to school today and take away all those young people's internal motivations" . . . but that's exactly what often happens.

PLOWBOY: You found a learning community on a submarine?

HOLT: Yes. It was during World War II, and I had a very unusual captain who believed in giving his youngest and most inexperienced officers--like me--a lot of responsibility right off the bat. This fellow realized that the best way for a person to learn to do something is to start doing it.

That was the first time anyone had ever put some real trust in me, and it was a very powerful educational experience. I was observant and asked a lot of questions, so before long I could do my share to run a submarine on war patrol. I had an important task to do, and I did it well. The experience provided a great boost to my morale.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think the currently popular "therapeutic" methods--which involve telling someone, "You're OK, you're really wonderful"--do much good. Tackling a job that seems worth doing, and doing it in a competent manner, is--to my way of thinking--the best way for a person to gain self-esteem.

On the whole, I was a perfectly conventional schoolmaster . . . who gave the high-school-aged students lots of tests and flunked my pupils right and left. The only difference between me and the average teacher was that--because I hadn't taken any education courses--I didn't know all the alibis that conventionally trained instructors use . . . excuses which imply that something's wrong with students who don't learn. I thought, if you can imagine such a simple-minded idea, that if my pupils weren't grasping their lessons, it was my responsibility to figure out a way to explain the subject so that they would understand it!

PLOWBOY: Do you really believe that most adults--even parents--actually do not like children?

HOLT: I know that's true . . . I've spent a lot of time observing how society treats children. Look, I could give you a ten-hour interview entirely on the subject of adults' feelings toward young people, but let me tell you just one tiny example.

I recently read a construction design manual that was full of surveys showing buyers' preferences concerning townhouses and clustered housing. And the number-one concern of potential owners was that they not live in a place where they could hear the sounds of children playing. They weren't talking about the noises of youngsters smashing bottles or having gang fights with zip guns, mind you . . . no, the buyers queried were objecting simply to the sounds of children having a good time together.

More important, though, I think thhe social life of most schools is so competitive and snobbish and status-oriented, and so full of meanness and teasing and ganging up, that--even if I didn't have any other reason for wanting to keep a child out of school--that very "society" would be reason enough to educate the youngster at home! I don't think schools teach young people anything about friendship, intimacy, and trust.

PLOWBOY: Suppose the children want to go back to school when they get older. Do they have peer problems then?

HOLT: Actually, they'll be in better shape for coping with school, because they're going there by choice and for their own reasons. It's like the difference between a prisoner in jail and a sociologist who goes in to study prison conditions. Both people are in the same building, but they're in very different frames of mind.

PLOWBOY: You think that public schools might actually cooperate?

HOLT: Oh, yes . . . we're begining to see evidence of such a trend now. For example, I know of several school districts in Massachusetts that are saying to homeschooling parents, "If your children want to come to school and use the library and gym, or take part in a play . . . why, they're welcome to do so."

And why not? Home schooling is not a threat that's going to overturn the whole school system. Most people are never going to try it . . . they don't like their children enought to want them around all of the time!

It's so easy to feel like we've been doing the same thing forever, but as long as there's a new person at the other end of the exchange, it is not the same thing.

Last Saturday, the NPR Weekend Edition interview with Carole King talked about her new "Welcome to my Living Room" tour. What got me was her response to Scott Simon's question about whether she gets tired of being asked to play one of her hits from 30 years ago... a song she's been playing now for three decades. She said that sometimes it is hard, at first, but then something happens...

"Every audience is new and different, and they breathe new life into the song."

But the fans stuck it out, shivering and huddling under plastic tarps, blankets, and trash bags and everyone was drenched. Chris Martin kept mentioning how grateful he was that everyone was there putting up with this. He even apologized for the weather!? But at the end, when he should have been as anxious as anyone to just get the hell out of there, he said he was going to do something they never do... an extra encore. He told us that he felt so bad about what we'd been going through that he wanted to do something special for us, so they came back out again after their last encore, and then did something they'd never planned on... and started playing.

We felt like we were the most special audience they'd ever played for. Here we all were, completely miserable, and still thinking we were lucky to have been part of that show, and that we experienced something nobody else would.

Who’d’a thunk? Surely the biggest cliché on the planet, but still full of life. I don’t get it, but it would appear you can still use flowers with gay abandon! Go nuts; use them for everything! Maybe it can fill in for a globe or something.

There's a game I used to play where you take a really small image from the painting of a famous artist and try to identify it. The trick is to see how small a sample you can use before you can no longer recognize either the painting or the artist. It's amazing just how identifiable a Van Gogh or a Monet or a Kandinsky or a Miro is, just from the tiniest slice. It's a wonderful game to teach yourself to really see the way the artist used color, texture, light, shapes, lines, etc.

Why shouldn't a book be a reflection of the brand? Most publishers will tell you that they are. They enforce editorial standards and layout guidelines to help ensure consistency. But consistency is not enough! Not nearly enough to make a memorable impact. Not nearly enough to be even identifiably unique, let alone remarkable.

The problem with so many non-fiction books, especially books meant to be instructional, is that they're treated as "writing", when they should be treated as "experiences."

You spent your first two years of college maintaining an inhuman blood alcohol level, when it hits you--you've taken out loans to pay for this drinking.

The problem is, you virtually never hear a student say that. It's always the parents or someone speaking on behalf of the educational system. When was the last time you honestly heard (and believed) an actual current college student claim that the true benefit of their formal college education is in learning to be a lifelong learner? That's just bulls***.

The real curiosity, for me and others, is why we spend so much time railing against the decline in public schools for K-12 in the US, while higher education practically gets a free pass. The only major complaints you hear are about the rising costs, when to me--that may be the least of it.

"I have no idea if I'll ever open a restaurant or develop this into a professional career, but whatever investment I make in this will serve me and make me happy for the rest of my life. I'll be using what I learn here in my personal life, almost every day, regardless of my career. How many people can say that about 90% of what they learned in college?"

Still, I look longingly at the cute Target dorm furniture and think, "maybe one day..." Then I hear what my friends are paying in college tuition, and snap out of it.

Very interesting post. I've done a fair amount of school (double majored in english and math, with an MS in engineering), and I feel that I got a lot out of it. But I have been blown away with what an interested, focused person can accomplish in software development with no degree (or even no coursework) in computer science.

At first, I thought the "self-taught" pheonomenon was a quirk of the software world - that the rapid rate of change in programming was somehow differentiated it from more mature fields (like medicine or law). But lately, I've come around to the notion that the presence of experts without degrees in software represents the norm, not the exception, for learning. People can become truly expert in fields without a "formal" education as long as they have access to information, tools for experimentation, and a passion for learning.

There's a reason the phrase "college education" is two words - it's a special case of the much broader concept of "education".

i always felt the degree was a formality. i worked hard, did well and graduated, but i never felt as if it would define me. i just knew i needed it to get into that interview. i always thought that once i got some place, i'd make some noise. so far i was right. i can't wait to see who i learn from next and what i can do. i'm just one of many.

Most of the things I learned at varsity were extra-mural. But those extra mural activities were supported by the structure imposed by being in a learning environment.

It is far easier for the passionate entrepreneur to turn joy into money then it is for the rich person to turn money into joy.

If you're 18, reasonably bright, and clueless about the world, college gives you 4 years to figure it out. If you're 22, very bright, and STILL clueless about the world...try grad school.

As countries grow richer and women get educated, they have fewer children and invest more in each one. Whereas peasants in Mali cannot afford not to have kids, many Westerners fret that they cannot afford to have them.

The stockmarket debut in 1995 of Netscape, the first popular web browser, marked the internet's first generation. The merger of “old media” Time Warner and “new media” AOL, announced in 2000, came to symbolise that era's excesses; and the collapse in 2001 of Webvan, a notoriously hapless dotcom, epitomised the bust. This week's pairing of Google and YouTube may come to be remembered as the moment “Web 2.0”—ie, the web, version two—came of age.

The surgeries are designed with whatever elements are necessary to allow NH to meet the price consumers can afford and still make a profit. This “consumer-generated” approach represents a big change for most managers, particularly in health-care institutions. They are more accustomed to basing their price on the industry-established cost, plus profit. But with a ceiling for costs determined by customer needs, breakthrough innovators are driven to play more effectively in the rest of the sandbox, redesigning their processes as needed to meet those cost requirements.

The zone of comfort drives away the zone of opportunity.

”ahh the old hibernate/spring/JSF/MySQL solution, so lightweight…”

What is remarkable, though, is that to make the solution small means also making it clear.

What is remarkable, though, is that to make the solution small means also making it clear. I think that this has mostly to do with human brains. We can only think one or maybe two sentences worth of thought at a time, so finding the concepts that make your solution one sentence is essential. The famous haskell quicksort is a perfect example of this. I can’t help but feel jealous of the computer science students ten years from now who will see algorithms presented in that way. (If you don’t read haskell the program just says: “An empty list is quicksorted. The quicksort of a non-empty list is the concatenation of (1) the quicksort of list elements less than the first element, (2) the first element itself, and (3) and the quicksort of list elements greater than the first element.” Though, of course, the haskell version is much briefer.)

We want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

The wonderful thing about the above quote is that it gets less brave and more obvious every year.

If I could transmit only a single sentence to the programmers of tomorrow which summed up everything I knew it would be that: write short functions

"I actually feel like I did some of my best work as a technical writer in those early years, because I didn't know anything," he says. "I would just have to read stuff until I saw the patterns."

one of the Web's most powerful features is that it lets users control their own destiny. Users go where they want, when they want. This quality is what makes the Web so usable, despite its many usability problems.

I finished tufte last night... what a disaster, or perhaps sunk with high expectations.

I'm a huge fan of dr. tufte's very influential writing on information visualization - as far as I know he's done the best work in the field. But this book - while simply physically and visually stunning - is a real disappointment.

In this work I read about 20% insight, 40% recycled material and preaching to what is probably the choir (this includes an overly repetitious chapter-long discussion of minard's lovely march to moscow graphic & his previously available power point piece), and 40% filler & drek. I don't find his comments on art, writing styles, baseball, and the like to be terribly compelling, and are certainly done better in many other works - and indeed, his thoughts on these ended up as being pretty grating and condescending, if not just wrong.

And that the book ends with several pages of photos (a few of really poor quality, I might add) his own outdoor artwork (which are of passable quality, but what the *bleep* does this have to do with evidence as defined at the front of the book?) only throws salt on the wounds.

This thing is maddeningly inconsistent. I wish I could simply dismiss the work, but it's full of beauty and joy as well as the bad. Sparklines are fun, but could be improved on. Words + images combined inline, some great stuff there. But while some of the really lovely things, like the translations of galileo, are wonderful and exciting to any science-loving person, they really are pretty pointless to the conversation at hand. He has gone straight down since his first major book - a 5+ star effort, the 2nd, 4.5-5 stars, 3rd, 3 stars, and this is about a 2 star one (2.5+ if you haven't read the others.)

If he'd stop believing his sycophants and stop taking himself so seriously in his quest to convince the reader that he's a high priest on a moral crusade it'd be wonderful. He really does try to convince the reader that this topic is of high moral concern - not just sometimes, but in general. I don't buy it.

And you shouldn't buy this if you haven't read his other works (although if you haven't I'll admit you'll probably like this, you just don't know any better ;-)). Read the staggeringly good "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" or the wonderful "Envisioning Information". And if you must read this, soak up the good points, and try not to grind your teeth with the rest.

We need software as a commodity. Creating software is an art. Therein lies the problem.

Bottom line- software is one of the least purpose specific products on the market (compare with a car, screwdriver, skateboard, bicycle, etc.) and as a result, will continue to be very buggy for some time to come. Think of very specific purpose systems like Tivo and you will see software of much higher quality due to limited usage patterns. Use a skateboard as a hammer or a car as a bulldozer and watch how long they meet your need.

For most people, you will run out of needs before Pagemaker runs out of capabilities.

Archeology is a highly underrated model for search and discovery. When your work is in piles everywhere, strata and proximity make immediately clear loose relationships and eras. Why can't computer desktops work this way? A folder shows no external indication whether it's bulging or empty, worn and frayed or newly-minted.

These are things we're already wired to notice and account for - why not capitalize on them?

Users are interested in direct links to documents, not in operating systems and aps. Opening screens should show documents, not an OS. The metaphor for the interface should be the information, not an OS, not an ap, not a marketing experience.

Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn't do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it'll stay that way forever, then you find you've lost it.

And Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1933 that the time will soon come when more satisfaction derives from the job than from consuming.

Now, if your children ask "how big is 1/16 of an inch, daddy," you can stand tall and declare "up arrow."

FIBER networks cross the world. Data bits move at light speed. The globe has been flattened, and national boundaries obliterated. Yet in Silicon Valley, the one place that is responsible more than any other for creating the network technology that supposedly renders geography irrelevant, physical distance is very much on the minds of the investors who provide venture capital.

Capital and attention are lavished on entrepreneurs in the Valley as in no other place. Ten years ago, when Dow Jones VentureOne began a quarterly survey of where venture investments landed, one-third of all deals in the country went to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, the same share of deals has gone to the same place, almost without variation. Most recently, in the first six months of this year, Silicon Valley still pulled in 32 percent; the region with the second-largest total, New England, was far behind, at 10 percent.

Kleiner Perkins has only one office, the one in Menlo Park. Sequoia has reached out to entrepreneurs more considerately, providing five offices. But only one of the five, the one in Menlo Park, is in the United States. The others are in China (two), India and Israel.

So I was happy when I saw the Story Editor since it looked like a basic word processing tool that the editors and assistants could use easily (i.e., without my help) when they want to put in something like last-minute caption edits.

If you stick to a directory structure URL (/about/), the page’s web address remains consistent, regardless of how the site is actually put together. And that’s gold; links don’t break, time is not wasted, and joy abounds.

At Harvard last year, endowments and gifts were a greater source of revenue than its MBA tuition fees.

AMERICA may be the land of the free, but Americans who favour both economic and social freedom have no political home. The Republican Party espouses economic freedom—ie, low taxes and minimal regulation—but is less keen on sexual liberation. The Democratic Party champions the right of homosexuals to do their thing without government interference, but not businesspeople. Libertarian voters have an unhappy choice. Assuming they opt for one of the two main parties, they can vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.

When Republicans win elections, it is because they manage to pull together an alliance between social conservatives and libertarians. But, as Ryan Sager put it in “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party”: “[L]ibertarians have always tended to see social conservatives as rubes ready to thump nonbelievers on the head with the Bible first chance they get, and social conservatives have always tended to see libertarians as dope-smoking devil-worshippers.”

This book is a reminder that France also has a great many intelligent, incisive writers of great clarity and passion, who not only don't hate America but admire it without gushing.

When it came to developing a fifth generation of computer languages, this orderly evolution fizzled out. The Japanese government's Fifth-Generation Computer project—aimed at marrying artificial intelligence techniques with programming—was abandoned in 1992, with little to show for ten years of research and billions of yen. The Japanese policymakers did not foresee the rise of the Internet and the need for an entirely different approach.

Another trend, which predates the web, but was greatly stimulated by it, is the shift to “object-oriented” programming. The objects in question tend to be convenient representations in computer code of counterparts in the real world. For example, a clickable button on a web page is an object.

Nifty as it is, however, Java does not always live up to its promise of being computer agnostic. “Write once, debug everywhere” is how cynics describe it.

How fast could all this happen? Although the .NET platform required a massive effort on the part of Microsoft, the language C^# was developed by a team of four researchers in a mere two years, with a similar-sized effort producing the compiler. It is thus within the realms of a small start-up's aspirations to develop the Java language for the next generation of the web, and to rely on open-source methods to generate the necessary environment. As the clash between C^# and Java shows, there is a huge amount at stake in setting the trend for programming languages. Expect a whole alphabet soup of new languages within the next decade.

The most public of Dr Mead's admirers is George Gilder, a technology guru, author and éminence grise during the Reagan administration. “No single individual has exerted a more profound influence on modern human productivity,” Mr Gilder wrote of Carver Mead in Forbes in 1988.

“The unifying objective,” they say, “is to avoid becoming a unified object.”

After launch costs, insurance is the second largest expense in getting a satellite into orbit, accounting for as much as 15-20% of a mission's price tag.

Designers of small satellites also have high hopes for micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). These silicon chip-like devices, fabricated with the help of etching and vapour deposition techniques borrowed from the semiconductor industry, combine a variety of sensing functions with the ability to activate microscopic levers, switches, valves and pumps carved into their innards. As such, they are true machines capable of performing mechanical work. The use of MEMS should lead to tiny radio-frequency transmitters and microscopic propulsion units and power generators.

Such devices, says David Williamson of the United States Air Force Research Laboratories, could revolutionise the way in which satellites are designed and built. Besides reducing their size, weight and power consumption, the use of MEMS devices would give far better component integration (and hence greater efficiency) in areas such as propulsion, communication, data processing, power generation and navigation.

Unlike computers, satellites depend far more on mechanical systems than on digital ones—and they have thus benefited far less from the effects of the rule-of-thumb law about the inexorable shrinking of prices and increasing of capacity that was first propounded by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, decades ago. That could all change once MEMS-based propulsion systems and other components are ready to fly.

Then, there would be no stopping the small-satellite brigade. Like computers before them, prices of small satellites could be expected to tumble and performance to rise remorselessly as the market widened from government agencies to include companies and universities, and then wider still to include small communities and co-operatives, and finally to embrace even wealthy individuals. Twenty years ago, nobody could seriously have imagined owning a supercomputer of their own. Today, a third of all families in the industrial world have the functional equivalent in their living room. The arrival of the “personal satellite” could be every bit as dramatic as was the personal computer.

Back in the 1980s, post-modern academics were basking in the youthful confidence of a new field. These were the people who, especially on American campuses, devoted themselves to disciplines (the word is used loosely) with the word “studies” attached: media studies, film studies, cultural studies and ethnic, racial, gender and sexual studies.

New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this “disconfirmation”.) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers mocked the “Great Disappointment” mercilessly. But even as they jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had been a great event after all—but in heaven, not on Earth. This happening was that Jesus had begun an “investigative judgment of the dead” in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between 1874 and 1975.

Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King Jesus on Earth.

[What] earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption.

God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.

The new financial aristocrats don't wear old school ties. Many don't wear ties at all. People have brought talents and tastes from the four corners of the globe. The ethos is American: what you know matters more than who you know.

Meanwhile, the salaries of top sportsmen have increased rapidly. Since 1992, when the top division in the English football league signed a deal with Sky, a broadcaster, the clubs' wage bills have increased by 17% a year, according to Stefan Szymanski, an economist at Imperial College in London. This has helped to uphold the notion that people who excel at what they do deserve to be paid much more than those who are merely mediocre. And, conversely, that the rich must also be very good at whatever it is they do. The yuppies would be appreciated more now.

But from northern Russia to the Middle East, the sight of ruined churches, empty refectories and defaced frescoes is a poignant image of modernity's effects on places whose ability to adapt has been impressive, but not infinite.

Forward thinkers understand content is still king and focus on such while deploying minimal upgrades, rather than relying on skillful makeovers that gain short-lived traffic spurts following award listings but offer downright weak content.

To be a successful freelancer, you need to have a passion for what you do. Passion (with the aid of caffeine) will keep you working late into the night when the rest of your friends are down the pub or fast asleep. Equally passion will keep you focused, motivated and away from the TV when times are slow. It’s the driving factor that got you into the industry in the first place, and in all likelihood the reason why you chose to go freelance.

Passion is particularly important when dealing with potential employers, be they design agencies or end clients. As somebody who uses freelancers myself, being able to demonstrate your love for the industry is much more important than your experience or technical ability. After all you can teach somebody a new skill, but you can’t teach them to enjoy their work. Ultimately this passion will be contagious and will rub off onto your clients, prospects and the work you do.

As a freelancer, your resume isn’t worth the disk space it’s saved onto. Instead what you need is a killer portfolio. If you are new to freelancing, building up a portfolio can be quite tricky. The best way to do this is to contact friends and family and offer to build them a website. I’m not suggesting you do this for FREE as this is potentially damaging to the industry and can also leave you in the difficult situation where your work isn’t valued. If you must do something for FREE, consider offering your services to a charity or community group who just wouldn’t be able to afford the services of a professional designer. Alternatively, create your own personal project or sandbox where you can demonstrate your ideas. I’ve hired freelancers in the past based solely on the basis of their personal work.

I complain about the cult of designer ego because it takes away from the craft mentality that leads to better work. The cult of editorial ego is another matter altogether: surrounded as we are by stilted prose, overstatement and eye–glazing textual banality, text has no more implicit safety in the hands of editors.

How can you design for the web if you can’t code? How can you direct photography if you’ve never worked in a darkroom? How can you design text if you’re not a careful reader?

That the physiobiology of reading is one that demands easy points of exit and entry

That print designers who gauge their work on the screen, and web designers who gauge their work exclusively on their own machines, are arrogant in their disregard

That simply paying attention to the design of type, or distinguishing it as “fine” or “invisible” or “classical” is like making a big deal about putting salt on a boiled egg

That letters are not pictures of things, but things

That words are not things, but pictures of things

Most popular, active forums are associated with great websites—websites that include a great deal of unique content and are updated on a regular basis. Link lists or news feeds from other sites won’t cut it, so if you don’t already have a thriving website with compelling, original content, you’ll need spend the time required to create one. To get back to our party metaphor, think of this part as the foundation of your healthy social life: becoming an interesting person and making some friends.

Now that I’ve scared off all the folks who want a “website in a box,” we can get started building a forum.