Dennis Crowley on Work and Productivity

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The New York Times has a good interview with Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare:

On things he’s learned being a CEO:

As the company has grown, I can sometimes start to feel disconnected, and I’ll decide to randomly meet with one person a day, and we’ll go out for a half-hour coffee. You do that for six weeks or so, and then all the channels of communication are open again. People feel like they can come and talk to me. I learn about the things that are troubling them or challenging them, or questions they might have.

I liked this exchange also:

Q. You worked at Google for a couple of years. Anything you’ve borrowed from that culture?

A. A lot of it. One of them is this idea of weekly snippets. Every Monday, you send in a bullet list of the stuff you’ve been working on, and the software compiles a list and mails it out to the entire company. So you can quickly scan them to find out the status of a project or what somebody is working on. It gives you a nice general overview of the company. So you follow the people you want to get updates from, but we make sure that everyone automatically gets them from me and our C.O.O. and our head of engineering and our head of product.

When I send out mine, the first heading is, “Things I’m Psyched About,” and the next is, “Things That I’m Not So Psyched About” or “Things I’m Stressed About.”  The next thing is usually a quote of the week — something I heard from one of our investors or maybe overheard from an employee — and then I have my snippets below that.

I’ve been using this system for about a year, and it works out great. I get a lot of feedback from employees. It only takes them a minute or two to read, and it’s like a bird’s-eye view of what I think is going well at the company and areas where I think we could improve. It’s also a good way to start a conversation. So I might write, “Hey, I heard someone say this, and so let me address why we’re thinking about it this way.”

You can find Dennis Crowley on Twitter here.

Science Fiction Writers Predict 2012 in 1987

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In 1987, a slew of science fiction writers were asked to predict the world 25 years away. These time capsule predictions of the year 2012 have been unveiled. A lot of the writers were way off, and here are the highlights. Who do you think was the most accurate?

ISAAC ASIMOV:

Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.

ALGIS BUDRYS:

Because we will be in a trough between 20th-century resources and 21st-century needs, in 2012 all storable forms of energy will be expensive. Machines will be designed to use only minimal amounts of it. At the same time, there will be a general expectation that a practical cheap-energy delivery system is just around the corner. Individuals basing their career plans on any aspect of technology will concentrate on that future, leaving contemporary machine applications to the less ambitious or to those who foresee a different future. The most socially approved-of individuals will constitute a narrowly focused aristocracy, and will be at the mercy of dull functionaries and secretive rebels who actually perform the day-to-day maintenance of society. It should be noted that most minimal-energy devices process information and microscopic materials, not consumer goods. The function of “our” society may depend on processing information and biotechnology to subjugate goods-producing societies. These societies may be geographically external, or may be yet another social stratum within central North America. In either case, crowd-management technologies will have to turn away from forms that might in any way impair capital goods production. Social regimentation will then have become so deft that most people will regard any other social milieu as pitiable.  

TIM POWERS:

Probate and copyright law will be entirely restructured by 2012 because people will be frozen at death, and there will be electronic means of consulting them. Many attorneys will specialize in advocacy for the dead.

ORSON SCOTT CARD:

We must count ourselves lucky if anyone has leisure enough in 2012 to open this time capsule and care what is inside. In 2012 Americans will see the collapse of Imperial America, the Pax Americana, as having ended with our loss of national will and national selflessness in the 1970s. Worldwide economic collapse will have cost America its dominant world role; but it will not result in Russian hegemony; their economy is too dependent on the world economy to maintain an irresistible military force. A new world order will emerge from famine, disease, and social dislocation: the re-tribalization of Africa, the destruction of the illusion of Islamic unity, the struggle between aristocracy and proletariat in Latin America—without the financial support of the industrialized nations, the old order will be gone. The changes will be as great as those emerging from the fall of Rome, with new power centers emerging wherever stability and security are established. The homogeneity of Israel will probably allow it to survive; Mexico and Japan may change rulers, but they will still be strong. If America is to recover, we must stop pretending to be what we were in 1950, and reorder our values away from pursuit of privilege.

And perhaps the most accurate predictions come courtesy of DAVE WOLVERTON, who wrote that in 2012 we would see:

1) That economic cycles caused by rises in technological levels will begin to level out—countries that have a falsely inflated economy will be forced to export their technologies to third-world countries where people are willing to work for less money. This will lead to a situation where knowledge, the key to our technologic success, will be spread across the world. We’ll see rapid decreases in starvation levels, but will still be plagued with political turmoil.

2) Men’s Rights—We will see a reaction to the women’s movement. Men will demand to be portrayed by the media as the sensitive, caring creatures that they are. They will also demand equal rights in custody battles where children are seldom awarded to a father because our society chooses to believe a mother is a better care-taker by nature.

3) Introduction of x-ray microscopes in the early 2000’s will lead to rapid progress in gene splicing. Look for rapid growth in medicine and mining, and food production. We may also see bacteria being engineered to simulate parts of the immune system (which could cure immune disorders such as AIDS and allergies).

More here.

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Hat tip: Jodi Ettenberg.

Related: Also see predictions of the year 2000 in 1900.

The Craigslist Experiment

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Eric Auld was having a hard time finding a job, so he decided to work backwards and figure out who he was competing against. So he created a job ad on Craigslist:

Administrative Assistant needed for busy Midtown office. Hours are Monday through Friday, nine to five. Job duties include: filing, copying, answering phones, sending e-mails, greeting clients, scheduling appointments. Previous experience in an office setting preferred, but will train the right candidate. This is a full-time position with health benefits. Please e-mail résumé if interested. Compensation: $12-$13 per hour.

The first response came within four minutes. In 24 hours, he received a staggering 653 responses. He then broke down the applicants’ experience into categories and performed an analysis of who applied. His biggest takeaways were:

1.) Employers won’t notice me by my résumé alone. This one I kind of knew already, but I need to actually follow through with my lesson. Am I really going to stand out in a tidal wave of 626 applications? Probably not. What I should do is figure out methods to grab the employer’s attention, whether it’s finding out if anyone I know works with the organization, seeking out a personal recommendation, or calling to double-check that the employer received my résumé (even though we all know how daunting actual phone calls can be). I need to find additional ways to let the employer know that I am the right man for the job. Anything to make the employer say, “Ah, yes, Mr. Auld,” and not, “Oh, right, Applicant #24601.”

2.) When job searching on Craigslist, apply to positions immediately. 49 percent of responses to this non-existent position were submitted in the first three hours alone — that’s 317 emails. I know that when I apply for jobs, I like to imagine my résumé near the top of the pile; this helps me sleep at night (in addition to scotch). Because of this experiment, I’ve decided to not bother submitting to Craigslist positions that are more than one day old. As for other sites, I’ll probably discard any postings that have been up for more than one week.

An interesting (if not morally honest) experiment. It’s important to point out that Eric has a Master’s degree, and he didn’t consider whether that was an advantage for him when applying for jobs. As echoed in the comments (and also, from my personal experience as well), Master’s degrees often hurt an application more than help, especially in entry level positions. The consensus is that the applicant might be so bored or resentful of the job, that he/she will be looking for something better/different immediately upon starting the new job.

The Aleppo Codex Mystery

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How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex (Hebrew: כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא‎), the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible, go missing? Ronen Bergman investigates in a thrilling piece for New York Times Magazine:

For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures — the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books — were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation. Some of these texts, according to Jewish faith, were handed down directly by God and included signs, messages and codes that pertained directly to the essence of existence. The multiplicity of manuscripts and the worry that any change or inaccurate transcription would lead to the loss of vital esoteric knowledge created the need for a single, authoritative text. And beyond its mystical significance, a unified text was also necessary to maintain Jewish unity after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire. As Adolfo Roitman, the head of the Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls and parts of the codex are displayed, said: “One can regard the thousand years between the scrolls and the codex, the millennium during which the standardization of the text was carried out, as a metaphor for the effort of the Jewish people to create national unity. One text, one people, even if it is scattered to the four ends of the earth.”

According to tradition, early in the sixth century, a group of sages led by the Ben-Asher family in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, undertook the task of creating a formal and final text. The use of codex technology — a method that made it possible to record information on both sides of a page, in book form, as a cheaper alternative to scrolls — had already evolved in Rome. Around A.D. 930, the sages in Tiberias assembled all 24 holy books and completed the writing of the codex, the first definitive Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. From Tiberias, the codex was taken to Jerusalem. But Crusaders laid waste to the city in 1099, slaughtering its inhabitants and taking the codex. The prosperous Jewish community of Fustat, near Cairo, paid a huge ransom for it. Later, in the 12th century, it served Maimonides, who referred to it as the most accurate holy text, as a reference for his major work, the Mishneh Torah. In the 14th century, the great-great-great-grandson of Maimonides migrated to Aleppo, bringing the codex with him. There it was kept, for the next 600 years, in a safe within a small crypt hewed in the rock beneath Aleppo’s great synagogue.

The story of what happened next — how the codex came to Israel and where the missing pages might have gone — is a murky and often contradictory one, told by many self-serving or unreliable narrators. In his book, “The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible,” published in May by Algonquin Books, the Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman presents a compelling and thoroughly researched account of the story, some of which served as the catalyst for additional reporting here.

This piece is a contender for one of the best longreads of 2012. Continue reading here.

A Tribute to Dmitri Nabokov

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Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, remembers Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dmitri was a womanizer, whose life resembled a James Bond film. But he was also his father’s best translator. It’s a beautiful tribute:

Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”

What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.

Great Wines for $20

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Eric Asimov, writing for The New York Times, argues that a wine bottle that comes in at $20 hits the “sweet spot”:

I want wine that excites me, that feels so good to drink that one sip urges on the next and the next after that. I want a wine that tells a story of a place and a people and a culture, that is not the predictable equivalent of a franchise restaurant but more like a little mom-and-pop’s, where you’re not always sure what you’ll find but you know it can have the capacity to inspire.

You might be able to find a bottle like that for $10. But it’s rarer than you think. At $15 to $25, though, the odds swing decidedly in your favor. With a little experience, you can find dozens of joyous bottles, plucked carefully from the ranks of the routine.

To that end, he lists twenty bottles of wine that cost $20 (in Manhattan, so you may be able to find it cheaper in your area):

François Pinon Vouvray Brut NV

A richer sparkling wine that is nonetheless dry, snappy, pure and precise with an undertone of honey, the gorgeous signature of the chenin blanc grape. François Pinon, one of my favorite Vouvray producers, has a knack for coaxing the perfect combination of voluptuous body and laserlike focus from chenin blanc. 

Domaine de l’Octavin Arbois The Péteux NV

This frothy sparkling chardonnay from the Jura is exuberant and floral yet dry, steely and absolutely delicious, perfect for a lunch outdoors. Octavin is a small, rather new estate started by a young couple, Alice Bouvot and Charles Dagand. They are devoted to natural winemaking, and the Péteux is a pétillant naturel. Rather than bottling finished wine with yeast and sugar in the manner of Champagne, which induces a second fermentation to produce bubbles, a pétillant naturel is bottled before the first fermentation is complete, producing a softer fizz. 

La Clarine Farm Sierra Foothills Rosé 2011

This is not one of those onion-skin-colored rosés from Provence, which epitomize the Mediterranean style. It’s darker, a pale ruby blend of syrah and mourvèdre grown in the Sierra Foothills, most often the source of bold, powerful zinfandels. This wine is a lesson in balance and elegance, dry and mineral, light enough for an aperitif yet substantial enough to drink throughout a meal.

Dönnhoff Nahe Estate Riesling 2011

Dönnhoff is one of the great riesling producers. The estate riesling is a blend of grapes from several different sites and offers more than initially meets the eye. Poured directly from a chilled bottle, it seems gently pleasant and lightly sweet at first. But as the wine warms up, its elegant nature becomes apparent, and a richness and rocky minerality emerge. 

See the entire list here.

Any oenophiles among the readers here? What do you think of that $20 wine list?

Oliver Reichenstein: “Good Design is Invisible”

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Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects (iA), the Tokyo, Zurich, and Berlin-based design agency. The company has found recent success in iOS and Mac app development. Writer for iPad is a minimalist text editor (I have it installed on my iPad, and highly recommend it), and per The Verge, “its focus-enhancing combination of sparse visuals and refined typography” has since made the leap to OS X and the iPhone.  Reichenstein recently took the time to answer some of questions on design and development with The Verge:

On invisibility of good design:

To give you an idea, with the new Retina displays we had to optimize the typeface so it looks like it used to look on the iPad 2. To do this we had to grade the typeface, producing subtly different versions for each class of display so they have the same visual weight.

To the user the type looks exactly the same on the retina display as on the iPad 2. This required a lot of tweaking from our side (to find the right definition), and the deep professional knowledge of Bold Monday. Users don’t notice this, but they don’t need to. Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear.

Good design is invisible. Good screen design happens in the subatomic level of microtypography (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macrotypography (how the typeface is used), and the invisible world of interaction design and information architecture. Minimum input, maximum output, with minimal conscious thought is what screen designers focus on. And just as type designers and engineers we do not try to find the perfect solution but the best compromise.

On the origin of iA Writer:

There were so many instances leading to it. I designed my first text editor in the early eighties. I even created a pixel font on a 5 x 5 pixel grid for the text editor. I did all that so I could see more text on the 256 x 192 resolution of my Dragon 32. Some of the ideas came from earning my philosophy student living as an informatics teacher in the nineties teaching MS Word and informatics, desperately trying to get pupils to stop fumbling and to start writing.

The biggest motivation to build iA Writer came from the mad idea to create our own hardware. A digital writing machine (the German word for typewriter). Apparently it is not that hard to produce hardware anymore if you have the right contacts in China. It is still madness for a small studio though. But months after our first sketches Apple presented the iPad, and then producing our own hardware was not necessary anymore.

The Mac version happened because the iOS version was such a big success. We tried to duplicate the same user experience in a completely different environment, which took a fair amount of time to do — and only a couple of weeks to copy.

The interview is also worth reading to get an idea of how Japanese and Western design differ in concept and execution.  As Oliver notes, Japanese web or app design is not comparable to Japanese art, graphic design, or architecture.

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Note: this blog post on the iA blog about how to correct Twitter errors is excellent. Highly recommend it.

Stop Waiting

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From one of my favourite photographers (and writers), David duChemin writes a superb post titled “Stop Waiting”:

My own soul is so sick of this culture of pragmatism that has people locked into their fears and their anxieties as though staying safe will guarantee them immortality. Live forever, but live in fear without ever reaching higher than the cookie jar; that doesn’t sound like a life to me, even if it were possible. There will always be reasons we think we can’t do what we long to do. Few of them, if any, are good. Amputees climb Everest. People with children travel the world. And talentless hacks make a decent living selling kitsch they call art. If they can do it, so can you. So can I. Not easily. Not cheaply. Not quickly. It might take a lifetime and cost us more than we imagined. But we can do it. It’ll be a little easier if we stop being so damn patient, if we stop waiting, get up and try, risk, fail, and repeat.

A must-read in entirety.

David’s book, Within the Frame, is the best $25 investment you can make if you’re into photography. It’s one of the best books I’ve read on the subject of photography. As David says: “Gear is good; vision is better.”

The Visibility and Eloquence of @KimKierkegaard

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The best new account that has popped up on Twitter in the last month is @KimKierkegaard. It’s the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of, who else, Kim Kardashian. These are my favorite tweets from the hilarious mash-up account:

On June 28:

What do you like better steak or cake? Existence is a prodigious contradiction which it is impossible to ponder without becoming passionate.

On July 2:

Man turns outward, away from the source of his happiness, hungry for distraction. Cant wait 4 tonite’s Keeping Up w/ the Kardashians on E !!

On July 16:

To strive to be what one already is, is the most difficult of all tasks. But everyone always thinks I’ve had my nose done.

On July 22:

My soul always turns back to the Old Testament & Shakespeare. They hate, love, murder their enemies. What could be more summery than that?

Find all the tweets under the full name, @KimKierkegaardashian.

A $65 Million Sculpture That Can’t Be Sold

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What is the fair market value of an object that cannot be sold? That’s the lead of this New York Times piece focusing on the intrinsic value of Canyon, a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg. Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, it would be a felony if anyone ever tried to sell. So the appraisers have valued the work at zero.

Two key insights:

The 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act make it a crime to possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, import or export any bald eagle — alive or dead. Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto “Canyon,” Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981.

But the Internal Revenue Service thinks the sculpture has a larger value (to the of $65 million) and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes. So if the owners of the painting can’t sell it, how is the IRS coming up with a non-zero market value for Canyon? Turns out, it is possible that someone overseas may want to purchase the painting illegally. But the NYT points out:

Still, the notion that the I.R.S. might use the black market in this way to determine a fair market value has surprised some tax experts. James Joseph, a tax lawyer with Arnold & Porter in Washington, noted that the I.R.S. has taxed illegal contraband at its market value, but added: “I don’t know of any instance where the I.R.S. has assumed taxpayers will engage in an illegal activity in order to value their assets at a higher amount. Al Capone went to jail for not paying income taxes on his illegal income, but this is very different than that.”

A very interesting Catch-22 in the art world.