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Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer talks with entrepreneurs at a JuicePitcher event about the history of his startup, Mint. Vator.tv recorded the video

What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian

By John Hasnas,

Political analysts frequently consider what it means to be a libertarian. In fact, in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled “What It Means to Be a Libertarian” that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy. But almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a libertarian. How does it actually feel to be someone who holds the principles described in Murray’s book?

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920′s that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. [...] It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

[...]

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education

Web technology is poised to shake universities, the way it rocked newspapers and the music industry—with convenient, cheaper alternatives.

“The economics of traditional schooling are so out of whack that there is an opening for new players,” says Fred Fransen, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, which helps donors more effectively give money to universities. From that perch, Fransen sees the typical university business model as prone to attack.

[...]

The Harvards of the world won’t go away. They will continue to be the high-fidelity players in the fidelity/convenience trade-off. But a large swath of the population might decide that going deeply into debt before even starting work is too high a price to pay for a high-fidelity education when a more convenient version will do. They will pull out of mid-level universities. Just as surely as many consumers gave up music CDs for Internet downloads, many students will soon decide to put aside a four-year stint at a traditional university for a cheap, easy, and good-enough degree delivered through laptop screens and smart phones. Schools in the middle of the pack—neither high-fidelity nor high-convenience—will have to adapt or suffer.

The (not so?) long tail

Rethinking the Long Tail Theory: How to Define ‘Hits’ and ‘Niches’

In a working paper titled, “Is Tom Cruise Threatened? Using Netflix Prize Data to Examine the Long Tail of Electronic Commerce,”Wharton Operations and Information Management professor Serguei Netessine and doctoral student Tom F. Tan pull information from the movie rental company Netflix to explore consumer demand for smash hits and lesser-known films. Netflix made its data available as part of a $1 million prize competition to encourage the development of new ways that will improve its ability to introduce customers to lesser-known titles they might find appealing.

[...]

The paper argues that the research findings have important implications because the Long Tail theory has gained momentum in the business world. “Whether or not the Long Tail exists is a fundamental question for decision makers in marketing, operations and finance who face the prospect of further penetration of the Internet channel, which offers expanding product variety and new recommendation systems to help manage it,” the paper states.

According to Netessine, the research is likely to generate controversy because of its findings that contradict the popular Long Tail theory. Nonetheless, Anderson is the first individual acknowledged at the end of the paper for “his encouraging comments and constructive advice.” Says Netessine: “We have agreed to disagree.”

The Paranoid Center

How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent by Jesse Walker on Reason.com

On June 10, 2009, an elderly man entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, raised a rifle, and opened fire, killing a security guard named Stephen Tyrone Johns. Two other guards shot back, wounding the gunman before he could end any more lives.

The killer was soon identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, an 88-year-old neo-Nazi.Von Brunn acted alone, but there was no shortage of voices eager to spread the blame for his crime. The murder was quickly linked, in a free-associative way, to the assassination 10 days earlier of the Kansas abortionist George Tiller. This, we were told, was a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence.”

[...]

It’s comforting to imagine that violence and paranoia belong only to the far left and right, and that we can protect ourselves from their effects by quarantining the extremists and vigilantly expelling anyone who seems to be bringing their ideas into the mainstream. But the center has its own varieties of violence and paranoia. And it’s far more dangerous than anyone on the fringe, even the armed fringe, will ever be.

Blogging homeworks

Why not?  My “back to school” week made me think about that. Yes, between 40+ hours of work with Ex Machina and 4 master degree classes there’s still time to think (OK, not that much).

• It’s easy. Once an essay is written, publishing it is just a click away.
• It’s a good way to show what you can do. It beats just showing a diploma, it shows why you deserve it.
• When you publish in the public domain, you can’t let go a “good enough” text, it pushes you do to something you’ll want to show the world.
• You get a lot more for your sweat. Instead of just getting a grade you get a grade AND a chance to start an interesting conversation and/or get useful feedback.

So in the following months i’ll blog my stuff, let’s hope it won’t suck!

Divorcer en se lançant des livres au lieu de la vaisselle

L’autonomie institutionnelle  est désirée par deux types de directeurs : Ceux qui veulent la liberté d’action et ceux qui veulent diriger leur empire au lieu d’être un acteur d’un système plus grand.

La différence entre les deux vient de la capacité de la personne à rassembler les gens autour d’un projet d’avenir et d’être prêt à s’engager à sa réalisation. Il faut être prêt à affirmer son intention et de susciter l’intérêt des membres de l’institution. Et suite à l’annonce de Raymond Duchesne du 11 juin, je ne peux faire autrement que de constater que nous ne sommes pas devant cette situation.

Ma question était simple : « À quel point la Téluq est prête à brasser sa propre cabane pour redevenir une pionnière en matière de formation hors-campus ? », et sa réponse ? Bien, je cherche encore s’il y a eu une réponse. Derrière la langue de bois il n’y avait aucun engagement.

La Téluq a besoin d’une sérieuse mise à jour, les dernières années ont vu naitre une foule d’outils pédagogiques et communicationnels incroyables. La Télé-Université a manqué le bateau en gaspillant son énergie sur ses disputes internes. D’ici à ce qu’un plan de renouvellement soit mis en place, je ne peux faire autrement que de constater que fusion / défusion, c’est pas mal du pareil au même.

Qui de Corbo ou de Duchesne saura amener sur la table un projet ambitieux et innovant pour notre université ? Malgré tout ce qu’on peut reprocher au rapport Brossard, au moins c’est un pas vers autre chose que l’immobilisme. D’ici à ce que le projet de séparation ressemble à autre qu’une chicane de famille, je ne peux pas appuyer cette option.

AÉTÉLUQ – Rencontre du 15 mars

Suite à une demande du conseil d’administration de l’AÉTÉLUQ je me vois dans l’obligation de retirer mes billets à propos de l’association. Jusqu’à nouvel ordre, je ne pourrai plus blogguer à propos de mon expérience d’administrateur au sein de cette organisation.

Education shifts, time-location becoming a process

He's learning, are you?

When we thought about education, we used to think about a building, some brick and mortar place where we went to sit on a bench and acquire stuff from 9AM to 4PM. Some DIYers used to go to the library to do it on the side, and that was pretty much the end of the story.

Fast forward to today. Learning is everywhere. We have a new gadget every month that we have to get used to. New tasks to master at work every other day. Society changes at a rhythm needing constant adaptation to. Globalization transports the big next thing all around the world. The internet brings knowledge to us at a speed unknown to the last generation. Our cell phones will close the gap between cyberspace and alwayspace. The line between learning and the rest of our life is gone.

What’s the place for education “as we know it” in all that? Nowhere.

Our schools worked for two reasons. First, we had to all be at the same place at the same time to communicate, this is over. Today’s communication tools shatter the gaps between us. We can talk to anyone anywhere without any troubles or costs. Second, we had the assumption that what we learned once was enough to go through an entire lifetime. Now we have to start over all the time. Stuff, ideas and systems get obsoletes by the time they’re put to use. We have the power and the necessity to learn in a process way, we are not constrained anymore by time or location.

We have internet schools, education in the work place, plans for continuous improvement during our careers, asynchronous communication between students and teachers, the list goes on and on. And still, it’s just the beginning. Stuff that at first look seems to be just 2.0 versions of old stuff – like thinking that Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia on the computer – are radically altering the way we interact with knowledge.

The future belongs to schools and organizations that will jump the wave and offer us new and interesting ways to access the information we need in our new lives. The internet is not just a virtual classroom; email is not just digital snail mail. That transition won’t be easy. “Doing what used to work, but faster” seems logic, but it’s not the right path. Those that will take the “let’s build something once impossible to create” way won’t all succeed, but they will push the limits of what we think we can do as humans. And this is where you want to be; otherwise you’ll get on the obsolete list of next month.