Cell Phones Bring Spectroscopy to the Classroom →
I love science and technology. Spectroscopy, honestly not so much.
The Chokehold of Calendars →
In my experience, most people don't schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.Right on.
Customer Service
It has never failed that every time I have walked into the Wells Fargo bank location closest to me that the representative who set up my account, Gabriel, has jumped up from his desk, said hello to me by name, and offered to take me out of line to make my deposit for me. On occasion, he has even filled out the deposit slip because he got to me before I had a chance to. Total time to complete customer satisfaction: 5 minutes.
It has never failed over the last six months that I have had trouble mounting and charging my (now seven years old) iPod. I couldn't quite diagnose what the problem was, but scheduled an appointment at the Apple store today to find out when it stopped charging completely. In two minutes, Ray had faulted the cable and gave me a brand new one out of a drawer. Total time to complete customer satisfaction: 10 minutes.
I would be okay standing in line for a few minutes at a busy bank branch or paying for a new connector cable; I really would be. But a fifty-cent cable was all it took to convince me once again that Apple has some of the best customer support in the world and how foolish I would be to think about buying (or building) a new PC for my next computer. And a five foot walk every other week is all it takes to make me proud to be a Wells Fargo customer and convince me I made the right decision when evaluating banks, even when the customer service couldn't really be factored into a comparison on interest rates and packages and ATMs and locations.
But no matter what comparisons you make, good customer service makes all the difference.
Google Cars Drive Themselves →
The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.My first thought was where they got the technology. Turns out they hired (or already employed) the Stanford engineers that won the second DARPA Grand Challenge.
My second thought: what's the end game? Making cars safer is great, but "the Google researchers said the company did not yet have a clear plan to create a business from the experiments."
This does not surprise me for some reason...
'At Least' Faith →
We all know the "neon sins" we're not supposed to do. We all know the big things we should avoid like the plague. Adultery, murder, money laundering, robbing banks, chances are if I suggested we shouldn't do those things you'd agree. There's nothing groundbreaking about that. But sometimes we play the "at least game."
Anybody under the age of thirty know that they used to use punch cards in phones?
The Symmetry of Share Shifts in Mobile Phones →
Wow. Vectors in business? They take that much math?
Highway engineering FAIL.
The Stock Market As Multithreaded Software →
You say stock market, I say single ginormous multithreaded application.
Interesting analogy between high-frequency trading in the stock market and a multi-threaded software application.