Rotundus.com

Here's a somewhat recent TED talk from an event in Calgary. The basic point that the speaker makes is that a failure to acknowledge failure seems to be holding organizations back.

Here the emphasis is on NGOs targetting international development and the sexiness of building schools and wells plus buying goats versus some of the other problems holding development back. I think that the principle applies more generally though. I'd also argue that it's not a good idea simply to acknowledge your own failures, but also to learn from the failures of those who've attempted things before you.

In How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work, the New York Times today had a bit of an interesting summary of the challenges for the U.S. economy.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that "Made in the U.S.A." is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

It's not just lower wages (and possibly lax enforcement of labor standards) overseas that are an issue, but also other things like flexibility and the strength of supply chains.

I just don't tend to think the "service economy" is particularly viable for the long term.

WestJet plan a new threat to Air Canada

Westjet "... unveiled its proposal to employees on Monday, saying it expects to break with its strategy of maintaining a single fleet of Boeing 737s and will acquire 40 turboprops. The new WestJet operation will oversee short-haul flights, mostly targeting service between smaller cities and major hubs within Canada."

'They took my place!' Single dad trying to take back home occupied by OWS

I'm becoming less and less a fan of OWS all the time. This seems like a little worse than the naivety that I at first associated with them.

9 reasons why your winter fuel economy bites!

I'm a bit surprised that they managed to come up with nine different reasons.

Sorcerer’s Apprentice Hosts a Dinner

Some interesting ideas in the New York Times as to how to apply crazy cooking techniques outside of a science lab.

At least that's what the following bit from Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From made me think of:

Darwin's notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a "commonplace" book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters - just about anyone with intellectual ambitions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of this period - Milton, Bacon, Locke - were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, "commonplacing" as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one's reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing's virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to "lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.

... The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. For some Enlightenment-era advocates, the systematic indexing of the commonplace book became an aspirational metaphor for one's own mental life ... Others, including Priestley and both Darwins, used their commonplace books as a repository for a vast miscellany of hunches.

... Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke's scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

(From p. 84 - 87)

Random meandering tales. Short blurbs of interest. Seems to resemble many a twitter account or blog. Perhaps something like my personal wiki might be a still better approximation. This seems like something distinct from writing in a diary (and is something that I think a lot of research-oriented jobs still encourage).