Wisdom's Quintessence

I have written before about how facebook is bad news, but someone just sent through this slidedeck of facebook cock-ups which should convince everyone that one should be very, very cautious about what they put on the net. Too funny.

And then there’s this one

This youtube video of some customer coming into a Best Buy to get an iPhone and ignoring the sales tech advice is pretty funny. Shame the kid was suspended. HTC should hire him just for the value of being able to claim him as part of their marketing campaign. I guess the same could be said about some Best Buy competition. And Sprint. Lol. I’m also interested in this technology he used to make the video. Xtranormal seems to just eat text and produce speech. We could have used this for our ludi game perhaps. It only works on windoze, but it does seem pretty nifty.

In an update, it looks like Brian, the creator of the video, got off with a slap on the wrist as someone with sense at strategic command at Best Buy figured out that they were about to nuke themselves with negative publicity and public pushback should they continue. Perhaps they should channel Brian’s creativity in an officially sanctioned fashion and get the guy into marketing. He got something viral at 25, and Best Buy should want some of that junk!

Brian did post a counter-point video as well, extolling the problems of the evo. He seems to be pretty critical of both and has some good points on all fronts. Perhaps someone should grab this kid and turn him into an analyst or a tech journalist….

A thoughtful post from Peter Coles summarises the current storm gaining energy to shake up the UK university funding system. How much of this can transmit itself cleanly across the phase interface between Englandshire and Wales and Scotland is unclear, but there are signs that there is going to be serious pain in the North as well.

Paul Hill posted an interesting summary of wifi interference problems recently on the .ac.uk wireless list. I digitally clone it here.

John Casti wrote a recent opinion in New Scientist that is quite interesting, and builds on ideas in his upcoming book Mood Matters, where he pushes an idea he labels social mood. I think that there is merit in these ideas and while he addresses societies at the scale of nation states and even global scales, I think that there is some application to organizations that is important.

The BBC are carrying news about how several UK HEIs are starting to test a dongle that could allow remote exams to be taken with more confidence of no cheating.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lifted off from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida at 15:45 GMT on Friday. This is surely a strong signal that commercial space flight, as foreseen by Asimov and the others, is nearly here.

The BBC ran an interview with Charlie Munger that is very insightful. He is just pushing forth financial analogues of Dewey pragmatism, but it is so true it should be ground into all tertiary students, if not secondary. The fact that so many people grow up with no understanding of financial markets, cycles, terminology, etc., allows the financial classes to get away with murder.

I was pushing the Calacanis post and passed it round to family, friends, colleagues, because I too believe that the FB thing is bad for the internet, just like I believe that closed, proprietary standards will actually thwart innovation. But, amazingly, after Jason finally got his reply to all fiasco sorted, and apologised, out comes another whammy.

Jason Calacanis sent out a big shot across the bows of Zuckerberg about how facebook is playing fast and loose with privacy. Here is the message and some further pushback.