Using Computers to Empower Curious Students
Earlier this week I posted about a low cost computer called Raspberry Pi and how the benefits of cheap computing are enormous. At a $25 price point you’re able to be curious, try new things, and make mistakes without costly consequences. Its high upside and low downside. A few days later the NY Times ran [...]
Give to Charity Day!
Donors ChooseToday is the last business day of 2011. Any loose ends need to be tied up, especially for tax purposes. I recommend people do two things, go to your bank accounts and make sure all tax applicable changes are completed and go to your favorite charity and donate. It’s tax deductible. To help with the [...]
The Right Formula for a Startup
A Company Demonstrating InconsistencyEvery week there’s a story about a sure thing startup in the news. The idea is usually the hiding in plain sight kind, where it’s such an obvious opportunity that you’re amazed no one has thought of it before. A can’t miss. Unfortunately, many of these companies turn out to be Tuesday morning commutes – [...]
6.5 Graphs Outlining the US Economy
I’m in a room that’s 8 feet by 10 feet. It’s just me. There’s a small box playing loops of TV shows, but I’m ignoring it. The temperature is 95 degrees but its cold in here. And I have a lot to think about. I know I’m going to pay for it. Situations like this [...]
Split Personalities – Tax Breadth and Tax Depth
We seem to have split personalities when it comes to the news and our politics. In the news we hear about natural disasters and the sour economy. In politics we hear about the failings of the President and the deficit. Why are these two voices talking about different subjects? The truth is they are talking [...]
Value Creator – CEOs
Chief Executive Magazine and chiefexecutive.net are running the third annual list of CEOs that are value creators and value destroyers . The standard measurement of a CEO doing well is the stock price, but there are influences on a stock price that may or may not happen. For instance Apple’s stock price barely budged when [...]
Learning about Risk and Reward in the Marketplace
The US has a culture where commerce permeates everything. It’s practically omnipresent. Because of this many Americans unknowingly learn facets of business that other cultures do not. A Harvard
Business Review blog entry by Vijay Govindarajan called Marketplace Literacy: A Reverse Innovation
Opportunity? pulls out three aspects of business: the skill being sold, the know-how to be efficient and the know-why to be effective. Here’s an excerpt example:
Marketplace literacy itself can be viewed at three levels: the concrete level of vocational skills or a trade, the more abstract
level of business know-how, and the level of understanding, or “know-why,” about the marketplace. For instance, suppose a poor woman who knows how to cook (a vocational skill) starts a food shop. To
run the business, she needs know-how — specifically, she needs to know how to set the menu and prices, choose a location, and promote her business. She also needs “know-why” — to understand why it’s
important to be customer oriented, why to choose one location and not some other, and, ultimately, why to go into this business and not something else.
Teachers Often Go the Extra Mile for Their Students – There’s a Means to Help Them Get There
It’s back to school time. Parents have spent precious dollars getting their kids backpacks, notebooks, new clothes, and other supplies. But I’ve observed first hand that many teachers also spend getting ready for school. Often times there’s the perfect lesson that needs this or that to be perfect. Or there’s a student or two who [...]
Billions of Dollars: Giving, Spending, Fighting, Accumulating, Owing, Losing, and Earning
The smart people over to Informationisbeautiful.net created something called a The Billion Dollar-o-Gram . Its a Treemap. I don’t
visually get why its called that, but it’s the method for displaying heirarchical data by using nested rectangles.
What I like about it is the relationships. Understanding proportions when talking about big numbers is difficult, so an illustration like the one below helps immensely, especially when people mention
a few billion spent on this or a few billion going on that.
I suggest checking out a book by them as well. It’s called The Visual Miscellaneum and it’s $17.81 over at Amazon.com .
One more item about their work, they provide a link to all their supporting data
.
Opinions on the Economy for Today and Tomorrow
The jobs report came out last week and it left me utterly befuddled. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t as
terrible as it appears (relatively speaking of course). There’s a certain segment of employment that has shrunk and is never coming back. A CNNMoney.com article claims it could be almost 8 million jobs. But conversely there are certain types of jobs that are going unfilled because the number of
candidates to fill them are few. For instance, last week the NY Times published a story about manufacturing companies struggling to find candidates who knew how to work a sophisticated computerized machinery. And now I’m reading about something called rural sourcing. It’s mostly the same advantages as outsourcing, but it’s hiring or setting up facilities in small towns in the
US. At one point taxes were such a monetary consideration that places like China and India were no brainers.