Rock the Boat

Avett Brothers, ” I Never Knew You.” Wish this song...

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:14:30 -0400

Avett Brothers, ” I Never Knew You.” Wish this song didn’t ring so true.

Audio

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:40:26 -0400

newspeedwayboogie: Neil Young - Star of Bethlehem With...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:16:01 -0400

Neil Young - Star of Bethlehem

With Emmlylou Harris on the most understated, yet most perfect, of harmonies. In fact, this is pretty much a perfect song.

shared from exfm

Closing out the weekend with some blues harp

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:38:46 -0400

Closing out the weekend with some blues harp

Information Arbitrage: VC funding vs. Crowdfunding - let's get real

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:05:06 -0400

Information Arbitrage: VC funding vs. Crowdfunding - let's get real:

informationarbitrage:

Crowdfunding is all the rage. Even the SEC recently blessed one type of crowdfunding for which there was risk of an enforcement action. Several in the early-stage ecosystem have called for VCs to “up their game,” as alternative paths to financing create competitive threats to both incumbent…

A great breakdown of VC versus crowd funding, but for me the most important difference is missing: VCs have a very specific and narrow definition of success, whereas crowd funding opens a more diverse range of acceptable outcomes. I think VCs have been a bit myopic on this topic: not everyone wants to play their game. Crowdfunding opens up the door to a class of startup between small business and billion dollar exit, and that is a win for long tail consumers and the founders who want to serve them.

After watching these guys nearly every Sunday it’s amazing...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:41:52 -0500

After watching these guys nearly every Sunday it’s amazing to see the hard work pay off

Mari’s favorite - this one is definitely making the road...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:22:35 -0500

Mari’s favorite - this one is definitely making the road trip playlist

Happy birthday to my dad, the best dance partner a girl could...

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:15:16 -0500

Happy birthday to my dad, the best dance partner a girl could ask for <3

"I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to..."

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:01:43 -0500

“I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be.”

- Chuck Close, via Brain Pickings

"Seamen were a privileged category of Soviet citizen in that they could travel abroad, and Vadim,..."

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:50:52 -0500

“Seamen were a privileged category of Soviet citizen in that they could travel abroad, and Vadim, too, wanted to travel. He got his wish. In more than twenty years at sea, he has worked on passenger ships, reefers, oil tankers, and all kinds of bulkers. His favorite topic is how sick he is of the sea. “You think it’s beautiful,” he would say as the sun came up from behind a cloud and shone on the blue clear water, lightly chopped by the wind. “I used to think it was beautiful, too. Now I can’t even look at it.””

- From “Polar Express” in this week’s New Yorker (http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_gessen)

"It hurts just as much as it is worth."

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:07:57 -0500

“It hurts just as much as it is worth.”

- Julian Barnes via Zadie Smith on joy and mourning

Education and the Long Tail

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:14:00 -0500

What does the rise of the Long Tail mean for education providers?

That’s the question I asked when I finally got around to reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, six years late the party. The gist of the book is that commerce and culture are increasingly shaped by niche interests, with significant implications for anyone producing content or selling products. Because the costs of developing and distributing something new have fallen to nearly zero, and because technology enables content/ product “discovery” at scale, consumers can now indulge the niche interests long held hostage by economic constraints. As Anderson puts it, “A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.”

For an education provider, and in particular an education provider producing its own curricula, the Long Tail phenomenon poses a real challenge. Scaling requires somehow resolving the tension between students’ diverse interests and the team’s capacity to develop and manage classes. Students might be interested in learning every programming language from A++ to Zeno, but trying to serve that full spectrum or “tail” would drain any team’s resources, with very little return on investment.

The solution, as far as I can tell, involves developing high-quality foundational content and as a follow-on serving niche interests through project-based, student-directed learning. Invest in the introductory material, plus a curated set of “blockbuster” topics, and then invest in building learning platforms that support and guide students as they work individually or in teams on advanced (or call it “niche”) topics of their choosing. I like this solution for a number of reasons:

It enables education providers to differentiate themselves according to their editorial perspective on what should be “foundational”;
It keeps costs low for education providers and students; and
It aligns with a pedagogical approach that favors hands-on, experiential learning.

For education providers like Khan Academy operating in the K12 space, that “editorial perspective” is complicated by standards (e.g., the Common Core) and related regulations and requirements. But I think it would be a mistake to operate under the assumption that those kinds of constraints absolve companies of the need to have a perspective.

I’m curious to see whether this theory holds up in the year ahead. With online learning still so inchoate, it’s going to be quite the ride either way.

The Stray Birds, “25 to Life”. Loving this album.

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:01:34 -0500

The Stray Birds, “25 to Life”. Loving this album.

"I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when..."

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:09:52 -0500

“I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.”

- Joseph O’Neill, Netherland. ”Furnace of memory” - read the book three years ago and still that phrase stays with me.

"I always thought those opening lines [of David Copperfield] were a bit scary because they indicated..."

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 23:44:00 -0500

“I always thought those opening lines [of David Copperfield] were a bit scary because they indicated we would not necessarily be the leading characters of our own lives. I couldn’t imagine how that could come about, something so awful; a sort of ghost-life where I could do nothing but watch that person who had taken my place and maybe hate her deeply and envy her everything, but not be able to do anything about it because at some point in time I had fallen out of my life, as if from an aeroplane, I pictured it, and out into empty space, and there I drifted about and could not get back, and someone else was sitting fastened into my seat, although that place was mine, and I had the ticket in my hand.”

- Words spoken by a character in Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, as quoted in James Wood’s lovely New Yorker criticism of Petterson’s work.

Audio

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:09:00 -0500

More Ryan Bingham love <3

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:42:56 -0400

More Ryan Bingham love <3

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: “Down by the...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:13:39 -0400

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: “Down by the River,” live from Big Sur in 1969

"Narratives are very important nowadays in writing books. I don’t care about theories. I don’t care..."

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 15:56:31 -0400

“Narratives are very important nowadays in writing books. I don’t care about theories. I don’t care about vocabulary. What is important is whether the narrative is good or not. We have a new kind of folklore, as a result of this Internet world. It’s a kind of metaphor. I’ve seen that movie, The Matrix—it’s a folktale of the contemporary mind.”

- Haruki Murakami, Art of Fiction

courtneylewis: Lykke Li - Silver Springs (Fleetwood Mac...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:11:14 -0400

courtneylewis:

Lykke Li - Silver Springs (Fleetwood Mac Cover).

Fleetwood covers generally make me nervous but I kinda loved this