Innovation & chaos ... in search of optimality

a great tumblr blog succinctly expressing entrepreneurial...

petermellalieu — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:29:17 +1200

a great tumblr blog succinctly expressing entrepreneurial concepts in info graphic format

How To Start A Startup

‘Poor verbal skills and grammar’ presented at an...

petermellalieu — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:19:44 +1200

‘Poor verbal skills and grammar’ presented at an interview is one of the “top four” interview mistakes according to York College of Pennsylvania’s Center for Professional Excellence.

Summary reblogged from

Troyer, B. (2012, May 30). College Grads Lacking Professionalism in the Workplace. Retrieved May 14, 2013, from http://comerecommended.com/2012/05/college-grads-lacking-professionalism-in-the-workplace-infographic/

Generation Y is accustomed to a much more lax atmosphere where sending text message-like emails from their smart phones is second nature. Recent grads are becoming more laid back, but their future workplace may not be.

The job market is as competitive as ever. As recent college graduates have looming school loans over their heads there is no better time to avoid the common mistakes of the rest of the Gen Y’ers vying for the same positions.

The 2012 “Professionalism in the Workplace Study” surveyed a national sample of HR professionals, upper class undergraduates, and managers or supervisors. The study helped to define professionalism and provide numbers to analyze the current state of professionalism in the American workforce.

It is important for recent graduates to take in to account the qualities most sought after by their next interviewer. From an HR standpoint, the most essential qualities of professionalism are listed below:

    Interpersonal skills (33.6%)

    Appearance (25.3%)

    Communication skills (24.9%)

    Time management (20.8%)

    Confidence (20.7%)

    Ethical (15.2%)

    Work ethic (14.2%)

    Knowledgeable (9.3%)

Full source report

York College of Pennsylvania. (2012). 2012 Professionalism in the Workplace Study. York, Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://www.ycp.edu/media/yorkwebsite/cpe/2012-Professionalism-in-the-Workplace-Study.pdf

The comments on the blog summary are most instructive!

clientsfromhell: Rules for Freelancers

petermellalieu — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:12:21 +1200

clientsfromhell:

Rules for Freelancers

Team Contribution Calculator. How do you assess the individual...

petermellalieu — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:31:00 +1200

Team Contribution Calculator.

How do you assess the individual contribution of team members on a project that the team members collaborate to produce? … How do you deal with the typical situation where different team members contribute different inputs to the team?

The video demonstrates and explains a spreadsheet-based Team Calculator that allows either a teacher and/or students to peer rate each other’s contributions to a team project. The calculator utilises the ratings combined with the grade allocated to the total team output to produce an individual contribution mark for each team member.

The calculator is designed to minimise the impact of free-loading and scape-goating. This is achieved through using (a) ranking (b) statistical medians rather than statistical means for the calculations. Consequently, extreme peer-rankings (high or low) are eliminated from the calculations automatically.

Download a prototype version of the spreadsheet from here:
Mellalieu, P. (2013, May 13). Team Contribution Calculator - Prototype Version 2.1 [Spreadsheet]. Unitec Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49418067/Team%20Contribution%20ver.%202.1%20copy.xls

Technical note

The spreadsheet was first created in Apple iWork Numbers, exported as an Excel file to NeoOffice, and fine-tuned for export as an Excel file to my public Dropbox for sharing. The video was created using Screenflow 4.

"An MIT engineer has founded a mechanical engineering company named Rethink Robotics that has..."

petermellalieu — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:26:36 +1200

“An MIT engineer has founded a mechanical engineering company named Rethink Robotics that has...

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs? Robots and algorithms...

petermellalieu — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:21:29 +1200

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?

Robots and algorithms are getting good a jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain’t seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)

Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society. Full bio »

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs? | Video on TED.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html

"He had the habit of travelling between Oxford and Bournemouth, where he often stayed,” Baillie..."

petermellalieu — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:48:22 +1200

““He had the habit of travelling between Oxford and Bournemouth, where he often...

petermellalieu: Hiking the Milford Track. Analogue photos from...

petermellalieu — Sun, 05 May 2013 14:19:00 +1200

View towards Mackinnon pass, Milford Track

Pathway through the alpine rainforest

A day's hike up from base camp over the Mackinnon pass

View from Mackinnon Pass

Alpine pond at the height of the Mackinnon Pass

Departure from Te Anau

Moss' in'trestin'

Sub-alpine lichen shown against New Zealand dollar coin

petermellalieu:

Hiking the Milford Track.

Analogue photos from my mid-1990s hike on the Milford Track. The expedition was arranged by Robert Shirley joined by his former university and territorial army mates. The hike is a three-day trip commencing at Te Anau concluding at Milford Sound.

According to Wikipedia, “The Milford Track is a widely known tramping (hiking) route in New Zealand – located amidst mountains and temperate rain forest in Fiordland National Park in the southwest of the South Island. The 53.5 km hike starts at the head of Lake Te Anau and finishes Milford Sound at Sandfly Point, traversing rainforests, wetlands, and an alpine pass.”

Apple’s profit from PC sales Q4 2012 exceeds next top...

petermellalieu — Sat, 04 May 2013 19:36:44 +1200

Apple’s profit from PC sales Q4 2012 exceeds next top five PC vendors

Dilger, D. E. (2013, April 27). What will Apple do with the Macintosh? Retrieved May 4, 2013, from http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/04/27/editorial-what-will-apple-do-with-the-macintosh

Alan Turing's Pilot Ace computer - video

petermellalieu — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:11:36 +1200

Alan Turing's Pilot Ace computer - video: Built in the 1950s and one of the Science Museum’s...

The The Digital Promise: The new program taking classrooms into the 21st

petermellalieu — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:20:02 +1200

I suspect the failure to deploy technology for learning in education that the following analysis...

There are 923 words that break the “i before e”...

petermellalieu — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 04:36:07 +1200

There are 923 words that break the “i before e” rule.

In contrast, 44 words follow that rule.

Question: if you weighted the probability of the word being used in daily, academic, or business use, would those statistics still support the absurdity suggested by the image? In other words, what proportion of commonly-used “i before e” words follow the rule?

Solar Energy: This Is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like I...

petermellalieu — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:24:04 +1200

Solar Energy: This Is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like

I wonder where a creaky, old hydro-electric power system places on this graph?

McConnell, B. (2013, April 23). Solar Energy: This Is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like. Armchair Economics. Retrieved April 27, 2013, from https://medium.com/armchair-economics/cbc9fdd91209

Somewhere over the rainbow, hobbits roam Glimpses through the...

petermellalieu — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:40:03 +1200

Somewhere over the rainbow, hobbits roam

Glimpses through the clouds of Mount Ruapehu and Mount Ngauruhoe in Tongariro National Park, New Zealand. These locations were used as part of Peter Jackson’s movies “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”.

Hobbiton film-set for Peter Jackson’s “The...

petermellalieu — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:15:18 +1200

Hobbiton film-set for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit”

Yesterday, I made an absolute, exquisitely, delightful excursion visit to the Hobbiton film-set near Matamata. I visited the site several years ago, when one saw merely tacky polystyrene remnants of the original “Lord of the Rings” film-set. However, the rebuilt construction for “The Hobbit” movie series is totally worth a half-day’s visit, as this slide-show will attest. Every building and artefact is constructed from durable materials. The gardens, plants, and sheep are all growing prolifically …. New Zealand’s six-month drought seems to have by-passed this part of Middle Earth. The “Green Dragon” pub serves a fine ale.

http://www.hobbitontours.com/

iSteve: The Movie. “It’s so crazy, it might just...

petermellalieu — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 04:36:00 +1200

iSteve: The Movie. “It’s so crazy, it might just work!”

I’ve watched the first 7 minutes. It’s brilliant. The review by Moren inspired me to glance at this. I love it. Especially if you know the alternate history, such as “Pirates of Silicon Valley”

Hord, A. (n.d.). iSteve. Retrieved from http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d2e0f617e3/isteve

Moren, D., & Friedman, L. (2013, April 18). Review: Funny or Die’s iSteve will tickle Apple fans. Retrieved April 19, 2013, from http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/reviews/?reviewid=3442824

Pirates of Silicon Valley. (2013, April 16). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley&oldid=550711946

Echoes of War: Songs by Butterworth and HousmanSung by Peter...

petermellalieu — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 03:13:00 +1200

Echoes of War: Songs by Butterworth and Housman

Sung by Peter Mellalieu at Auckland Clef Club Inc, 16 April 2013, in anticipation of New Zealand’s ANZAC Day, 2013.

Two songs composed by George Butterworth (England) MC (12 July 1885 – 5 August 1916) set to poems by Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936).

The two songs are ‘The lads in the hundreds’ (No. 5) and ‘Is my team ploughing’ (No. 6) from eleven settings of Housman’s poems ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1911 and 1912). The first set were published as “Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’”.

From Wikipedia:
The main theme of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time.

‘A Shropshire Lad’ was first published in 1896 at Housman’s own expense after several publishers had turned it down, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students. At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman’s nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men’s early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a bestseller. Later, World War I further increased its popularity.

Housman was surprised by the success of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ because of the deep pessimism and obsession with death throughout, with no place for the consolations of religion. Set in a half-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, “the land of lost content”, the poems explore the fleetingness of love and decay of youth in a spare, uncomplicated style which many critics of the time found out-of-date as compared to the exuberance of some Romantic poets. In fact, Housman wrote most of the poems before visiting the county.

The parallel is regularly made between the often gloomy and death-obsessed subject matter of ‘A Shropshire Lad’, written in the shadow of the Second Boer War, and Butterworth’s subsequent death during the Great War. In particular, the song “The lads in their hundreds” tells of young men who leave their homeland to ‘die in their glory and never be old’.

Butterworth remains perhaps the most obvious case of “what if…?” that is left to us from the battlefields of northern France, and he joins the Frenchman Albéric Magnard, the Spaniard Enrique Granados, and the German Rudi Stephan as possibly the greatest loss to music from the First World War.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Butterworth (together with several friends including Geoffrey Toye and R. O. Morris) joined the British Army as a Private in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, but he soon accepted a commission as a Subaltern (2nd Lieutenant) in the 13th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, and he was later temporarily promoted to Lieutenant. He was known as G. S. Kaye-Butterworth in the army.

Butterworth’s letters are full of admiration for the ordinary miners of County Durham who served in his platoon. As part of 23rd Division, the 13th DLI was sent into action to capture the western approaches of the village of Contalmaison on The Somme. Butterworth and his men succeeded in capturing a series of trenches near Pozières on 16–17 July 1916, the traces of which can still be found within a small wood, although Butterworth was slightly wounded in the action. For it Temporary Lt George Butterworth, aged 31, was awarded the Military Cross, gazetted 25 August 1916, although he did not live to receive it.

The Battle of the Somme was now entering its most intense phase. On 4 August, 23rd Division was ordered to attack a communication trench known as Munster Alley that was now in German hands. The soldiers dug an assault trench and named it ‘Butterworth Trench’ in their officer’s honour. In desperate fighting during the night of 4–5 August, Butterworth and his miners captured and held on to Munster Alley, albeit with heavy losses and despite ‘friendly fire’ from Australian artillery. At 0445 on 5 August, amid frantic German attempts to recapture the position, Butterworth was shot through the head by a sniper. He was hastily buried by his men in the side of the trench, but his body was lost in the fierce bombardments of the next two years. The following morning the same trench was the site of Private William Henry Short’s (Yorkshire Regiment) act of gallantry which was to win him a posthumous Victoria Cross.

A Shropshire Lad. (2013, March 31). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Shropshire_Lad&oldid=547915429

George Butterworth. (2013, March 31). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Butterworth&oldid=547005390

Errata

In the narration the presenter incorrectly attributes the poems to Auden rather than Housman.

Farewell to Halmstad University International Exchange...

petermellalieu — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:06:11 +1200

Farewell to Halmstad University International Exchange Students

Farewell lunch for our international exchange students from Halmstad University, Sweden. Over a period of four months the six students worked on several international market development projects with local Auckland businesses. Coordinated by Denisa Hebblethwaite, Unitec Department of Management & Marketing.

startupsbunch: (I encountered this photo at...

petermellalieu — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:24:46 +1200

startupsbunch:

(I encountered this photo at http://theChive.com)

As an entrepreneur, it caught my attention and made me think about what our society values and what captures its interest.

Looking beyond the few inaccuracies here (Steve Jobs was a ruthless capitalist- NOT a hipster; media knew he was Jesus of BUSINESS, not computing), the point stands that Dennis Ritchie created a technology and Steve Jobs marketed it- Ritchie is unknown and Jobs is famous.

But why is Steve Jobs’ participation meaningless because the original idea wasn’t his? Jobs made this developed concept into something of utility to the masses and gave it to them. That is what we value- things that are useful to us. The Winklevoss’ may have had the idea for Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg GAVE it to us. “If you were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.” Which begs a question: Who is the REAL inventor- the creator, or the provider?

As an entrepreneur who is both the creator and provider, my opinion is that it depends on what you consider the end product. Here we have two end products: Ritchie’s coding and iProducts. Ritchie’s coding is ultimately an ingredient in iProducts, which affect the lives of many many more people. That is what entrepreneurship is all about- providing a service/good that affects the lives of others. It is giving a gift. Ritchie DID receive much recognition. Our citizen mass praised Jobs as his gift was given out to more people.

For example, one of my chemists has provided a service to say, a thousand people. To us thousand, her service is very helpful and she is a Dennis Ritchie in our eyes. But I plan to take her product (formulation aid) and use it as an element in a larger, more complex product (vodka) that will be sold to, say a million people. Who will be better known- this chemist or my brand? Similarly, if a new RTD (ready-to-drink) product uses this vodka brand as just an ingredient and sells to a billion people, the RTD will be even more praised.

That said, with each increase in product complexity, more resource-input is required. Ritchie needed other bits of tech developments to make UNIX. Jobs needed 10x more resources including hardware sources, marketing and branding savvy. It is reasonable to say that Jobs, as the creator of the further-down end-product, took much more risk in terms of investing time and money. In our society, ‘risk equals reward’. It’s business rule #1, and life rule #1 as well. Therefore, risk paying off big time captures our attention and is also why we’ve heard more about Jobs. We want to hear about risk payoffs whether it’s NASA reaching Mars or our buddy killing it in Vegas.

Ultimately, is this really the social injustice that the photo makes it out to be? I would say both are inventors, and both deserve credit for providing different products. The fact is purely that Jobs reached more people by taking a more captivating risk by standing on the shoulders of Ritchie as all creators do. After all, every single creation EVER is the composition of many before it- nothing is truly original. Which is why the statement in the photo that ideas were ‘stolen’ is ridiculous. If every brain fart was patented, nothing would be invented. In fact, the key to any form of creativity or art is ‘connecting two seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that produces new meaning’. This can be applied to anything- even jokes. ‘A guy walks into a bar…ouch.’ Here we’re presenting a connection (same word). Considering this, perhaps ‘combining’ doesn’t take it’s own form of brilliance, but IS brilliance. As a society, we are continuously standing on the shoulders of those before us including Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.
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rockscanfly: Note: Everyone one of these diseases … will...

petermellalieu — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:01:05 +1200

rockscanfly:

Note: Everyone one of these diseases … will come back if enough people lose immunity. They are still out there, and borders will not save you. We are a global community. Things travel.

Except smallpox. We eradicated that sh*t, and unless someone starts using it in bio warfare, we’ve seen the last of it, thank God and Jenner.