Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Teambildung

10 lessons hier.

Sharethis on Mashable

here.

Sharethis listed on KillerStartups

here.

Teaching Company courses

Regular readers of TEE know that I am a fan of the Teaching Company. Earlier I finished Jeffrey Kasser's lovely Philosophy of Science on video. At present, I am in the middle of a video course called Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations taught by UCSB's Brian Fagan. It is a super course with global sweep (good coverage of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in addition to the usual European & ancient civilization coverage). For my driving pleasure, I just finished Michael Sugrue's (Princeton) Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues on audio. The cast of characters in the dialogs is large, and a good guide to the inside ball is essential. Sugrue's course does the trick. I usually peruse the courses on sale (here). Next up on audio, Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed through Biography. Specifically, I'm interested in analogies to the engineering profession in the history of the medical profession.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Fashionista video is pretty tight

See the abbegirl fashionista video here. Go to www.howyoushare.com for more info.

MIT's Pentland giving killer talk

I'm blogging live in a talk by Sandy Pentland of MIT's Media Center on Automatic Measurement and Modeling of Human Networks as part of Nosh Contractor's Age of Networks series at the UIUC. Both the modeling and measurement parts are really worth a look.

Nextumi's share2me renamed sharethis

I've been working as chief scientist since 2004 for a company called Nextumi on a ubiquitous sharing tool called share2me. The product has been renamed sharethis and the company is launching a major marketing campaign using YouTube videos and a media campaign. See here, here (myspace id reqd) and here for more details.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Visit to UNCC

I've spent an enjoyable few days with Frank Skinner, founder of the Mechanical Innovations course at UNC Charlotte learning about the exciting innovation-based activities in mechanical engineering. They have a progressive senior design course, a spanking new building, and 5 new hires on the way. Sounds like things are moving in a nice direction at UNCC ME.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

IlliGAL GA proves P=NP

See full post here.

Goldberg renounces capitalism, advocates Plato's approach

David E. Goldberg, author of The Entrepreneurial Engineer, and director of the lab that today showed that P=NP (see post here), today renounced capitalism by disavowing the approach of TEE and by resigning as chief scientist of Nextumi, a web2.0 company that is officially releasing sharethis, a ubiquitous sharing tool, this week. "Marx and Foucault were right. Capitalism is an oppressive system and all discourse is mere posturing for power. I can no longer toil in the vineyards of a self-serving elite whose very existence is anathema to the interests of a yearning global proletariat." Asked if he wasn't also abandoning the competitive and innovation principles embedded in his evolutionary computation work and The Design of Innovation, Goldberg said that "Mathematics is one thing. People are another. I can no longer live knowing that my work might be used by unscrupulous operators and even venture capitalists to justify their evil."

When asked what system might be better, Goldberg had this to say. "I think Plato had it about right in The Republic. Abolish private property, family relationships, and install a philosopher-king. Just because Socrates was an ugly pest doesn't mean that he and his star pupil didn't have something interesting to say. Moreover, this system seems to be working well at the University of Illinois, so I think it might just scale well to the US economy."

See the whole press release here.