One social place to record podcast audio, with any number of hosts, from anywhere in the world, on any device, for live audiences…and one place for that audio to live, for it to be listened to, curated and shared. Socially.
It seemed obvious that just solving for existing podcasters was a waste of time. A democratized social podcasting platform implies, well, democracy. Besides, when it comes to podcasters; there aren’t very many of them, and they don’t have any money.
So, we spent most of a year building it...
Spotify has a great little Easter egg playlist to try to keep you as a customer!
The life and times of one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century: Claude Shannon—the neglected architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded.
Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.” His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we’d be living in today—and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
And it’s the story of Shannon’s life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.
I can’t wait to read this new biography about Claude Shannon! The bio/summer read I’ve been waiting for.
With any luck an advanced reader copy is speeding it way to me! (Sorry you can’t surprise me with a belated copy for my birthday.) A review is forthcoming.
Apparently there’s a beta Bioinformatics group on Stack Exchange now. It’s just come out of alpha in the last few days and it appears anyone can join now.
So you're sitting near the gate at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for your plane. After you read your newspaper (I hope) and finish making calls on your cellphone, check emails and Snapchat (millennials only), you look at the wall-mounted TV screen, and there's CNN.
When you walk through the terminal changing planes in Chicago, there's CNN. And when you reach your final destination, San Francisco, the airport screens are showing CNN -- not Fox, not MSNBC, not ESPN.
Innovate Pasadena: Valerie Alexander on “How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace”
Sadly, based on the general attendance in comparison to typical weeks and someone who asked new people to raise their hands, there was a terrible turnout of the “regulars” and the majority of those there were first-timers. I’m not sure if it was the timing with the beginning of Summer or perhaps the title of the topic that scared the usual crowds away, but one thing is clear. THEY REALLY MISSED OUT! I’ve been to half a dozen or so of these coffees, and hundreds of presentations in this genre and this was easily one of the best I’ve ever seen.
I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen.
I still feel that way over six years later.
Colin Walker has a personal blog he calls Social Thoughts. If you read his most recent few weeks of posts you’ll see that he is toying with several subtleties to how his blog looks and works. Of course he has microblog posts, similar to my statuses, but he also has longer form posts. And he’s struggling with how to show them, how to segregate them into feeds (or not), etc.
This morning, at the Friday morning coffee meetup of Innovate Pasadena held at Cross Campus, I saw one of the singularly best and most valuable talks I’ve heard in a long time. Many of these types of speakers, while engaging or even entertaining, are telling the same tired stories and at best you learn one sentence’s worth of value. Definitively not the case this morning!!!
How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace (Despite Having “Female Brains”) by Valerie Alexander
Entitled How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace (Despite Having “Female Brains”) writer and speaker Valerie Alexander presented a brief discussion of human evolutionary history (a topic I’ve studied closely for several decades) that featured the difference in development of male and female human brains. Based on this and with a clearer picture of what broadly differentiates the sexes, Valerie then gave a multitude of highly relate-able examples from her professional life highlighting how women can simply take back control in the workplace to not only better succeed for themselves, but to also help their companies see their true value and succeed simultaneously.
Further, she also included some simple and very actionable advice (for men and women) to be able to make a better space within corporations so that they’re able to extract more of the value women bring to the workplace. Hint: Women bring a HUGE amount of value, and a majority of companies are not only undervaluing it, but they are literally throwing it away.
Not only were the messages tremendously valuable and imminently actionable by both women AND men, but she delivered it with fantastic confidence, grace, wit, charm, and warmth. In fact, I’d say it was not only strikingly informative, but it was also very entertaining. If you’re in the corporate space and looking to turn around your antediluvian or even pre-historic work culture (I’m looking ominously at you Uber and similar Silicon Valley brogrammer cultures), then jump in line as quickly as you can to book up what I can only expect is the diminishing time in her speaking and travel schedule.
Innovate Pasadena recorded the talk and I’ll try to post it here as soon as it’s available. Until then I will highly recommend purchasing her book How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace (Despite Having “Female Brains”), which I’m sure has not only the content of her lecture, but assuredly includes a whole lot more detail and additional examples than one could fit into such a short time frame. I also suspect it’s the type of book one would want to refer back to frequently as well. I’ve already got a half a dozen copies of it on their way to me to share with friends and family. I’m willing to make a substantial bet that for uncovering inherent value, this book and her overall message will eventually stand in the pantheon of texts and work of those like those of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Lillian Gilbreth, Frank Gilbreth, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, J.M. Juran, and W. Edwards Deming.
Psst… If the good folks at TED need some fantastic content, I saw a shortened 25 minute version of her hour-long talk. It could be tightened a hair for content and length, but it’s got exactly the tone, tempo and has the high level of presentation skills for which you’re known. Most importantly, it’s definitively an “Idea worth spreading.”
Innovate Pasadena has finally uploaded a copy of the video of Valerie Alexander’s talk:
A great little introduction and start to what portends to be the science biography of the year. The book opens up with a story I’d heard Sol Golomb tell several times. It was actually a bittersweet memory as the last time I heard a recounting, it appeared on the occasion of Shannon’s 100th Birthday celebration in the New Yorker:
In 1985, at the International Symposium in Brighton, England, the Shannon Award went to the University of Southern California’s Solomon Golomb. As the story goes, Golomb began his lecture by recounting a terrifying nightmare from the night before: he’d dreamed that he was about deliver his presentation, and who should turn up in the front row but Claude Shannon. And then, there before Golomb in the flesh, and in the front row, was Shannon. His reappearance (including a bit of juggling at the banquet) was the talk of the symposium, but he never attended again.
I had emailed Sol about the story, and became concerned when I didn’t hear back. I discovered shortly after that he had passed away the following day.
nota bene: I’m currently reading an advanced reader copy of this; the book won’t be out until mid-July 2017.
Danny Westneat (Seattle Times)
