Theory meets pragmatism meets optimism in Bjarke Ingels' architecture.
His big-think approach is informed by a hands-on, ground-up
understanding of the needs of a building's occupants and surroundings.

Bjarke Ingels' architecture is luxurious, sustainable and
community-driven. At TEDxEast he shows us his playful designs, from a
factory chimney that blows smoke rings to a ski slope built atop a
waste processing plant.

... "architectural alchemy"

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a
screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now
rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate,
remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines
ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into
our cyborg selves.

... Now what we’re looking at is not a physical extension of the self
but an extension of the mental self.

... In reality, most projects worth doing are not repetitions of previous things

... Software is not about repeating, it's about inventing.

... Real software development is about doing something that you've
never done before. That's why all stupid analogies about routine
real-life stuff break.

Policies are often the result of something that once went wrong. It’s
organizational scar tissue developed from a This Can Never Happen
Again mandate. And its almost always ill-considered.

The problem with policies are that they compound and eventually add up
to the rigidity of bureaucracy that everyone says they despise.
Policies are not free. They demean the intellect of the executer (“I
know this is stupid, but…”) and obsolve the ability to deal with a
situation in context (“I sympathize, but…”).

Here’s a curve ball: When something goes wrong, have a chat about it,
embed the learning in the organizational memory as a story instead of
a policy. Stories have context and engage the listeners, so next time
a similar situation arise, you’ll be informed by the story and act
wiser.

Policies are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again
situations. A collective punishment for the wrong-doings of a one-off.
And unless you want to treat the people in your environment as five
year-olds, “Because The Policy Said So” is not a valid answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/opinion/friedman-average-is-over.html

... There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new
services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance
in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require
workers to have more and better education to make themselves above
average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than
a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree
and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate
degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1
percent.

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we
need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important
than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures
that every American has access to post-high school education.

To-Do Lists Don't Work
2:11 PM Tuesday January 24, 2012
by Daniel Markovitz

... The alternative to the feckless to-do list is what I call "living
in your calendar." That means taking your tasks off the to-do list,
estimating how much time each of them will consume, and transferring
them to your calendar. (Don't forget to leave time to process your
email. And leave some empty space — one to two hours — each day to
deal with the inevitable crises that will crop up.) In essence, you're
making a production plan for your work.

Deciding which item to handle at what time overcomes the paradox of
choice, compensates for the intrinsic heterogeneity of your work,
provides the context of deadlines and other commitments, and provides
a (soft) commitment device to help you do the right thing at the right
time.

It's an eye-opening exercise: you'll probably find that it's tough —
if not impossible — to find a place for everything. But this is the
reality of your life. You've simply used the calendar to paint a true
picture of the time commitments you have on your plate. And whether or
not you make these commitments visible, they're there. After all, if
you're going to be run over by a truck, you might as well get its
license plate.

Putting your work in the calendar enables you to better determine
whether or not you can (or should) say yes to a new project. And if
you do say yes, you can better determine when you realistically might
be able to get it done.

Policies are often the result of something that once went wrong. It’s
organizational scar tissue developed from a This Can Never Happen
Again mandate. And its almost always ill-considered.

The problem with policies are that they compound and eventually add up
to the rigidity of bureaucracy that everyone says they despise.
Policies are not free. They demean the intellect of the executer (“I
know this is stupid, but…”) and obsolve the ability to deal with a
situation in context (“I sympathize, but…”).

Here’s a curve ball: When something goes wrong, have a chat about it,
embed the learning in the organizational memory as a story instead of
a policy. Stories have context and engage the listeners, so next time
a similar situation arise, you’ll be informed by the story and act
wiser.

Policies are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again
situations. A collective punishment for the wrong-doings of a one-off.
And unless you want to treat the people in your environment as five
year-olds, “Because The Policy Said So” is not a valid answer.

Humans - as a species, we suck! The only real evolutionary advantage
we have is our brains, and by using them we’ve become the dominant
species on the planet. Our brains are superbly adapted for our
survival and success in the environment in which they evolved - the
African savanna 200,000 years ago. Our brains are not-at-all suited
for modern life, and are plagued by a raft of bugs and unwanted
features that we’ve been unable to remove.

... The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer
culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age
of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two
reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours
is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade
to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.

So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young
people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as
they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you
have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So, you
would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of
success. It's based on this great cognitive science research that if
we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age
of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we
do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking
at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.

So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?"
Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually
unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we
now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online
games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are
extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade we're going
to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at
whatever that is. If you don't know it already, this is coming.

The game industry is developing consoles that are low energy and that
work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet so
that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil,
can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next
decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers.