I am a bit of a grinch around the holidays as I really don’t like getting more stuff. As a result I am also not all that excited about buying stuff for other people. Thankfully this year there is a terrific solution – gift cards from Skillshare and from Shapeways. With these you can give the gift of learning and discovery! What could be better? The recipients can of course take any class or buy any item but when you give both, they can first take the Introduction to 3D Printing on Skillshare ...

I am a bit of a grinch around the holidays as I really don’t like getting more stuff. As a result I am also not all that excited about buying stuff for other people. Thankfully this year there is a terrific solution – gift cards from Skillshare and from Shapeways. With these you can give the gift of learning and discovery! What could be better? The recipients can of course take any class or buy any item but when you give both, they can first take the Introduction to 3D Printing on Skillshare ...

Facebook goes public and its stock declines. Commentators write that investors should have known it was overpriced. Twitter goes public and its stock pops. Commentators write that the company left money on the table. Not nearly enough people though remark on how crazy it is that companies still go public the way they do. Three years ago I wrote a post saying that I was hoping we would see IPO 2.0 and unfortunately I am still waiting. What do I mean? Building a complete order book upfront and ...

Facebook goes public and its stock declines. Commentators write that investors should have known it was overpriced. Twitter goes public and its stock pops. Commentators write that the company left money on the table. Not nearly enough people though remark on how crazy it is that companies still go public the way they do. Three years ago I wrote a post saying that I was hoping we would see IPO 2.0 and unfortunately I am still waiting. What do I mean? Building a complete order book upfront and ...

Today I will be participating in a discussion at NYU on the future of higher education. The panel that I will be on has been given the following questions: “Do universities provide good value for money today? What are the gaps in the higher ed ecosystem, and who will fill them?” As it turns out these are the wrong questions to ask and I am planning to explain that in my introductory remarks. Universities got going almost a thousand years ago with the founding of the University of Bologna in 1...

Today I will be participating in a discussion at NYU on the future of higher education. The panel that I will be on has been given the following questions: “Do universities provide good value for money today? What are the gaps in the higher ed ecosystem, and who will fill them?” As it turns out these are the wrong questions to ask and I am planning to explain that in my introductory remarks. Universities got going almost a thousand years ago with the founding of the University of Bologna in 1...

Writing this on a flight back from Vegas where Susan and I just attended Day 1 of the Women 2.0 conference – I will write a longer blog post about that when not crammed into an economy class seat on Delta. The trip was another reminder of my love-hate relationship with Vegas. It is quintessentially American and condenses its best and worst. It was built by gangsters and used to be run by them – now they have gone corporate. There is fantastic entertainment starting with the Cirque du Soleil s...

Writing this on a flight back from Vegas where Susan and I just attended Day 1 of the Women 2.0 conference – I will write a longer blog post about that when not crammed into an economy class seat on Delta. The trip was another reminder of my love-hate relationship with Vegas. It is quintessentially American and condenses its best and worst. It was built by gangsters and used to be run by them – now they have gone corporate. There is fantastic entertainment starting with the Cirque du Soleil s...

Last Tech Tuesday as part of my series on the theory of computation I introduced the Turing Machine. Just to refresh your memory, the Turing Machine is essentially a Finite State Machine connected to an infinite tape for storage. And now, drum roll, here is Alan Turing’s amazing intellectual breakthrough: he showed that it is possible to construct a single Universal Turing Machine that will simulate any other Turing Machine! Let me explain. What a particular Turing Machine does is defined by ...

Last Tech Tuesday as part of my series on the theory of computation I introduced the Turing Machine. Just to refresh your memory, the Turing Machine is essentially a Finite State Machine connected to an infinite tape for storage. And now, drum roll, here is Alan Turing’s amazing intellectual breakthrough: he showed that it is possible to construct a single Universal Turing Machine that will simulate any other Turing Machine! Let me explain. What a particular Turing Machine does is defined by ...

In a previous edition of Homeschool Wednesdays, I had written about different ways of motivating the study of math. In particular I suggested that showing how math can be beautiful may be one way to get some kids interested in it. My first foray into that was showing how spirals occur in nature and can easily be modeled using math. In my presentation this past Sunday I talked about waves. Here it is: Math & Beauty 2: Waves from Albert Wenger When I presented it, the embed on Slide 10 actually...

In a previous edition of Homeschool Wednesdays, I had written about different ways of motivating the study of math. In particular I suggested that showing how math can be beautiful may be one way to get some kids interested in it. My first foray into that was showing how spirals occur in nature and can easily be modeled using math. In my presentation this past Sunday I talked about waves. Here it is: Math & Beauty 2: Waves from Albert Wenger When I presented it, the embed on Slide 10 actually...

Today’s post is over at USV.com and is announcing our investment in Human Dx. They are working on something that I first wrote about here on Continuations under the somewhat clumsy title The Next Frontier for Peer Production: Open Machine Learning Services. In fact, the contact with the Human Dx team was the result of someone reading the post and putting me in touch with the founders.

Today’s post is over at USV.com and is announcing our investment in Human Dx. They are working on something that I first wrote about here on Continuations under the somewhat clumsy title The Next Frontier for Peer Production: Open Machine Learning Services. In fact, the contact with the Human Dx team was the result of someone reading the post and putting me in touch with the founders.

I have written a fair bit about climate change here on Continuations. It seems that in the US we have about a weeks worth of debate after a big storm such as Sandy and then it quickly dies down. So this year given the so far relatively uneventful hurricane season the debate seems entirely absent. That is tragic because none of the fundamentals have changed and we are seeing the devastating results now in the Philippines. Super typhoon Haiyan has apparently killed at least 10,000 people there ...

I have written a fair bit about climate change here on Continuations. It seems that in the US we have about a weeks worth of debate after a big storm such as Sandy and then it quickly dies down. So this year given the so far relatively uneventful hurricane season the debate seems entirely absent. That is tragic because none of the fundamentals have changed and we are seeing the devastating results now in the Philippines. Super typhoon Haiyan has apparently killed at least 10,000 people there ...

One of the rumors from last week was that Snapchat turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook valued at $3 billion. As always in these situations (cf Groupon) one doesn’t know whether such an offer really existed or how firm it was (and there is also the question of how quickly and easily it would have closed). But this story is clearly related to another story which Jenna Wortham reported on in the New York Times on the weekend: the decline of Facebook usage among teenagers. Clearly one ...

One of the rumors from last week was that Snapchat turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook valued at $3 billion. As always in these situations (cf Groupon) one doesn’t know whether such an offer really existed or how firm it was (and there is also the question of how quickly and easily it would have closed). But this story is clearly related to another story which Jenna Wortham reported on in the New York Times on the weekend: the decline of Facebook usage among teenagers. Clearly one ...

So far in the Tech Tuesday series on the theory of computation we have learned about Finite State Machines and their limitations, as well as the more general relationship between automata and languages. As a reminder, an automaton is a model of computation and the reason to have such models is so we can apply formal reasoning to them. Today I will introduce an automaton known as a Turing machine after the amazing Alan Turing who dreamed up this model of computation in the 1930s. The easiest w...

So far in the Tech Tuesday series on the theory of computation we have learned about Finite State Machines and their limitations, as well as the more general relationship between automata and languages. As a reminder, an automaton is a model of computation and the reason to have such models is so we can apply formal reasoning to them. Today I will introduce an automaton known as a Turing machine after the amazing Alan Turing who dreamed up this model of computation in the 1930s. The easiest w...