Some Douglas Engelbart groupies are running a c-MOOC called Thought Vectors this summer (Thought Vector-s in Concept Space). (more)

*Twitter officially unveiled version 1.1 of its API Wednesday, deprecating support for longstanding features such as RSS in the process. (more)

High-speed Apple Computer interface, replaced by Thunder Bolt (more)

Pat Kane on Wannado City, and career-play Theme Park for kids. Educating Kids on Making A Living?

Alex Osterwalder posts a draft of a manual intended to help people think-through and improve their Business Model. (more)

person with some Governance role in a group? (more)

Rob Walling says you should stop reading Business Book-s such as Seth Godin's, Getting To Plan B, and Business Model Generation. (more)

Adam Gopnik reviews a couple books that cover the history of Times Square in NYC. Traub and Sagalyn agree in dispelling a myth and moving toward a history, and the myth irritates them both-Traub's usual tone of intelligent skepticism sometimes boils over here into exasperation. The myth they want to dispel is that the cleanup of Times Square in the nineties was an expression of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign against crime and vice, and of his companion tendency to accept a sterilized environment if they could be removed, and that his key corporate partner in this was the mighty Dis Ney, which led the remaking of West Forty-second Street as a Theme Park instead of an authentic urban street. As Traub and Sagalyn show, this is nearly the reverse of the truth. It was Mayor Ed Koch who shaped the new Times Square, if anyone did, while the important private profit-makers and players were almost all purely local: the Old Oligarchs, the handful of rich, and mostly Jewish, Real Estate families-the Rudins, Dursts, Roses, Resnicks, Fishers, Speyers, and Tishmans, as Sagalyn crisply enumerates them. Mayor Giuliani, basically, was there to cut the ribbon, and Disney to briefly lend its name... The distinction between popular culture and mass culture is to our time what the distinction between true folk art and false folk art was to the age of Ruskin and Morris; we want passionately to define the difference because we know in our hearts that it doesn't exist... All the same, there is something spooky about the contemporary Times Square. It wanders through you; you don't wander through it. One of the things that make for vitality in any city, and above all in New York, is the trinity of big buildings, bright lights, and weird stores. The big buildings and bright lights are there in the new Times Square, but the weird stores are not. By weird stores one means not simply small stores, mom-and-pop operations, but stores in which a peculiar and even obsessive entrepreneur caters to a peculiar and even an obsessive taste... Which returns us, with a certain sense of awe, to the spell still cast by the original sin of the 1811 grid plan. We make our accidental pleasure plazas do the work of the public squares we don't have. This is asking a lot of a sign, or even a bunch of bright ones lighting up the night.

Some Social TwitterBot-s manage to gain followers, build up a Klout Score, etc. The bots generate tweets either by reposting messages that others have posted or by creating their own synthetic tweets using a set of rules to pick out common words on a certain topic and put them together into a sentence. (Markov Chain) More surprisingly, the socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. That suggests that Twitter users are unable to distinguish between posts generated by humans and by bots. “This is possibly because a large fraction of tweets in Twitter are written in an informal, grammatically incoherent style, so that even simple statistical models can produce tweets with quality similar to those posted by humans in Twitter,” suggest CarlosFreitas and co...

Interview: Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong is a surgeon, drug developer, entrepreneur and the richest man in American medicine. Since selling the company that makes his breakthrough cancer drug Abraxane in 2010, he has been developing and expanding NantWorks, an LA-based medical technology company with implications far beyond medicine... I don’t call it Artificial Intelligence –- I call it amplified intelligence. We’re coining this term AI3, meaning amplified, actionable and adaptive intelligence. We’re going to enhance the cognitive capabilities of a human being who can’t recall information at the speed and depth that we need to make the right decision. But this information is in the cloud and can give the doctor actionable information in real time. With actionable, adaptive intelligence, everybody learns from everybody else. Amplified intelligence makes sure we give the right care at the right time, especially when it comes to making life-threatening (HealthCare) decisions. (Augmenting Human Intellect)

Ted Neward wrote a post with a misleading title "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease". His real point is: Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?... Or, perhaps, let me ask it this way: your 16-year-old wants to build a system to track the cards in his Magic CardDeck. What language do you teach him? We are in desperate need of simplicity in this industry. Whoever gets that, and gets it right, defines the "Next Big Thing". See Language For Learning Programming, Situated Software. (more)

Hugh MacLeod's Wine Business client (more)

Product Design/Industrial Design house. (more)

Business Strategy guru at Harvard Business School. (more)

Portion of entering students who finish their College Education (or High School), rather than Drop Out.

Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or Client Centered approach) to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research... Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow (1908–70) pioneered a movement called humanistic psychology which reached its peak in the 1960s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

With help from Washington, the for-profit College Education industry is loading up millions of low-income students with Sub-Prime debt they'll never pay off... Similarly, those who earn two-year degrees from proprietary schools rack up nearly three times as much debt as those at community colleges, which serve a similar student population. Proprietary school students are also much more likely to take on private Student Loan-s, which, unlike their federal counterparts, are not guaranteed by the federal government, offer scant consumer protections, and tend to charge astronomical interest--in some cases as high as 20 percent. These figures are all the more troubling in light of these schools' spotty record of graduating students; the median Graduation Rate for proprietary schools is only 38 percent--by far the lowest rate in the higher education sector. What's more, even those students who make it through often can't find jobs. The reason for this is simple: while some proprietary schools offer a good education, many more are subpar at best... In the case of proprietary colleges, most of the large publicly traded chains forged arrangements with SallieMae, the nation's largest student loan company. (Once a quasi-government agency like FannieMae, it became entirely private in 2004.) In exchange for pots of private student loan funds that they could dole out at will--meaning without regard for students' ability to repay the debt--the schools gave SallieMae the right to be the exclusive provider of federal student loans on their campuses... SallieMae clearly understood that these private loans were going mostly to subprime borrowers who might not be able to pay them back; in 2007, Senate investigators uncovered internal company documents showing that executives expected a staggering 70 percent of its private student loans at one for-profit school to end in default. Investigators concluded that Sallie Mae viewed these loans as a "marketing expense"--a token sum to be paid in exchange for the chance to gorge on federal funds... The frenzy only intensified after Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) in 2005. This made it almost impossible for those who took out private student loans to discharge them in bankruptcy and, not surprisingly, turned the private student loan market into a much more appealing target for lenders.

family of therapy (Self Improvement) techniques (more)

high-traffic Social Networking site, focused on young-adult market (more)

I’m a Data Scientist in Residence at AccelPartners (VC), Scientist Emeritus at BitLy, co-founder of Hack Ny, co-host of Data Gotham, and member of Nyc Resistor. (more)