WW at The Economist thinks there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "JobCreation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment"... I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else. It's not necessarily that we're burgeoning entrepreneurs eager to start small businesses. It just sucks to have a boss... It could be that an economic shock like the one we've recently suffered will lead to a resurgence of the sort of economic Insecurity behind our grandparents' comparatively materialist values. But it could also be that our culture's transition to post-materialism has been sufficiently thorough to have altered how even relatively low-skilled workers are inclined to respond to UnEmployment... We need to stimulate the prospects for employment, but we also need to make it easier for people to just work in ways that may not show up in the official unemployment stats. You can think of this as tearing down barriers to "SelfEmployment", if you must. (Free Agent)

Schema Org was announced by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo as a shared set of Open Format-s, to be supported by Search Engine-s in scraping Structured Data. It seems to based on Micro Data: how does this differ from GData or various MicroFormat work? (more)

Clive Thompson interviews Vaclav Smil (one of Bill Gates' favorite authors). His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (more)

Paul Krugman says we need Public Policy to focus on jobs (UnEmployment), not GDP. The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly. We could, for example, have New Deal-style employment programs. Perhaps such a thing is politically impossible now - Glenn Beck would describe anything like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a plan to recruit pro-Obama brownshirts - but we should note, for the record, that at their peak, the WPA and the CivilianConservationCorps employed millions of Americans, at relatively low cost to the budget... Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they're bad for long-run growth - that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. Yes, correct. They delay actual adaptation - like the Japan-style bank-saving Bail-Out we chose. And crowd-out Disruptive Innovation, extending a Great Duration. (more)

The Department Of Labor and the Department Of Education today announced a new education fund that will grant $2 billion to create OER (Open Education resources) materials for career training programs in Community College-s. According to Secretary of Labor HildaLSolis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) will invest $2 billion over the next four years into grants that will “provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and Career Training programs.”... Cathy Casserly, incoming CEO of Creative Commons, said, “This exciting program signifies a massive leap forward in the sharing of education and training materials. Resources licensed under CC BY can be freely used, remixed, translated, and built upon, and will enable collaboration between states, organizations, and businesses to create high quality OER. This announcement also communicates a commitment to international sharing and cooperation, as the materials will be available to audiences worldwide via the CC license.” (more)

Mike Rowe testified to a US Congress committee about the need for Maker-s who can keep doing skilled DirtyJobs. It occurred to me that I had become disconnected from a lot of things that used to fascinate me. I no longer thought about where my food came from, or how my electricity worked, or who fixed my pipes, or who made my clothes. There was no reason to. I had become less interested in how things got made, and more interested in how things got bought.... In general, we're surprised that high UnEmployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage. We shouldn't be. We've pretty much guaranteed it. In High School-s, the vocational arts (Vo-Tech) have all but vanished. We've elevated the importance of "higher education" to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled "alternative." Millions of parents and kids see ApprenticeShip-s and on-the-JobTraining opportunities as "vocational consolation prizes," best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of "shovel ready" jobs for a society that doesn't encourage people to pick up a shovel... My written testimony includes the details of several initiatives designed to close the skills gap, all of which I've had the privilege to participate in. Go Build Alabama, I Make America, and my own modest efforts through DirtyJobs and mikeroweWORKS. I'm especially proud to announce "DiscoverYourSkills," a broad-based initiative from DiscoveryCommunications that I believe can change perceptions in a meaningful way.

WalMart has received government Subsidy (Corporate Welfare) to the tune of $1B (insert pinky in mouth) over the past 20 years. ... free or reduced-priced land, Job Training funds, Sales Tax rebates, tax credits and infrastructure assistance, including investment in roads... low-cost financing... Does the local Small Retail-er get those deals?

"practical" Learning (more)

founder of Press Books (more)

aka Nexus7 (more)

Just discovered Ward Cunningham's [new](https://github.com/Ward Cunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki) Spike Solution of Smallest Federated Wiki (P2P). The Smallest Federated Wiki project wants to be small in the "easy to learn powerful ideas" version of small. It wants to be a WikiEngine so that strangers can meet and create works of value together. And it wants to be federated so that the burden of maintaining long-lasting content is shared among those who care... This project should be judged by the degree that it can: Demonstrate that wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning. Explore federation policies necessary to sustain an open creative community. Ruby Personal Server (not Ruby On Rails). A step beyond WikiWeb, more oriented toward Creative Network Group Forming? (more)

chunk of product functionality distributed to actual users/customers (more)

Sort of like a Minimum Viable Product or ProtoType, but emphasizing exploration of the technical risk of an idea.

Kent Beck defines the early Life Cycle of a Start Up, and applies Lean Startup principles to the earlier phases in Unit Test work, the tracking and fixing of bugs (Issue Tracker, Zero Defect) and design. Only some testing and defect fixing serve to reduce latency and increase the frequency and value of experimentation over the short term. Design belongs on the list of activities that need to be responsibly performed in moderation during the takeoff phase. If it's Thursday and you only have enough money to last until Friday at 5, the responsible thing to do is perform another market experiment, not automate a difficult test, fix a random defect, or refactor away duplication... Every startup feels overwhelming from the inside, but every dawn brings exactly one day in which to work. The cellist Pablo Casals was once asked how he had the stamina to play a long passage of blisteringly fast sixteenth notes. "I rest between the notes," was his reply. In a startup you can "rest" between experiments. If an A-B Test takes a day to gather significant results, that's a day you can spend investing in the future without jeopardizing the present. Spend time between crises wisely and you'll have both a system and a business you can be proud of.

*Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader and composer.[1] Starting his career with jazz legend Donald Byrd, he shortly thereafter joined the MilesDavis Quintet where Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace synthesizers and funk music (characterized by syncopated drum beats). Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success among pop audiences. His music embraces elements of funk and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz. In his jazz improvisation, he possesses a unique creative blend of jazz, blues, and modern classical music, with harmonic stylings much like the styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. (more)

Hurricane Party switched to a Lean Startup process to Pivot to their new Fore Cast tool. (more)

Sony is finally dropping DRM for its MP3 distribution. Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com's (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi's Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007. ... Worse for the labels, the restrictions ultimately resulted in less control over the paid download industry. Because DRM tended to tie consumers to the store most compatible with their music device, the record labels unwittingly gave much of the power over music distribution to Apple Computer, the manufacturer of the most popular digital music player, the IPod.

Lawyer. (more)

Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社 Son �� Kabushiki Gaisha?), commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo, Japan.[3] Its diversified business is primarily focused on the electronics (TV, Computer Game consoles, refrigerators), game, entertainment and financial services sectors.[2] The company is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets.[4] Sony is ranked 105th on the 2014 list of Fortune Global 500.[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony

applying an Agile Software Development style to Contract design - of Software Development or other relationships (Consulting and other) (more)