O’Brien said the biggest thing that held him back from both writing and performing was a fear of being criticized because he’s incredibly sensitive. He punched a big hole in one of the biggest clichés in fame—that you just have to develop a thick skin. He says he’s still just as sensitive and criticism still hurts just as much. The secret is to just keep going anyway, because you will get criticized no matter how brilliant you are.
The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.
— How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late: Andy Grove - Bloomberg
Not every new site is a hit. One called Pandaganda, which collected images of pandas looking comically evil and sinister, fizzled after a few weeks, so Mr. Huh pulled the plug. “We kill about 20 percent of all the sites we start,” he said. The idea of quickly tailoring a blog network to satisfy the fickle tastes of a Web-savvy audience, generating new sites to capitalize on a viral sensation and dropping the ones that don’t catch on, is what convinced Geoff Entress, a noted angel investor in the Seattle area, to help Mr. Huh purchase the original company. “Being flexible and able to change as the environment changes is a huge asset to a consumer Web site,” said Mr. Entress, who has backed more than 35 local start-ups, including an online community for booklovers called Shelfari that was eventually bought by Amazon.
— I Can Has Cheezburger Blog Leads to a Web Empire - NYTimes.com
Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.
— Innovation in history: Getting better all the time | The Economist
people are, to a large extent, in charge of their own intelligence. Being smart - and staying smart - is not just a gift, not just a product of their genetic good fortune. It is very much a product of what they put into it. It means that being smart is a long process of self-development and self-discovery.
the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
— How Does Technology Affect Kids’ Friendships? - NYTimes.com
WOMEN now outnumber men at elite colleges, law schools, medical schools and in the overall work force. Yet a stark imbalance of the sexes persists in the high-tech world, where change typically happens at breakneck speed.
Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now.
— SCOPE - medical blog - Stanford University School of Medicine
Kaizen (Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better”) refers to a philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management. It has been applied in healthcare, government, banking, and many other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers.
I remain suspicious, however, of anyone who argues that online social networks, like Facebook, will revolutionize human interactions. Whenever I encounter some utopian celebration of Facebook, I always go back and read some Jane Goodall, or Robert Sapolsky, and remind myself that our social lives haven’t changed that much since we were hairy apes patrolling the African forest. In fact, the most obvious parallel for just about every primate troop remains high school. It’s not that Facebook doesn’t matter - it’s just that our social lives are stubborn things, and tend to revolve around the same constants regardless of the technology.
Research from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and some NGOs seems to suggest that consumers who see labels like the dolphin-friendly image on Starkist tuna or the “Totally Chlorine Free” stamp on paper products, tend to prefer those products over others. Of course, price points and other variables come into play, but in general, a green label encourages people to shift their purchases toward environmentally-friendly products.
