Our picks of the week from around the web, including the science behind an everyday knotty problem, the man who sequenced his baby’s genome before birth and why the internet is a psychology experiment.
Scott Adams | Dilbert | 16 June 2014
Notes on start-up culture in Silicon Valley. “The internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment. Building a product for the Internet is the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part. The only way to make the hard part work is by testing one hypothesis after another. Every entrepreneur is a behavioural psychologist with the tools to pull it off.”
Brian Watson | Medium | 16 June 2014
How to be a venture capitalist. Lessons learned from two years as an analyst with Union Square Ventures. VC is about story recognition. “Remember the anecdotes (and how they’re resolved), because history often repeats itself. If your investment thesis can’t be summarised in 140 characters, you’re being too prescriptive. Avoid companies where there are diminishing marginal returns to data.”
Jill Lepore | New Yorker | 16 June 2014
Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption, accepted across American industry as “the gospel of innovation”, is wobbly at best. It rests on a group of handpicked case studies that prove little or nothing. The first of them gets the disk-drive industry quite wrong: “Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant disrupters no longer exist, their success having been in some cases brief and in others illusory.”
Life begins with genome revealed
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review | 13 June 2014
Californian genetics researcher Razib Khan sequences his baby’s genome before birth – a first for a healthy human. It’s not illegal, but the average person would probably not find a lab or a doctor willing to take on the job, for ethical reasons. The great fear: “Discovery of a bad mutation could lead parents to an abortion.” Khan did the sequencing using free online software, and says: “The future is here, deal with it.”
I don’t believe robots will eat all the jobs
Marc Andreessen | 13 June 2014
Tech pioneer counsels caution. “Robots and AI are not nearly as powerful and sophisticated as people are starting to fear. With my venture capital hat on I wish they were, but they’re not. There are enormous gaps between what we want them to do, and what they can do. There is still an enormous gap between what many people do in jobs today, and what robots and AI can replace. There will be for decades.”
Thomas Baekdal | Baekdal | 13 June 2014
Should the “first sale doctrine” apply to digital goods in America? It grants a buyer the right to do whatever they want with a product that they have legally purchased; but it currently only applies to physical goods; which is why Apple and Amazon can limit what a buyer can do with a download. It feels wrong. But perhaps a digital product is more like a bus ticket: it confers a right of use, not ownership of the bus.
Bill Gates | Gates Notes | 12 June 2014
In praise of Vaclav Smil, “an original thinker who never gives simple answers to complex questions”; and of Smil’s latest book, “Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialisation”, about basic everyday commodities – such as cement, steel, paper, aluminium. China has used more concrete in the past three years than America used in the whole 20th Century. Even so, humanity should have enough stuff for the next 50 years.
Why your iPhone earbuds always get tangled
Jim Edwards | Business Insider | 12th June 2014
Because physics. Strings do knot themselves spontaneously. And here’s a scientific paper to prove it: “Spontaneous Knotting Of An Agitated String” by Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith of the University of California at San Diego. “A cord shorter than 46cm will almost never tangle itself when sealed inside a rotating box for a period. But between 46cm and 150cm the probability of a knot forming rises dramatically.”
