Apple and Advertising
In the beginning, Apple Computer was a hobby in Job’s garage, advertised through computer hobby magazines. Dedicated hackers were busy building their community, and Apple was one of the hobby friendly architectures. Key here is the small, but critical, start-up…
Business as an Investment
I finished my reading of Mike Maloney’s Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver, partially to get an idea of how he got started in the business of bullion. He’s actually had several businesses throughout his life, including one where…
Ossified Education
I started reading The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring. So far, it re-iterates some of the sentiments that I’ve seen before: Sustaining innovation of the university has…
Financial Cascade Failure
I’ve been reading quite a bit about the economics of the financial sector, and have come to two interesting conclusions. One is that the fractional reserve and central banking systems are very much akin to a Ponzi scheme; except that…
Embarrassing Big Brother
I read today an interesting article on Lew Rockwell’s site about one Robert Kahre. He had arranged to pay his employees in gold and silver coin. He arranged for them to all work as private contractors, and paid them absurdly…
Abelard to Apple
I heard through the blogosphere about DeMillo’s book Abelard to Apple. I checked it out from the library, because, if I’m to be self-employed as an educator, I thought it would be useful to get an institutional view of the…
Where’d that null come from?
One of the most annoying things that can happen to a computer programmer is the dreaded NullPointerException, or in C++, the segfault that occurs due to dereferencing a null pointer. The null pointer error has this ‘feature’ which makes it…
Teaching Consultation
A couple weeks back I substituted as the TA for a discussion section. I was recorded on video, which was reviewed by the Teaching, Learning, & Technology Center. Here are some notes about educational techniques that I took during the…
Deliberate Practice in Programming
The easiest way to improve your working habits and skillset is by deliberately practicing. For example, according to The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance (1993, Psychological Review) what separates elite players from average players is…
Learning the Abstractions
Since much of programming is about creating and manipulating abstractions, it figures that a large amount of education is going to be about leaning those abstractions. Things like classic data structures, the useful sloppiness of O-notation for algorithm analysis, and…