Author Archives: betsym

Last night I read this utterly depressing article about organ transplant. I used to be a huge fan of organ transplant, I’ve opted in of course and have a little dot on my driver’s license. It just seems so … … Continue reading →

Last month I read a great book, The Power of Habit, which explores the neurological science behind habit formation. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the book—the most frequently cited (and somehow least interesting) one I’ve seen is … Continue reading →

A student in Peter Thiel’s class on start-ups blogged notes of one of the lectures, which led to a NYT article, which led to a blog post by a colleague. The general argument being put forth is that intense competition … Continue reading →

The folks over at Edge have a really interesting read on innovation, creativity and culture by Mark Pagel. I had a couple reactions to this: (1) Is innovation always data-driven? Mark makes a rather compelling argument that innovation is rarely the … Continue reading →

*Update* This post was originally titled “Teach not coding but architecture,” which is still reflected in the permalink. I have however updated the title to reflect a far better one proposed by Jonathan Zittrain on Twitter. My colleague Nicklas Lundblad has a … Continue reading →

I was really struck by this article last week describing research that used publicly available Facebook profiles to predict students likely to suffer from alcohol abuse. The article suggests toward the end that there is an open question of how … Continue reading →

Last week I spent a bit of time learning about the Quantified Self movement—a group I’ve been following from the shadows for a couple years now, but which I’d not really engaged with closely until recently. The group is an … Continue reading →

A couple years ago while I was at home with my family for Christmas I got a call from my credit card company. Someone had tried to charge $14,000 to my account on Christmas Eve, “was that you?” they wanted … Continue reading →

Last week I stumbled across an interesting summary of a recent paper in the journal Memory and Cognition:  By setting your predictions for the future in a familiar landscape, you allow yourself to use your memories of the past to … Continue reading →

Several years ago I worked on a project for a client examining the business opportunities in mobile healthcare—particularly in developing countries. At the time,  it all seemed theoretical—if you had good mobile connections and if smart phone penetration were high … Continue reading →