I took some time today to try to catch up on readings that have eluded me owing to other, perhaps more pressing matters. An article in the December 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM 54(12) caught my eye, with the engaging title of “Visual Crowd Surveillance through a Hydrodynamics Lens”, by Moore, Ali, Mehran, and Shah (included just for …
Married to an Idea: Is it Time for a Divorce?
I’ve been working on an in-house project for a couple of months. It’s one of those things that can (and did) become almost all-consuming, as there were many components, all of which had to fit together into a cohesive unit for optimum effectiveness. I was within days of launching it, when I realized that a major piece of it just …
Spending Time Well
I’ve been using computers since 1968. I taught myself BASIC via a time-share arrangement, using a 110 Baud teletype connected to a computer several hundred miles away. Storage was on paper tape, and execution times were glacial, but I was using a computer! Time wore on. The personal computer age arrived, and I got very familiar with command-line control, first …
A Thought for Today
A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. –B.F. Skinner, American psychologist, inventor, and author Questions: None. Just consider its applications in your own activities.
Is Failure an Option?
Failure seems to be much in the news lately. Over the space of just a few days, I came across several interesting items in the New York Times (What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?), the Harvard Business Review (Three Ways to Turn Setbacks into Progress), and a blog post from The 99 Percent (Why Success Always Starts with …
Perceived Powerlessness
As I write this, the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. is feeling more than a bit of what Earth’s dynamic systems can evince: Hurricane Irene—while weakening from its higher-powered status—is causing major disruptions to various ecological systems and those wrought by humanity, as well. Whole areas of Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware are being evacuated, and the mayor of New …
Connectivity Withdrawal
Our Internet connection went down last night, as a result of a huge lightning strike to our ISP’s central distribution site. We found this out upon returning to the office after a much-needed one-hour respite from professional activities. I can’t speak for the rest of the group, but my immediate reaction—other than a technological “I-wonder-what-happened?”—was a huge yawn. At the …