FT: “In her research on how remote teams communicate, Catherine [Cramton] analysed thousands of messages across email and chat logs from geographically dispersed teams. She identified that conflicts arise from one of five reasons: differing contexts; unevenly distributed information; inconsistent interpretations of what’s important; individuals accessing information at different speeds; and understanding the meaning of silence in disparate ways. Shared context is the most important factor, says Catherine, but it’s also the most challenging to achieve for dispersed teams. When you have coworkers in another country, for example, it’s more difficult to gain awareness of your differences. Everything from local holidays and customs to workplace facilities will affect your interactions.”
Nathan Baschez: “You can think of the post-launch phase of a startup as one big optimization problem. You have a bunch of goals—engagement, retention, growth—and a lot of levers you can pull to achieve them. The challenge is figuring out which goals you should focus on, and which levers actually work. The good news is that there are some frameworks you can use to think through this problem.”
Julian Simon (in 1996): “There is one resource that has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance – the most important of all resources – human beings. Yes, there are more people on Earth now than ever before. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods – by how much we must pay to obtain their services – we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, throughout the preceding decades and centuries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services of a driver or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a driver or cook – or economist – has risen in the United States. This increase in the price of people’s services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.” [via CafeHayek]
WSJ on science-based strategies to eat better: “Set one or two specific rules, and stick to them. Make a grocery list, and shop online. Good sleeping begets good eating. Don’t eat alone.”
FT: “Writing the Revolution [by Heather Ford, about Wikipedia] evokes two themes that together encompass practically every contemporary anxiety about truth and technology: how humans create knowledge, and how machines manipulate it. We privilege Wikipedia content, writes Ford, because we believe it is a product of mass consensus, what the journalist James Surowiecki first dubbed in 2004 “the wisdom of crowds”. And we trust that its editors adhere to strict policies, the main ones being that articles should present a neutral point of view, and that all contestable claims within them should be reliably sourced. In an age of hyper-awareness around subjectivity and disinformation, these beliefs are reassuring…Wikipedia content is further privileged, she writes, because it is encoded as structured data about objects in the world and their relationships to one another. This transforms it into machine-readable data, meaning it can be digested by the algorithms that power the products of major commercial players, from Google’s Knowledge Graph (the fact boxes that appear next to Google search results), to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri.”
