"Last week I wrote about the nonprofit FORGE, who’s executive director Kjerstin Erickson has been using her blog on the Social Edge website to chronicle the effect of the financial crisis on her organization. For FORGE, this isn’t just an experiment in radical transparency, they are in very real danger of going out of business." [...] "Is Kjerstin doing the right thing by blogging about their troubles? Is she out of her mind? They only need to raise $100,000 by the end of the year. How can they leverage their willingness to embrace radical transparency and their social media savvy to sidestep the financial crisis and continue pursuing their mission?" - Jen Dodd
A start-up founder's perspective on how to avoid becoming a dictator as your company grows. While his experience is in managing developers, I think his insights are applicable to most management situations. - Jen Dodd
One of the most compelling talks on science outreach I've seen, and it fits in 12 minutes. Four simple little questions about science that apparently most people get wrong, including science graduates and science teachers. - Jen Dodd
"When trying to be agile and include the user in our early stage development we have run into the fact that people that are used to business applications are not used to seeing a rough application. They treat it like it is production quality at the earliest of stages and in turn can bog down development." - Jen Dodd
if you look at the "readers choice" it's full of TED talks - Deepak
The Hans Roling/Gapminder TED talk has got to be the best talk ever. - Nick Lothian
Jamie: You're right - it came from a link on a page you bookmarked. - Jen Dodd
Paul Collier's TED talk on "4 ways to improve the lives of the bottom billion" is a great presentation - not as fancy as some, but really striking. I also like Robert Fuller, Stewart Brand, John Doerr, Freeman Dyson, and Bill Stone. (Yes, I have watched way too many TED talks...) - Jen Dodd
University PR is probably among the most egregious displays of hyping up research and making it sound like the next coming of *insert favorite diving figure here*. Bugs me to no end - Deepak
Deepak - yeah, University PR departments seem to be the only places in the world where scientific breakthroughs happen on a weekly basis. - Michael Nielsen
I think a lot of the problem is that the habit and expectation of promotion is so entrenched at an institutional level now that it's very hard for universities to change even if they want to. - Jen Dodd
A big downside from the "hyping of science" is that students new to research have very unrealistic expectations about the messiness and failure rate in the lab. I have found sharing our lab notebook to help communicate that and hopefully they don't feel so bad when they do fail - Jean-Claude Bradley
I hope this doesn't mean the magic exercise-replacement pill that was all over the news is just hype :) - Richard Akerman
I agree with Jean-Claude. I remember being dazed by the graduate recruiting presentations, very unrealistic to the point of misleading. - Aarthy
Jean-Claude, I also agree. I guess this is a problem inherent in a conventional publishing model that doesn't allow positive reporting of failed ideas and experiments. - Jen Dodd
I'd like to know so that I can watch and learn. I'm pretty sure that female speakers need to do things a differently from male speakers, but since the best presentations are mostly by men (eg http://www.knowhr.com/blog/200...) it's hard to know in what ways. - Jen Dodd
