Year: 2007

The inconvenient fiscal truth

Taken together, the unfunded national commitments, including the national debt, future obligations on entitlement programs, and other commitments such as pensions, that fiscal exposures are $50.5 trillion or $170,000 for every man, woman, and child. The United States fiscal inconvenient truth should feel especially weighty for those in Generation X, Generation Y, and the generations to follow because according to the GAO, the total fiscal burden over the next 75 years represents $400,000 for every full-time worker in the United States and $440,000 per household.

“If we [the United States] were a company, we would be out of business.” (The Huffington Post)

Subprime mortgages: you wreak what you sow

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them.But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do. (The New Yorker)

If the measure of performance/success is quantitative, can we expect anything else?

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The very definition of insanity.

Pecha Kucha – the 20×20 presentation

[E]xactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down.The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art. (Wired)

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. (Pecha Kucha)

 

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Words and visuals: Why are you there?

How do you set people on fire?

Presenting the appalling presenter

How do you set people on fire?

The art of ruling the minds of men

Google interview questions

Here are just a few:

  • How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
  • You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
  • How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
  • How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
  • Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
  • How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

More questions here. ((Link updated 201009))

Related posts:

Interviewing with IBM

70/20/10 – Managing innovation the Google way

How to run a meeting like Google

 

Gates and Jobs: the interview

In a rare appearance together on the same stage at the same time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs discussed each other’s contributions to the technology industry.Bill Gates and Steve Jobs discussed each other’s contributions to the technology industry.

All Things Digital hosted the event and its website provides a transcript of the event. Here is the highlight reel:

Besides allowing viewers to get to know both individuals and what they think of each other, the interview covers a lot of history of the personal computer, software development, standard adoption, and other subjects with which students might not be familiar.