This is a reasonable thing for MIT to do. Many comparisons to book burning have been made in various comments, which is not a good analogy. In this situation, the analogue to book burning would be burning his books[1]. MIT is just declining to have their name on the cover of his books (read: lectures) any more.
MIT is not trying to decree that the guy has some egregious objective moral failing. They're saying that they ran an internal investigation, with the help of other physics faculty, and found Lewin to be in violation of their institutional sexual harassment policies, and as a result, they're removing his content from their platform. This is a perfectly good reason to distance themselves from him, as well as making it clear that they take sexual harassment very seriously by impacting his legacy so negatively.
MIT OCW continues to host courses for 8.01 and 8.02, the courses his lectures covered, with lectures given by other faculty[2]. The loss of material to learn from is marginal at best - these videos are for the same courses at the same school with much of the same infrastructure (notes/recitation videos/etc).
This is pretty cool. I like her learning style. I do the same thing, and I love the process of going from looking up every other word to being able to actually understand independently, even in small chunks.
> She scratched around in Google until she found uploaded PDFs of the articles she wanted. She would read an abstract and Google every word she didn’t understand. When those searches snowballed into even more jargon, she’d Google that, too. The expanding tree of gibberish seemed infinite—apoptosis, phenotypic, desmosome—until, one day, it wasn’t. “You get a feeling for what’s being said,” Kim says. “Pretty soon you start to learn the language.”
Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.
The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.
"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"
Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.
Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
"Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site."
I really want this too. I need some sort of simple contact rolodex that simply shows who I know, why I know them, and why they're important (where do they work, how do I know them, who are they connected to, etc.). Just a simple UI, something that I would use most of the time simply to search.
Probably overkill for your needs, but I use CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org) to do that for my work. It's basically a centralized web-based contact list, for which you can then link them between each other (different types of relations), add custom fields, etc. -- the program does a lot more than that (online fundraising, mass mail, event management, and other tools mostly aimed for non-profits/volunteer groups), but you can also just use it for that.
It's then possible to expose the contact data to LDAP using "ldapcivi" (https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi), so that the contact data can be queried from any mail client (including phones).
We also integrated CiviCRM with our IRC bot, so we can query emails and other info from there. Ex: "who is John Doe" on irc will respond with the basic data (name, email, phone), as well as the relationships of that contact, ex: "John is Manager of foo at ACME".
Sounds like google's circles. The problem is that most folks treat their Gmail account as their "real" account and don't give it out willy-nilly. Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.
> Also, that the circles thing is one-way - I can use circles to control how I see others, but can't use them to control how they see me.
No, if you share something to a circle someone isn't in they wont see it, so they do let you control how others see you. Not a huge G+ fan, but I was a fan of circles.
I was not that big fan of circles, made sharing with the wrong people easy.
I like that my personal life (facebook) and professional (linkedin) is two different networks. Its hard to accidentally share the the bad joke with my professional network.
I think something like circles could be done right -- if each circle had a custom background, etc. so that it looked and felt like a different website. I'm not worried about posting political rants to LinkedIn because it's obvious I'm on LinkedIn rather than FaceBook or Google+; I wouldn't be worried about posting to my coworkers group if there were very obvious signifiers that I was in that group.
IIRC, Facebook used to have this feature (ages ago), but it was removed. It used to ask where you knew someone from when sending a friend request, and it didn't let you send the request if you didn't know the person.
On the profile page of your contact there is a "★ Relationship" button. Click that and it will let you add general notes or more detailed information about how you met.
Would you trust them enough to be certain enough that it would always stay this way so you could safely put slanderous information about a person here? I certainly wouldn't.
Have you tried Rapportive? https://rapportive.com/ It shows additional information about the person in your Gmail sidebar.
Also you might want to check out Nimble, like Rapportive it pulls info from other social networks. If there's a feature you want, it seems they listen to ideas.
I've also used http://www.cerberusweb.com/tour for sorting email and importing additional data about people, but that might be overkill. With Cerberus you would have to import the location data info yourself, for example. It's a "power user" type of application, very versatile.
Something like Contatta? I used to work there a year or so ago, so I may be biased, but still feel it's an improvement over email and sterile CRM. I personally like how it brings several pieces together, even if it's still missing a calendar for example. It's still in open beta, but I know it's extensible too. I may sound like an ad, but there's nothing for me to gain from it now, just my opinion.
Humin looks interesting but logging in with facebook is a deal-breaker for me. Logging in with google would be slightly better, since all of my contacts are there already and if Humin doesn't integrate with my current contacts I'm not sure what value it has.
Contacts+ uses my google and facebook and twitter credentials to link to those services, not to verify who I am - and if I don't want to link to FB or twitter, I don't have to; I'm definitely uncomfortable with being forced to use a particular identity provider.
I wonder if Humin has really thought through their identity and credential management requirements. A great many sites these days allow one to create an account simply by logging in "on the fly" using an existing email address and a password you enter then and there. One email validation email and you're good to go.
For people that you _might_ forget it should be pretty easy to summarize in a sentence or two. Two sentences should easily cover when, where, and why you met. Throw in common contacts and you're good to go. Obviously these same two sentences might not encapsulate why your wife is important to you, but, really, you aren't quite likely to forget that either.
Why do you say that? It seems like an important thing to keep track of, for people who you don't keep in regular contact with. Prevents "Who the heck is Greg Bobberton?", if you can just look and see "Greg Bobberton: that guy from the Widgetpalooza conference, was interested in that one idea I had" (obviously with less vague specifics).
I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through.
I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.
If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
This is totally off the cuff, but here's my first thought:
To sign up for the site, you need only a username, password, and verification method (email/sms/facebook/something to authenticate you as a person, but this wouldn't necessarily be tied to the account). The usernames are unique, and your personal url is domain.com/username or something along those lines (like reddit).
Then you can give your business card to everyone and their spammy recruiter, and if they follow up and visit your domain.com/username, they can hit the "request email" button, at which point you can choose which email to give them or ignore it all together. Potential problem is that unique usernames will mean that professional ones run out quickly. Not sure at what scale that becomes an issue....
In other news, if anyone here is going to be at hackMIT and would be interested in working on something like this, email me (its in my profile).
Hmm, a kind of double opt-in? (Or possibly triple if you count handing out the card in the first place.)
Interesting idea, at the same time there are ways to replicate this today in terms of 'send me a blind message on Facebook/LinkedIn and I'll maybe reply' and it doesn't seem to work well, at least not in my experience. It's about the power dynamic, fundamentally.
Doesn't the facility to redirect email from certain addresses straight to a spam box or to higher priority accounts make regular email filters more-or-less functionally equivalent?
I don't think I give my business card out to enough spammers for the need to manually opt-in everyone that wants to email me to be a less laborious task than blocking/ignoring the occasional promotional mailing.
I couldn't reply on your last comment, so it will be here. How would be your "9 or 10 cards"?
I imagine you can just control what info a conctact would have access. Maybe: professional email, personal email, office phone, personal phone, where do you work.
Maybe one profile for each info..but that is 5... how to reach 9 or 10?
I think of a relationship regulated by tags. Tags similar to Google+ Circles. You can use to set context: <church>, <college>, <company>. Or access: <prospect>, <top investor>, <important network>, <conference contact>. You can define an access profile for a particular tag.
You can change contacts though an app, but he won't have any access until you alocate a tag to him. So you won't offend anyone upfront, as even the VIP investors will have to wait until you put an all-accesstag on them. So it is a much more subtle acknowledge when after weeks the contact still don't have access to your email.
I could imagine setting up the following cards right away. And by "card", I'm not specifically referring to a piece of paper, but perhaps some kind of contact-info-related digital object.
* BFFs
* Recent acquaintances
* Close family (reasonable people)
* Extended family (think annoying newsletter emails)
* Co-workers (cell number included)
* Clients (cell number definitely not included)
* Spammy business contacts (vendors)
* Travel (something I could hand out with temp hotel and phone info, etc.)
* Japanese (my wife is from Japan, we have lots of friends here and visit there often)
I could also imagine handing out specific cards at various social functions. For example, at a writing club I used to attend, I'd want to provide a link to my portfolio online. I'd never ever want anyone else to read that embarrassing stuff though. In another case, I used to attend a board game club, and it would've been nice to hand out cards with links to my profile on boardgamegeek, meet-up profile, etc.
It seems like this would work best if the exchange format was simply vCard or some other open format. You get to control who gets what at the point of exchange, and they can consume it into whatever system they like. There's no after-the-fact futzing with tags or permissions or contact management; it's just a system to control how you present yourself. The whole idea is probably DOA if you can't interface with the rest of the world's contact software. Maybe you allow connections if both people in the exchange are users of your service, but you wouldn't want to take it for granted.
As an aside, this got really interesting when we considered the "hot girl in a bar" situation. Let's say she gets asked for contact details many times, it's too loud to hear names or whatever, so she might need to snap a picture of the guy at any point of exchange, then review and modify permissions later. But that seems kinda fussy as a system.
> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.
What you need is an "premium" email at a "premium e-mail provider". :)
You signed up as Joe Doe and plug your basic info: website url, physical address, your real email address, phone number cell phone, etc. All this can be in multitude quantity, like your email: office job 1, office job 2, personal. All this info is confidential and only seen to you.
Then your conference comes in. You click "create addresses" and system is randomly generating your email addresses, like this:
joe-doe-349522@email.com
joe-doe-153212@email.com
joe-doe-145621@email.com
joe-doe-675427@email.com
Then for each email you can setup few options, like:
- forward this email to office job 1
- forward this email to office job 2
- forward this email to my personal email
- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with short profile: my homepage url, my pshysical address, my office phone, but no cell phone.
- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with my personal cellphone.
When forwarding your email you can have optional header, such as extra info you added initially: "this is my Word Expo 2014". Then when 2016 comes in and you receive an email, header tells you the origin of it.
You can setup any email to hold on mail and not forward it at all and just notify you once a week/month/once there is X emails awaiting.
At any point you can dispose an email or simply set it to auto-expire. Or change its settings for that matter.
You have two options when it comes to your presentatione. You can go high tech and print (or request print) of business cards with QR code where each code is your CRF card with different email of course. In this scenario you could have different color of qr code representing different email setup and just memorize: green qr code - potential investors, yellow qr code - potential employees, blue qr code - cute blonde that i think likes me!
Or even simplier solution: order yourself a few thousand business cards with your email address like this: "joe-doe_______@email.com" and then just write down the email number after the pre-printed part of your email address that will match particular premium email #. And if someone asks about it, just tell them a perfect excuse: "oh yeah i get so much spam that once a year i have to create a new email for myself".
Someone building such a system could call it similar to gmail so your emails look normal, like maybe pmail.com (for "premium" mail) or something like it.
I think the problem is that this is very niche market. I am sure for a right solution you would pay even $99 per year, but again it would be hard to market and even harder to make some money long-term off of it :)
You can actually do this with gmail itself: johndoe+x@gmail.com is a valid alias for johndoe@gmail.com, for any value of x. So you can make up whatever set of custom addresses you want; they all go to the same account, and filtering/forwarding/etc. can be done with standard gmail filters (not sure about autoresponses; you'd probably need a third-party client for that).
Of course this plus-sign behavior is a pretty well-known fact about Gmail, so it'll be obvious that you're bucketing your email in this way. Anyone can easily read off the 'base' address johndoe@gmail.com, so you'd need to set it up so that mail to this address is heavily restricted and anyone wanting to actually reach you would have to use johndoe+secret@gmail.com or whatever. But I think this would basically also be true of any custom service you could invent having similar functionality.
Exactly. Anyone know this "trick" so I can envision people that didnt have the response back in a day or two, just remove the + part thinking exactly what you said -- my email went to some less-important folder.
I, for example, always remove the + part. Not sure why, just a behavior. Even if wrong, still it is what it is.
Besides, I don't think you can discard your email. So if you had joe.doe+aaa@gmail.com and month later you decided you don't want anymore email from this account, you would have to setup rule for this email to go to spam, which is not a perfect scenario. Better would be an auto-response that e-mail expired. Something like PlutoMail is doing.
> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.
I don't give out business cards. I tell people to google me and send me an email or a tweet or whatever they end up finding.
This filters out everyone who doesn't have a really good reason to contact me because they just won't care enough to invest the 30s of extra time it takes to type "swizec" into google and click a link.
I think the main purpose of business cards today is to serve as a physical reminder of who you met, not to provide you contact info which can be found elsewhere.
Memory is not the best keeper of information at conferences where you might meet tens of people.
You can use Facebook to accomplish everything you can do with your social network. Make your profile 2-3 sentences and your current city, allow people to request to see email, and just ignore the feed.
The advantage of course is that there's about a billion people already on it.
I actually figured out a domain for this idea before I gave up. The problem is I can't figure out how it scales correctly. It ideally would A) have strong network effects B) you would get contact data through your interfaces of choice (iphone, email address book, gmail, android, etc) and would rarely if ever interact with a web gui for the service. It should also have a circles concept so that I can give different people different details.
those all seem to rule out the various business models. hope someone smarter than me figures it out.
You need to find a set of people who are connected and connectors, and who have this kind of problem in spades. Then build in sufficient virality so they all start using it, and as you point out, multi-platform presence. Many folks have tried to replace the business card and failed, but I've seen cards with custom URLs rather than contact details on them; maybe that's one way to go. (QR codes require too much friction.)
Something like the .tel domain? http://telnic.org/ You don't get to run your own server, all .tel domains are run by the same company. You just set up yourname.tel with your contact info. Example: http://mark.tel/
http://mark.tel (and about.me mentioned in another comment) is a prime example of a problem with using given names/last names to form URLs to share contact information. Say you get http://smith.tel - this is great for you but bad for every other Smith out there. http://mark.smith.tel doesn't solve it either.
OTOH using some sort of central-issued IDs (NI, kennitala, PESEL, SSN, INSEE, passport number) like http://87120402424.pl.tel feels a bit dystopian...
This (and sister comments to mine) are super interesting, we're working on this problem space - with a professional focus - and there are a bunch of folks in the consumer side too. Happy to chat to anyone interested in solving this sort of problem.
As someone who recently came across an actual rolodex, with both typed and hand-written notations throughout, this idea sounds like something I'd seriously consider signing up for.
Agree, but I like having everything in one place. I don't get a lot of email, so that may change, but I have a filter and separate inbox[1] set up for stuff I read, including RSS.
No, because people have too damn many email addresses.
I typically have multiple email addresses at all times, with one constant (my gmail) and the others revolving around my employer, my school, and other affiliations. And which email I give you depends on how I know you (I'll give classmates and potential employers the university one, etc). So even though I might have someone's corporate address, if they change companies, I'm SOL. With this service, I can click your "request email" button, and you tell me the most convenient address to reach you at.
Out of curiosity, what are some of the things you're trying to combat the 2nd type of procrastination? I've been experimenting with habits and other organizational systems to use my time more effectively, and it's been going pretty well so far.
The main thing I do when I realize I'm frittering away time when there's something pressing that I really should be doing, I think "OK. On xxx Date in the future, you are going to be held accountable for The Thing. That date is approaching, and when it gets here, you are either going to fail or succeed, and the difference will likely be what you spend your time on right now."
This is moderately successful for important tasks with important consequences, but not so helpful when I really should, say, do my laundry. But I figure that if I can get the hard things sorted out, I'll slot the laundry in somewhere later (textbook procrastination rationalizations, yes, I recognize the irony).
I'm also playing with todo lists to help me plan better - keeping everything in my head is certainly not optimal. I sampled a bunch of methods: so far Wunderlist has been the best for just straight todos. I would like to change my habits so that when I'm too tired (physically or mentally) to do intellectual work, I default to a less demanding task - exercise, errands, whatever - instead of HN. But that's still a work in progress.
One other thing is that I've been keeping more notebooks. If something happens, and after the fact I think "Hmm, that could have gone better..." I'll jot some notes down about what I could have done instead. When the semester starts (I'm an undergrad student) I also want to start keeping a rough weekly plan in the notebook, like this: http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/08/08/deep-habits-plan-your-...
> Out of curiosity, what are some of the things you're trying to combat the 2nd type of procrastination?
Yeah, like you, changing habits/organisation is a big thing. Another is that I've set things up such that it's far easier to exile myself from the internet. I try to restrict my leisure browsing to one VM and my work to another VM. So on.
> This is moderately successful for important tasks with important consequences, but not so helpful when I really should, say, do my laundry. But I figure that if I can get the hard things sorted out, I'll slot the laundry in somewhere later (textbook procrastination rationalizations, yes, I recognize the irony).
I don't mind letting these things languish. If it takes me a long time to do laundry, so what?
Thanks for sharing your findings about todo lists. My todo list is essentially the same thing as my calendar, and I wonder if I'd benefit from separating them a bit.
There's a big difference between an "internet connection" and "facebook". My opinion (as someone who cancelled my Facebook and netflix accounts this month, never had a TV, but do have a smartphone (mostly for GPS)) is that anything meaningful that happens on facebook can happen just as easily via text or email. If your close friends are planning an event or talking in a group chat, great, they can shoot you a text or email.
The things that facebook (and twitter) has the market cornered on are the things that no one cares about. For example, with these sites, you can see random updates from old acquaintances that really do not impact your life. That would never have happened before social media, and personally, I did not feel that 140 character quips, infini-scrolling feeds of irrelevant info, or gossiping were benefiting my life at all, so I've been on a deactivation spree.
95% of the time Facebook is a complete waste of time, but every time I get close to deleting an account I hear from someone that I have not seen in years. Someone I would have otherwise lost touch with. For that alone it is worth it (for me).
I don't know the answer here, but it's something I've considered often, so:
Is it possible that those top 1-2 people just knew so much more than you, going into the class, and had such a strong foundation in closely related material, that they picked it up more quickly? I mean, if the scenario was "my twin brother and I went into a math class with the same level of math knowledge, and he didn't study and got an A, while I studied 15-20 hr/wk and got a B" then I would find that much stronger evidence to conclude that these differences may be innate. But to me it seems likely that the 1-2 people who vastly outperformed everyone else may have just been setting themselves up to do that for the previous 10 years. By which I mean, they were intensively studying math throughout high school (and likely before), so that although they may not have known the course material going in, after seeing it once they think, "oh, yes, that's an obvious result based on x, y, z things that I already know. And it's a very nice way of thinking about w." Whereas you, not knowing x, y, z, or w, don't have any of that intuition. So they can make connections and learn by analogy "effortlessly" while you have to study much more to understand these concepts.
Ed Witten (of M-Theory fame) famously did the entire undergrad physics syllabus in his own time one summer after completing a different degree. Then he applied as a postgrad, aced his interviews, and got in.
The tragic thing about the 10k myth is that it makes people who aren't the best of the best underestimate just how good the really talented people are.
Most people simply cannot do what Witten did. No amount of personal tutoring or practice time is going to give them that kind of cognitive ability.
The reality is that you can take them a random selection of kids, hothouse them in any subject, and most of them will turn out to be good at best. Not brilliant, not geniuses - just good.
There's certainly an argument to be made that a lot of talent is wasted, and education is much better at destroying ability than nurturing it. But that's a different point.
The bottom line is some people just get it - whatever it is - and they're outstanding.
I'd guess most people here get technology like that to an extent that most of the population can't imagine. I'm certainly not brilliant, but I'm much better at getting technology to work than my friends and neighbors.
Take an aptitude like that, level up ten times or so, apply it to math or physics or music, and you get some idea what 'brilliant' might mean.
>Most kids want the thousand bucks, Lee said, but the pennies doubled daily over 30 days eventually adds up to more than $10.7 million.
30 years perhaps?
Anyway, it's cool to hear about Microsoft Research. This quote is especially exciting, since scalability is the main question I've had about quantum computing (and really quantum mechanics as a whole) being viable outside of a lab.
>“The problem of coherence is a major focus of our research here,” Lee said. “Every researcher connected to this field dreams of building a quantum computer. We are not trying to build a quantum computer. Our belief is that trying to build a quantum machine by controlling electron spin and using surface codes is like trying to build a computer using vacuum tubes. Labs all over the world can do that, but you’ll never be able to scale up. We’re taking an outrageously hard, unreasonably difficult approach, and if we succeed – and it’s a big if – then we will have a building block for a scalable quantum machine. We have a chance, a tiny chance but a real chance, to completely upend technology and society in a fundamental way just like the transistor did.”
Edit: oh, wow, I was thinking about the 30 day thing really wrong. Thanks!
My interest in the Miley Cyrus model might need a little more explanation. Back a few months ago, when she was releasing over-the-top videos (wrecking ball?), everyone was saying some variant of "wow why is Miley famous she obviously has no talent and this is just lewd." But this is the crux of her brilliance.[0] She has tricked a very large number of people into advertising for her, regardless of whether she does anything requiring talent. But then there's the obvious tradeoff: she has to deliver all of these ridiculous things, likely to the detriment of her ability to contribute anything actually meaningful to the industry. Maybe other people have made that deal but none seem to have been as successful, at least based on the data from my facebook feed. And this is a rare case in which facebook feed data is a useful measure of the success of the business, because it fuels the clicks and the conversations and the weird interest.
Anyway. Every time I see something about her, even overwhelmingly negative, I shake my head and think "another person tricked into feeding her success". Her willingness to decouple her success from anything "worthwhile"[1] about her (talent/skill/beauty/benefit to fans), at the cost of irrecoverably changing her career in what most would view as a very negative way, is sort of fascinating.
[0] I say "her brilliance" but in reality I am sure she is just the face for a manager type orchestrating the money-and-fame-for-girl's-reputation-and-soul deal.
[1] "Worthwhile" in quotes because is anything in the pop music industry really worthwhile?
Are you purporting that Miley is currently popular because she's doing over the top things, despite her music not being good?
If so, I don't think it's a correct assessment. Her music is ultimately popular because people like it. I don't think people think Wrecking Ball is a better song because the video was over-the-top, nor would a wild video make me like a song I would otherwise hate. Miley was also popular before she got more extreme. On the flip-side, Britney Spears was far more popular before she got extreme. I'm sure there are other cases where an artist receives more press attention that does not correlate to increased music sales.
Chris Brown has had nothing but bad press since he hit Rhianna a few years ago and he's still placing songs on the charts and radio. People seem to mostly dislike him, but will still listen to his music. I don't think they're listening to him because he hit a woman and is in and out of jail. I think they just like the songs he makes.
In the end, people still need to have some connection to the music. In pop music, that connection may not be entirely rational, and it certainly isn't lasting, but it's still there for some period of time.
>Her music is ultimately popular because people like it.
I don't think that this is actually true - most of these songs are purchased from agencies, produced to within an inch of their lives, and marketed aggressively in every possible medium. People may like the songs (and they should, because every part of the process has been managed by the most talented and successful people in the music industry), but that's not specifically the reason for Miley Cyrus's success.
Biley Papyrus could have the same songs in the same order on the same records with a sound produced to be indistinguishable to the versions you're familiar with, and if Biley didn't have the brand that has been created around Miley (or Rhianna, or any major corporate pop artist), Biley's success with that same set likely wouldn't be what Miley's success has been.
edit: Also - Smiley Papyrus (Biley's sister) could have the exact brand as Miley, and an entirely different set of songs, and the expectation would be that she would be successful. Hell, when Miley puts out her next album, she pretty much is Smiley.
It seems like some baseline talent is necessary to make the strategy work. I don't claim to have any ability to judge musical ability, plus it seems many artists aren't writing their own songs anyway, so I'm not trying to comment on her merits. Just noting that she's chosen to shift attention from her actual music to these antics, which is a strange choice from my perspective.
* Have at least some baseline modicum of talent
* Have access to talented songwriters
* Have access to talented producers
* Be attractive, or at least interesting to look at
* Have a stage presence
Bonus points for:
* Ability to dance
* A salacious or intriguing "private" life
Many pop stars have singing talent in spades (Beyonce, Adele, Whitney Houston), but many others have proven that extraordinary singing talent is not a pre-requisite for enormous success (Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus, perhaps Madonna).
I would say talent is less important now than ever. But this could be an illusion, as history is likely to forget pop stars who leave behind nothing memorable.
The bonus points for "salacious private life" are short-term, often borrowed against the long term.
Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are not exactly long-term success stories, even though they continue to be in the news and their popularity is still worth money.
I don't know if she's thinking of it this way, but one could look at her antics as a marketing strategy (cough cough growth hacking? cough cough). This is an old strategy that many others in the entertainment industry have tried with varying levels of success.
I think that an over-the-top video helps to get more reach, helps to introduce more people to a song. There are many songs with similar qualities, but if yours reach a wider audience, you will dominate the sales (and award) charts.
Put it another way: it doesn't matter if your song is good for many people, if you can't reach them, nobody will know about you.
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
I'm pretty sure with a father and godmother long timers in the music business, I'm pretty sure she knows what she's doing.
For another take that confirms it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOwblaKmyVw
She definitely knows what she's doing. You can't go from that "Jolene" video you linked to sitting naked on a wrecking ball[0] in one year, by accident. The interesting thing is that she would choose deliberately to do that.
I don't think so - unless I'm missing information about them (they're now rebranded as just "Genius" FYI). Their two main controversies that I'm aware of were the SEO violation thing and the founder's inappropriate comments about the serial killer's sister.
The first they apologized (and were penalized) for, the second they fired the founder. They aren't embracing negative attention, as far as I can tell.
I disagree. Even though Rap Genius has showcased plenty of what I like to call "douchey" behavior, in the end of the day they still make an awesome app that I and many others essentially need.
Every time I see something about her, even overwhelmingly negative, I shake my head and think "another person tricked into feeding her success".
What does it say about you, though, that you are reading that person's commentary? Whoever it was was probably just using her notoriety to make a point they wanted to make anyway. Media feeding frenzies go both ways. The media uses Miley as much as she uses them. The system isn't as simple as one person tricking another person into free publicity.
It's worth pointing out that Miley Cyrus didn't exactly invent this model. The old saying is "there's no such thing as bad publicity". The first example that came to my mind is Madonna who always seems to do something "stupid" and "crazy" every couple years that reminds people she exists and keeps her in the public eye.
The old saying is "there's no such thing as bad publicity".
I am really so sick of hearing people repeat this mantra. Bad publicity can have silver linings and sometimes what might seems like bad publicity is not bad at all. But there are plenty of examples of bad publicity that is just bad publicity. See Tiger Woods for a straightforward example.
Paris Hilton did it as well - leak a sex tape, do all sorts of outrageous shit, and make sure that the media covers it all and people talk about it. Ironically, she's the first Hilton in a while to be a self-made millionaire; her actions got her cut off from the bulk of her trust fund, but she's making about $10M/year in endorsements and public appearances.
That was my thought too, math is obviously tied very closely to language. And programming did come from CS which came from math. Web/App dev is just so far downstream from all of the math, that people in those roles can get away with ignoring it.
In fact, if you accept the premise of math as a language, most of the piece can be boiled down to: "language skills help programming skills, whether that language is mathematics or not".
Another nitpick:
> A common variation on this: without a CS degree, you can’t build anything substantial. Which, ha ha! Don’t tell the venture capitalists! They’re down there on Sand Hill Road giving actual money to hundreds of people building software projects without any formal qualifications whatsoever. In fact, they do it so often that the college-dropout-turned-genius-programmer is our primary Silicon Valley archetype of success. And monetarily, their strategy seems be to working out for them, if the fleets of Teslas on 280 are any indication.
1. Tesla is not a "software project" and I can't imagine that building a car is light on math.
2. Elon Musk has a degree in physics and dropped out of a Stanford EE PhD. He's not a "college dropout" or a "genius programmer." The CTO, Straubel, also has (non CS) engineering degrees from Stanford.
3. To my knowledge Tesla was initially 100% funded out of Musk's PayPal money, not venture capital.
"Math is irrelevant, look at Tesla!" is simply a ridiculous thing to say.
Now that you point it out I can see how it could be interpreted that way. I had trouble recognizing that because I don't think being wealthy (owning a Tesla) is an indicator that one "built something substantial".
MIT is not trying to decree that the guy has some egregious objective moral failing. They're saying that they ran an internal investigation, with the help of other physics faculty, and found Lewin to be in violation of their institutional sexual harassment policies, and as a result, they're removing his content from their platform. This is a perfectly good reason to distance themselves from him, as well as making it clear that they take sexual harassment very seriously by impacting his legacy so negatively.
MIT OCW continues to host courses for 8.01 and 8.02, the courses his lectures covered, with lectures given by other faculty[2]. The loss of material to learn from is marginal at best - these videos are for the same courses at the same school with much of the same infrastructure (notes/recitation videos/etc).
[1] http://www.amazon.com/For-Love-Physics-Rainbow-Journey/dp/14...
[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-fall-2003/