This is a quote from "the black swan: the impact of the highly improbable":

If you are a researcher you will have to publish inconsequential articles in "prestigious" publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences.

...

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel.  "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their year will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

First the electronic lady will say "dia Español" you must resist the urge to say "Español" because she'll start speaking spanish or something.

Next, stop listening to what she says and say the following really fast:
"representative, representative, represntative, representative, representative, representative, represntative, representative, representative, representative, represntative, representative,...."

You will maybe get to say the first ten before a real live person will answer. It's great service if you know how to...express yourself.

Derek Sivers analyzes how a shirtless dancing guy got a whole crowd to join him and the importance of the leader's first follower which "transform a lone nut into a leader". The video can be found here and originally found via 37Signals' weblog.

There is a famous assumption that every piece of code includes at least one bug. Now combine this assumption with a scientist that fixes bugs in his code until the results meet his expectation and you get common practice in research that makes use of custom developed code.

I dream of a publication that publishes the articles, code and data under a cross-medium viral license like the GPL. Cite the paper, use the code or data and you must release your article, code and data under the same license. I call it the Brain Pyramid License or BPL for short. Details still need to be worked out.

The guardian has a nice article about the general need to release software and data.

A friend at UCLA has a nice piece of software that tries to help bring the well established practice of keeping a lab log book of the experiments to computer science.

This is a lovely example of how to encourage users who opened an account and disappeared to come back. Way to go weebly.

EverNote is one of those really annoying companies that has a clear excellent vision and is just great at executing it. The vision: your external brain. The execution is also on the right path. The basic idea is you can dump anything you have on your mind into it: sound, images, text. And those things will be easily accessible on any platform: web, windows, mac, android, and of course the iPhone. All this before you get to their API. Check out the video below and keep your eyes on them.

Don't want to take my word? 10 million dollar investment and 2 million users speak for themselves. Mashable put up an great interview today with the evernote CEO Phil Libin.

Highlights from the interview. The user with the most notes has 85,000 notes :). Libin differentiates between longterm retention and short-term retention which I found interesting. About half of the users come back to evernote more than once in the first month.

How to increase short-term user retention? He says make it more welcoming, add videos and tutorials etc. There are some good examples of how to do this introductory phase well. I remember farmville had a super friendly gentle introduction. Wufoo.com also has helpful super friendly messages that both show you what your next steps can be and make you feel great.

The longterm retention is at the high 90s, if you come back after a month you pretty much never leave :), Living says. He also points out that the longterm retention is more important since these users are more likely to sign up for user accounts. How do you keep them though? I'd like to know more.

What's in their future? Libin says more of everything including sharing and API.

My Dad sent me this video. Steve Jobs is one of the people I admire most. I believe the iPhone is a good testament of what he is capable of, and what we can (only) try and aspire to achieve. Entering an existing mature market, and introducing so much practical innovation that it takes the whole industry several years to begin to catch up, that's amazing. Granted the iPhone is not the product of one man's efforts, yet I believe Steve Jobs' fingerprints are all over it.

This commencement speech is inspiring and worth seeing (again).

Research about "good" perfectionism and "bad" perfectionism.

Paul Graham: "If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean."