read - raman srinivasan on Diigo

21 Jun 09

What the Little Bird Told Me About You: Three Twitter Apps for Psych Analysis

omorrow morning, social media and marketing researcher Dan Zarrella is debuting a new way to see into the minds of Twitter users by analyzing their most recent 1,000 tweets.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.

Zarrella wrote in an email tonight that he used RID (Regressive Imagery Dictionary) and LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to parse the data. RID is a text analysis tool composed of more than 3,000 words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis software program that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words in emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech. The program considers positive and negative emotion words, self-references, and words that refer to sex, eating, or religion.

Profiles with updates that are protected cannot be analyzed by TweetPsych.

Let's take a look inside the mind of a few Twitter users. Most of the social media elite tend to have fairly impersonal tweets; hence, their TweetPsych profiles are relatively homogeneous catalogs of upward mobility, obsession with professional affairs, and moral imperativism. Here's a profile of a photographer/mother/homemaker/blogger in Georgia:

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20 May 09

Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Dissanayake posed that question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children's play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question.

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Informally, though, her education continued. Because her husband studied zoology, she was exposed to the principles of natural selection and their influence on animal behavior. "I had this social world of ethology," Dissanayake says. "We'd sit around and talk with the graduate students and make these links," sometimes comparing the behavior of animals and humans. She also picked up ideas while typing her husband's papers and translating articles he wanted to read.
After John earned his doctorate, the Eisenbergs moved to Vancouver. Two years later, when Eisenberg was offered a position at the University of Maryland, they moved to the East Coast. Not long after, the Smithsonian Institution named Eisenberg director of research at the National Zoo. He brought animals home from his new job: At various times, a pangolin, a cavy, hedgehogs, pocket mice, desert rats, and a genet lived in their house. "City boy," she teases when a reporter asks what a cavy is. "It's a rodent that looks like a little deer, with these big brown eyes." She bottle-fed it. "Living with John," she says, "I really came to realize that humans are animals in a way that I would not have otherwise."
19 more annotations...
- With her husband's encouragement, she began work toward a master's degree in art history at the University of Maryland. Then, in June 1968, the Smithsonian sent Eisenberg to Sri Lanka on a project that included a census of the island's wild elephants. The family settled for a year in Kandy, one of Sri Lanka's ancient cities. While John was in the jungle, Ellen homeschooled the children. She also rented a piano. "I hadn't played for years," she recalls. "I'd stopped when we left Berkeley." She began playing music with a group of expatriates and Sri Lankans, and soon she was part of their circle. "This was before television" came to Sri Lanka, she explains. "It was very much a Victorian atmosphere." The group met once a week to play music together. "These were well-educated, broadly educated people," she says. Many were doctors. One of them, S.B. Dissanayake, a professor of dentistry with an interest in public health, would become her second husband.
- In her second husband's home, which he had designed himself, the windows were always open. In photographs, in fact,
  they look less like windows than like the strategic omission of walls. Bats flew in and out. When it rained, you
  could hear the water hitting the giant leaves outside. A Buddhist temple stood nearby. "There was always some tree
  in bloom," she recalls, "with fragrance that would waft into the house." They had to boil the water they drank,
  they slept under mosquito netting, and they had no running hot water. Yet they had a record player, a subscription
  to the Times Literary Supplement, and "bookshelves with Proust and stacks of French film magazines."
- Sri Lanka made Shakespeare intelligible to Dissanayake: It was a world with fools and omens. The arts saturated everyday life. People offered flowers at the temple and drew symbols on the floor before bullocks threshed the rice. She observed the rituals closely. The experiences started her on a new train of thought.
- It's difficult to discuss her first book, What Is Art For? (1988), without reference to her other two,
  Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000). The three are not so much distinct works as snapshots of a single theory at different stages of development. That theory starts with a striking set of observations.
- First, the arts appear to be universal. No one has found a culture that lacks them. Second, they consume a
  large portion of available resources. Among the Owerri in Nigeria, for example, the artists who build and paint
  ceremonial mbari houses are exempted for up to two years from the workload normally expected of healthy adults. Third, the arts give pleasure. Our internal motivational systems reward us for making and appreciating the arts the same way they reward us for having sex, spending time with friends, and eating nutritious food: The experiences feel good. And fourth, young children engage in the arts almost spontaneously. With only gentle encouragement, children will sing, move to music, make believe, scribble, and play with words. Together, these four facts suggest to Dissanayake that natural selection long ago rendered the arts a standard component of human behavior.
- In its freedom from social rules, art resembles play, while in its emphasis on display and embellishment, it resembles ritual. To focus her inquiry, Dissanayake has picked out a common element: During all these activities, humans make something special. That is, they distinguish an object or action from the ordinary. "What's interesting about humans," Dissanayake says, "is that they gild the lily. They do more than is necessary." "Making special," rather than "art," is what Dissanayake studies.
- What does making special accomplish? Something that has been made special is more likely to attract and engage
  the attention of others. Dissanayake offers as an example the hand axes fashioned by Homo erectus between
  1.6 million and 200,000 years ago. Flat and almond-shaped, with both front-back and left-right symmetry, the axes
  fit comfortably in the hand and have sharp cutting edges that meet in a point. They were clearly useful, but they
  cannot have been merely tools—they are too attractive. Some are made from pieces of flint with embedded
  fossil shells that figure on the sides of the hand axes as ornaments. Others, under inspection by electron
  microscope, show no evidence of the wear and tear of use. Even a plain, well-worn hand ax is the result of
  far more care than would be required to produce a stone capable of cutting, and the pains taken by Homo erectus
  hundreds of thousands of years ago can stir strong feelings in Homo sapiens today.
- making special
- "A society that performed communal rites that bound its members in common beliefs and values would presumably have been more cohesive and therefore more equipped for survival than one that did not." The tribe that prayed together stayed together (and caught more ungulates and had more children).
- In What Is Art For? she argues that the arts
  should be integrated into modern life, as they are in premodern cultures, not set aside as the fiefdom of
  specialists self-conscious about their outsider status. In Art and Intimacy, she calls for more art
  education in schools. And in Homo Aestheticus, she takes aim at the hyperliterate credo of poststructuralism: The arts are a part of our evolved nature, she explains; literacy, a recent invention, isn't. She diagnoses the Derridean notion that there is nothing outside the text as a delusion typical of—and flattering to—someone overinvested in the skill of writing. She dismisses as "poppycock" the notion that there cannot be thinking or experience without language.
- It was
  in Scotland that Dissanayake learned more of the details concerning mother-infant affiliative behavior
  that distinguish Art and Intimacy from her earlier work—and from nearly all other studies of
  evolution and the arts.
- But then she names two more books she wants to write—an evolutionary analysis of music and a rebuttal to evolutionary psychologists who in her opinion have underestimated the arts.
- . In
  The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that humans share the sense of beauty with other animals. Bowerbirds, for example, ornament "their playing-passages with gaily-coloured objects." He believed that if apes could give their opinion, they "would probably declare that they could and did admire the beauty of the coloured skin and fur of their partners in marriage."
- Evolutionary psychologists have found evidence that seems to confirm Darwin's hunch that human aesthetic preferences have been shaped by natural selection. For example, most people find a grassland with scattered trees to be the prettiest kind of landscape—no surprise, since that's how the African savanna looked during the Pleistocene, and it would make sense if our predilections encouraged us to seek out the terrain we are best equipped to survive in. When eight-year-olds are shown photos of a rain forest, a deciduous forest, a coniferous forest, an East African savanna, and a desert, they overwhelmingly pick the savanna as the place they would most like to live.
- No such skepticism afflicts Geoffrey Miller. Like Dissanayake, Miller has a proposal to explain what art is for. In
  The Mating Mind (Doubleday, 2000), he suggests that the arts—and many other aspects of human culture—first developed as a way of showing off to prospective mates. The more complex and delicate the arts became, the more taxing they were of brainpower and the better they functioned as indicators of an individual's vigor. In Miller's view, "the peacock's tail, the nightingale's song, the bowerbird's nest, the butterfly's wing, the Irish elk's antlers, the baboon's rump, and the first three Led Zeppelin albums" are all forms of romantic excess. They advertise good health and good genes (and the prospect of good sex) by throwing effort away as conspicuously as possible.
- And "we're good at making things," explains Steven Pinker. "Put those two facts together, and you've got a species that's smart enough to know how to concoct artificial stimuli to push its own pleasure buttons." Pinker likens the arts to pornography, strawberry cheesecake, and drug abuse. Drug abuse, for example, is present in almost every culture, consumes gross amounts of an individual's energy and resources, and is intensely pleasurable. But it is not a behavior that anyone would call adaptive.
- "When you're in a movie theater watching Jaws, your emotion system is actually engaged, but your motor system is not," Cosmides explains. "Nobody has to hold you back from the screen." That's odd, given that emotions are what spur us into action, and it suggests that humans are well designed for appreciating fictional narratives. Furthermore, we have a strong appetite for off-line experiences: We watch sitcoms and dramas more often than news programs and documentaries. And that's odd, because those shows contain very little accurate information about the world. What might the evolutionary advantage of fiction be? Cosmides doesn't rule out Dissanayake's proposal, but she offers a few of her own.
- In a recent article in the journal SubStance, Cosmides and Tooby have suggested that telling and enjoying stories might be the ways that human brains build the mental components responsible for managing social behavior. Most such assembly processes finish their task and then disappear (babbling, for example, subsides after infants learn to speak), but it may be that social behavior is so complex and vital that humans never stop tinkering with this particular weapon in their psychic armamentarium. "It might be that a cheap way of learning about the social world is to run simulations," says Cosmides. "So if you're reading Lord Jim, you're learning about what happens in a social community when somebody does what's considered to be an act of cowardice."
- After the Temple University English professor Robert Storey realized to his chagrin that he "could apply psychoanalytic theory any way I chose," he found himself attracted to "the empirical steadiness" of evolutionary psychology. His Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Northwestern, 1996) speculates about the emotional "biogrammars" that inform the genres of comedy and tragedy. The University of Oregon's Michelle Scalise Sugiyama says she turned to evolutionary psychology "due to my failure to be convinced by postmodernist theory." Her dissertation for the UC-Santa Barbara
  English department analyzed in Darwinian terms the choices faced by women in Ernest Hemingway's fiction. (Mate choice, sexual fidelity, and hunting prowess are, after all, more than a little relevant to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.") Ian Jobling, a graduate student in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, has written about the way Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe satisfies the naturally selected but currently maladaptive desire for murderous revenge.
  His Ivanhoe essay appeared in the spring 2001 issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, which was
  devoted to literary biopoetics. The issue was edited by the Texas A&M Russian professor Brett Cooke, who is also
  responsible, with UT-Dallas's Frederick Turner, for the anthology Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (Paragon House, 1999).

05 May 09

Making It - The New York Review of Books

Making It
By Sue M. Halpern
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder

Bantam, 960 pp., $35.00
Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown, 309 pp., $27.99
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
by Geoff Colvin

Portfolio, 228 pp., $25.95

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A stock is the right to own a little piece of a business.... Use a margin of safety...[and] Mr. Market is your servant, not your master. Graham postulated a moody character named Mr. Market, who offers to buy and sell stocks every day, often at prices that don't make sense. Mr. Market's moods should not influence your view of price.
Buffett's annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the textile company he bought for $7.50 a share in 1962 that he turned into a holding company comprised of insurance, candy, vacuum cleaner, furniture, jewelry, prison uniform–manufacturing, food, paint, encyclopedia, and other companies that now trades for about $90,000 a share, down from a high of $150,000 in December 2007, is read by millions of investors and money managers and market neophytes alike looking for any bits of advice they can glean to increase their net worth. It is not unusual for the company's annual meeting, hosted in Omaha by Warren Buffett himself, to attract tens of thousands of shareholders (and those who score tickets on eBay) eager to learn from the master.
7 more annotations...
- We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.
- If Langan had had what Gladwell, citing the psychologist Robert Sternberg, calls "practical intelligence"—knowing what to say and who to say it to—he might have graduated from college, gone to graduate school, become an academic, written peer-reviewed articles, sat on innumerable committees, and made something recognizable out of his life. But lacking the kind of family background from which, Gladwell says, such knowledge comes, he was doomed to failure.
- Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.
- it's that they headed out on their path to greatness well before their peers. Woods was two when his father put a golf club in his hands. Bill Gates started programming in high school at a time when no one had computers at home because he himself had yet to have the vision of the PC. Buffett began investing before he was in long pants. Sidis was ready to enter Harvard as a nine-year-old.
- Anders Ericsson and colleagues who wanted to know why some conservatory students went on to solo and orchestral careers while others ended up as workaday music teachers, Gladwell invokes "the 10,000 hour rule":
  
  The striking thing about Ericcson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.... And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
  
  The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
- liberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn't much fun.
- "Working really hard is what successful people do," Gladwell writes,
  
  and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty. That lesson has served Asians well in many endeavors but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics.

17 Apr 09

A special report on health care and technology: Health 2.0 | The Economist

A special report on health care and technology
Health 2.0

Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition
How far can interactive digital medicine go?

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me think there are bigger things to come. “The key is patient-driven research,” explains Gregory Simon, head of Faster Cures, an advocacy group in Washington, DC. Most of the push for adopting electronic health records has come from institutions anxious to cut costs and reduce medical errors, but he thinks the biggest gains will come in the shape of better treatments for difficult diseases. He sees patients increasingly getting together online and sharing medical data and treatment histories.

On a website called PatientsLikeMe, members from around the world swap stories about their ailments and discuss subjects like adverse drug interactions, dosing strategies, new drugs and trials for more than a dozen diseas
How far could all this go? Neil Seeman, who runs a health-strategy innovation group at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, thinks that “Health 2.0” is important “because it reinvents how we identify opinion leaders and exploit disruptive innovation.” His research has shown that the most active communities on social networks such as MySpace concentrate not on celebrity gossip or sport but on chronic illness—especially stigmatised conditions like depression.

03 Apr 09

Asian Data Shows Severity of Slump - NYTimes.com

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many of the economies in the region, notably China’s and India’s, will still experience significant, though slower, growth this year.
Still, the data Wednesday appear to indicate that the global slump has months to run. Moreover, economists say that the labor market, already bad, is set to deteriorate as companies face intense pressure to scale back costs and output.

Slump Hits Home for Venture Capitalists - WSJ.com

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Along a one-mile stretch of road here dotted with trees and inconspicuous two-story buildings is one of the nation's priciest -- and supposedly recession-resistant -- commercial real-estate "micro-markets."

Boasting a tony street address with similar name recognition to Wall Street, Sand Hill Road is the moneyed center of Silicon Valley, where venture-capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital reside. With a limited inventory of 1.1 million square feet of office space that tenants often sign multiyear leases to lock up, the area is the second-most expensive commercial real-estate market in the .

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31 Mar 09

Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog Archive My Web 2.0 Expo Keynote: until Best Buy adds people to its website our jobs are not done «

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1. The real social media strategy you should have is to get people to promote you. Most people are more likely to promote you if they think you’re listening to you. (Zappos does this by having more than 300 employees on Twitter who will fix any problem you have instantly). Amazon does it by having great reviews. If I review some products my name is on the site and I’m more likely to tell other people about Amazon than some other site, like Best Buy’s, that might have a lower price but doesn’t feature me.

30 Mar 09

Structured Finance for Beginners « The Baseline Scenario

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29 Mar 09

Sourcetone Interactive Radio

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28 Mar 09

FrontlineSMS:Medic

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The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products.: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 - Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, March 31 - April 03, 2009, San Francisco, CA

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This presentation will empower entrepreneurs and managers to:

1. Identify a profitable business model faster and cheaper than your competitors.

2. Continuously discover what customers want to buy before building or making follow-on investments in new features.

3. Ship new software at a dizzying pace: multiple times a day while improving quality and lowering costs.

4. Build a company-wide culture of decision-making based on real facts, not opinions.

20 Mar 09

Crawling the Web to Foretell Ecosystem Collapse | Wired Science from Wired.com

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he Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

"If we look at coral reefs, for example, the Internet may contain
information that describes not only changes in the ecosystem, but also drivers of change, such as global seafood markets," said Tim Daw, an ecologist at the UK's University of East Anglia in a press release about his team's new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease. Google Flu Trends,
which uses a cloud of keywords to determine how sick a population is, tracks epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease
Control. Less serious projects — like this map of a United Kingdom snowstorm based on Tweets about snow — have also had some success tracking the real world.
These research efforts seem to indicate that people are good sensors, but pulling the information from what they post in human-readable formats and transforming it into quantitative models of the world is tough. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network has developed an epidemic warning system that pulls in data from news wires, web sites, and public health mailing lists. The GPHIN, which is probably the most advanced and uses highly variegated information, only picks up on about 40 percent of the 200 to 250 outbreaks that the World Health Organization investigates each year.

Why science is elBulli's vital ingredient - opinion - 20 March 2009 - New Scientist

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haven't eaten at elBulli. With 2 million applications for 8,000 seats a year, few get the chance, though the New Scientist editor is one of the lucky few that did get a seat – you can read his account here. Instead I took the opportunity of Adrià's visit to Harvard to chat to the chef about his cutting-edge techniques.

How did you discover how to make spheres of liquids?

Spherification was an idea I got from a factory visit in 2003. I went there with a friend, and we saw a little glass that had spheres in it. I asked "What is this?" They started saying it was an alginate solution. "Do you have alginate here? Give it to me," I said.

You have to put some calcium chloride in it to get the effect, so we went to the drug store and bought some. We arrived at our workshop and we began to mix things – and the first sphere was made.

It was like magic, but we were limited to a small number of products. The moment we put alginate in any liquid that has any acidity or salinity, it will not work.

But then we realised that if we made a bath of this alginate solution and we simply added yogurt, then it reacted because yogurt contains calcium. That's the inverse spherification. Then we discovered calcium gluconolactate. It's a salt which is completely tasteless.

We can now construct spheres with whatever liquid we want inside.
How did you discover how to make spheres of liquids?

Spherification was an idea I got from a factory visit in 2003. I went there with a friend, and we saw a little glass that had spheres in it. I asked "What is this?" They started saying it was an alginate solution. "Do you have alginate here? Give it to me," I said.

You have to put some calcium chloride in it to get the effect, so we went to the drug store and bought some. We arrived at our workshop and we began to mix things – and the first sphere was made.

It was like magic, but we were limited to a small number of products. The moment we put alginate in any liquid that has any acidity or salinity, it will not work.

But then we realised that if we made a bath of this alginate solution and we simply added yogurt, then it reacted because yogurt contains calcium. That's the inverse spherification. Then we discovered calcium gluconolactate. It's a salt which is completely tasteless.

We can now construct spheres with whatever liquid we want inside.
5 more annotations...
- here's a very well-known technique I call "the airs". It was simply a day that we were making apple juice and we took one of these mixers to blend it and we could see a vapor coming out – an air coming out. I tasted it, it was marvellous. It was the lightest texture imaginable. After that we made it with beets and the vapour also came out. The third one was a failure.
- haven't eaten at elBulli. With 2 million applications for 8,000 seats a year, few get the chance, though the New Scientist editor is one of the lucky few that did get a seat – you can read his account here. Instead I took the opportunity of Adrià's visit to Harvard to chat to the chef about his cutting-edge techniques.
  
  How did you discover how to make spheres of liquids?
  
  Spherification was an idea I got from a factory visit in 2003. I went there with a friend, and we saw a little glass that had spheres in it. I asked "What is this?" They started saying it was an alginate solution. "Do you have alginate here? Give it to me," I said.
  
  You have to put some calcium chloride in it to get the effect, so we went to the drug store and bought some. We arrived at our workshop and we began to mix things – and the first sphere was made.
  
  It was like magic, but we were limited to a small number of products. The moment we put alginate in any liquid that has any acidity or salinity, it will not work.
  
  But then we realised that if we made a bath of this alginate solution and we simply added yogurt, then it reacted because yogurt contains calcium. That's the inverse spherification. Then we discovered calcium gluconolactate. It's a salt which is completely tasteless.
  
  We can now construct spheres with whatever liquid we want inside.
- haven't eaten at elBulli. With 2 million applications for 8,000 seats a year, few get the chance, though the New Scientist editor is one of the lucky few that did get a seat – you can read his account here. Instead I took the opportunity of Adrià's visit to Harvard to chat to the chef about his cutting-edge techniques
- Read full article
  
  Continue reading page
  
  |1
  
  |2
  
  Ferran Adrià is no stranger to experimentation. As head chef and co-owner of the world's most avant-garde and exalted restaurant – elBulli on Spain's Costa Brava – he is constantly trying to push the boundaries of his cooking, so far pioneering the use of foams, flavour-filled spheres and liquid nitrogen.
  
  Adrià says that elBulli is "not a restaurant" – I guess you could see it as a cross between a research lab and an edible art installation. Now Adrià has taken a further step towards the science world by striking up a collaboration with scientists from Harvard University and recently toured the laboratory of physical chemist Laurent Courbin.
  
  Courbin studies the properties of non-Newtonian fluids, which can simultaneously display properties of liquids and solids. One such fluid is starch mixed with water (see a competition-winning video of the substance).
  
  Courbin expects the collaboration to be mutually beneficial. He hopes to help Adrià's team achieve new textures by tweaking foods at the molecular level. Yet he is also keen explore the physical properties of foods from the kitchen of elBulli. "It's really an interaction to try and improve our understanding of a problem," Courbin says. "In the end we would get an understanding of something, he will get an improvement in a product."
  
  And if the Harvard collaboration yields a paper or two, don't be surprised to see Adrià among the authors, he says. "We publish with some industrial people, why not with a famous chef?"
  
  I haven't eaten at elBulli. With 2 million applications for 8,000 seats a year, few get the chance, though the New Scientist editor is one of the lucky few that did get a seat – you can read his account here. Instead I took the opportunity of Adrià's visit to Harvard to chat to the chef about his cutting-edge techniques.
  
  How did you discover how to
- Read full article
  
  Continue reading page
  
  |1
  
  |2
  
  Ferran Adrià is no stranger to experimentation. As head chef and co-owner of the world's most avant-garde and exalted restaurant – elBulli on Spain's Costa Brava – he is constantly trying to push the boundaries of his cooking, so far pioneering the use of foams, flavour-filled spheres and liquid nitrogen.
  
  Adrià says that elBulli is "not a restaurant" – I guess you could see it as a cross between a research lab and an edible art installation. Now Adrià has taken a further step towards the science world by striking up a collaboration with scientists from Harvard University and recently toured the laboratory of physical chemist Laurent Courbin.
  
  Courbin studies the properties of non-Newtonian fluids, which can simultaneously display properties of liquids and solids. One such fluid is starch mixed with water (see a competition-winning video of the substance).
  
  Courbin expects the collaboration to be mutually beneficial. He hopes to help Adrià's team achieve new textures by tweaking foods at the molecular level. Yet he is also keen explore the physical properties of foods from the kitchen of elBulli. "It's really an interaction to try and improve our understanding of a problem," Courbin says. "In the end we would get an understanding of something, he will get an improvement in a product."
  
  And if the Harvard collaboration yields a paper or two, don't be surprised to see Adrià among the authors, he says. "We publish with some industrial people, why not with a famous chef?"
  
  I haven't eaten at elBulli. With 2 million applications for 8,000 seats a year, few get the chance, though the New Scientist editor is one of the lucky few that did get a seat – you can read his account here. Instead I took the opportunity of Adrià's visit to Harvard to chat to the chef about his cutting-edge techniques.

19 Mar 09

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17 Mar 09

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16 Mar 09

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She starts by listing the 50 most promising graduate students at each of nine elite engineering schools in the United States. It’s hard to determine their names and even harder to figure out what they’re working on, but she likes the challenge. While she isn’t yet wooing them for corporate clients, she figures that they will be worth watching as their careers unfold. As far as she can tell, no other recruiter is doing anything quite like it.

To widen her contact list, Ms. Reed subscribes to 31 periodicals, including Technology Review and niche publications like WaterWorld. She takes pride in having attended the first Burning Man festival in Nevada and the first TED conference in California; she has been networking at those engineer-friendly events and at many others ever since.
Daniel J. Socolow, who runs the MacArthur Foundation’s fellows program, colloquially known as the “genius grants.” Those prizes of $500,000 each, spread over five years, are conferred each September on about 25 people. Recent recipients have included an astrophysicist, a weaver, a saxophonist and a stage lighting designer.
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- K. Ram Shriram, one of the best ways to find the right people involves peeking inside Stanford professors’ computer labs, where graduate students’ business ideas are just taking shape. One such chat led him to Google six years before its initial public offering in 2004. His six-figure investment in Google — he wouldn’t divulge the exact amount — has produced one of the great venture-capital winnings of all time: $1.15 billion in sales proceeds, according to Thomson Reuters. He still holds about $420 million of Google stock.
- Bet on passionate newcomers. “I prefer youth over experience,” he says. “You need a spark of idealism, and that’s much more likely in someone’s first or second start-up.” He also warms up if he hears that a candidate’s parents were teachers or academics, believing that it “generates kids with great curiosity.”
- country-music executive Scott Borchetta scored his biggest career break by backing the singer Taylor Swift in 2005, when she was just 15 and most people in the music business believed she wasn’t ready for a solo career. Mr. Borchetta liked her blunt, edgy lyrics and thought that they could connect with other teenagers, who usually aren’t big country fans.
  
  Some young singers have seen their appeal fade fast when sudden fame proved tormenting. But Mr. Borchetta says he saw early on that Ms. Swift could thrive in the spotlight, coming across as friendly and open with almost any audience. A defining moment came in 2006, when the two visited a radio station in Bristol, Tenn., hoping to make a good impression.
  
  “Often they just say hello for a few minutes and don’t let a brand-new artist on the air,” Mr. Borchetta recalled. “But they liked one of Taylor’s songs and told her so. Without missing a beat, she replied: ‘Thank you. Can I play it right now for your listeners?’ ” The station managers couldn’t say no, and Ms. Swift’s march to the top of the charts had begun.
- Gensler is bringing a new twist to its internship program. A major goal involves hiring students from United States universities who grew up in Brazil, Argentina, India, China or the Mideast and might eventually want to return to their native countries later in their careers. The hope, says Diane Hoskins, one of three executive directors running Gensler, is that these interns can eventually play important roles in helping Gensler build its overseas offices.
  
  Historically, Gensler has expanded in a gradual, impromptu way, opening most of its 31 offices when major clients want work done in new locations. But Gensler’s new effort to nurture transnational architects reflects a more deliberate matching of future talent and future strategy, by clustering gifted people together.
  
  This approach pays homage to one of the firm’s most successful hires. In 1991, an American-trained Chinese immigrant, Jun Xia, joined Gensler’s office in Denver and thrived there, winning awards for a regional airport job. He had planned to settle in the United States, but after a visit to Shanghai in 1998, he urged his bosses to open an office there, so Gensler could play an important part in China’s building boom. The firm did so.
- The Apple encounters made Mr. Moritz especially alert to what kinds of executives can build a big new consumer market on the strength of their ingenuity and sheer force of will. “It’s extremely rare,” Mr. Moritz says. “But the best entrepreneurs have this incredible need to do what they’re doing. A subject has entirely engrossed them. They have an extraordinary drive to flourish in it. They can’t think of anything else they want to do.”
- MR. MORITZ tests entrepreneurs’ passion for their company by grilling them about their own proposed salaries — a standard venture-capitalist question. High salaries are viewed with suspicion. Bare-bones pay is generally a good sign; it means the founder wants every possible dollar to go toward the success of the company, even if it means personal sacrifices. Mr. Kaplan says he passed that test by taking a mere $50,000 annual salary at first as the chief executive of Flip’s maker, Pure Digital Technologies.
  
  Mr. Moritz also wants entrepreneurs who think big. Steve Streit, founder of the Green Dot Corporation, a prepaid-debit-card company backed by Sequoia, says he asked Mr. Moritz a few years ago whether they should consider an offer to sell the company. Both men recall Mr. Moritz retorting: “You don’t understand what you have here. Maybe you should take a vacation. You will not have five Green Dots in your life.”
  
  Talk of selling Green Dot vanished.

14 Mar 09

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