msglenn

Makes sense. My designer and I used a shared board on Pinterest in the beginning and that worked fine. The part that got hairy was going back and forth with the actual PSDs of the design. It might be nice to add simple drawing tools for giving feedback. Good luck!

Lots of designers seem to be using Pinterest to collect inspiration. How is this different?

Which is sad, because I've found Medium to be a terrific blogging tool for people who don't want to be full time bloggers.

The interface is really very easy to use, with the only annoying thing being the difficulty in browsing Collections when deciding which one to post your work in.

But isn't there a certain lack of humility in attempting to solve a set of problems that you have no insight into because they do not affect you at all?

There is nothing wrong with trying to address "third world problems" if you have the skills and background knowledge to actually do something, but if you grew up in a middle class suburb then stick to working on what you know. A lot of the innovations in the first world eventually end up being used and applied to bigger problems anyway.

I found Oblivion to be an homage to some of the best sci-fi over the past few decades (Moon, The Matrix, Independence Day), an effect that was ruined by the feeling that it took itself too seriously to realize it was an homage.

In terms of derivative sci-fi, I think Oblivion really reinforces the author's point.

Ideally we would help ALL students improve, but isn't it better that we give the kids with more involved parents a fighting chance by letting them opt into a more rigorous school?

Otherwise we create a situation that looks like this:

1. Parents who are involved fight a losing battle to help their kids succeed in a school that is simply not equipped to educate them.

2. Those students fail to achieve in traditional ways, reinforcing the idea that it's pointless to try.

3. Repeat until everyone suffers from an acute case of learned helplessness.

Access to quality education is not a right in this country, but attendance is required for a variety of reasons. Most of them related to creating and maintaining a functioning society. The more lofty goals of compulsory public education are about giving every child the skills to have a chance at a decent life.

So, if the government is going to force people to send their children to school, but isn't going to MANDATE a minimum quality level, they should at least give people a choice in deciding what's best for their kids. Because as it is now, the government is forcing people to send their kids to schools we all know are terrible.

As we fight to improve the quality of education in urban areas, it is critical that we pay attention to the results we're getting. That is the point, after all.

That said, this article fails to mention one of the most salient arguments in favor of charter schools: If education is the primary path for upward social mobility, then every parent should have some choice in where their child goes to school. And that choice should not be wholly dependent on current socioeconomic status.

Some schools may not do better according to traditional measurements, but creating a system where schools more transparently market their strengths and weaknesses to parents doesn't just give them more decision making power, over time it also creates a more informed parent class. Eventually leading to even better schools.

The A player rhetoric makes it easy to discard an employee without reflecting on how your actions as a company might be affecting that person's performance. The blame for poor performance immediately falls to the employee.

Sometimes the employee truly isn't going to work. But if you're a startup and you have someone who buys the vision of the company, fits the culture but doesn't exactly fit the role, it may pay to reevaluate the specifics of the job in light of the skills you know that person has.

So maybe it's not just about getting rid of the idea of the A player, but reconsidering whether the A player has to come into your company ready made.

Might I suggest a third reason: Maintaining your sanity.

Not just in terms of remembering that there are other people out there struggling alongside you in the entrepreneurship game, but also in giving you a modicum of control over your next steps. While I don't believe success is completely up to luck, a lot of the when and how is completely out of your hands. Reading on startups often gives me concrete, actionable advice. This ties into Ev's first point but it's not just the ideas, it's the feeling that I have a key, non-random role to play every step of the way. If you're the type of person who needs the world to be a certain way to be happy, knowing that you have a chance to make it that way keeps you on the right side of crazy.

People often look worse in photos than they do in real life simply because they don't know the tricks for adjusting their face and bodies to achieve the best effect. This photographer positions people in unnatural ways to ensure his subjects look their best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...

Contrast this with how we see ourselves: In 3D and from a variety of angles. Indeed, when we look at ourselves in a mirror, we often position ourselves in ways that make us look our best. Who here hasn't done a 30 second mirror check/pep talk to remind ourselves how great we are? Ever strike a totally unnatural pose?

I think the subjects of these tests are looking at the images and picking the image that best fits the version of what they see in the mirror, hence the bias.