PIPA (Protect IP Act) is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S.
Visual Summary
Source: AmericanCensorship.org
Response of the world
On the 18th of January the world's biggest online pages blacked out for a day to protest against censorship (See images below).
Mark Zuckerberg The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet. The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.
Impact that SOPA and PIPA can cause
Source: khanacademy.org
When will be any decision?
On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate.
This article wants to clarify some basic approaches about motivation. How the main motivating factors working, and how ot give positive and negative feedback as a leader.
Basic motivation factors
Personal allowance (salary) and bonus
Produce new things and positive feedback (recognition)
Fear
Self directions (free use 20% of work time)
What motivation factors motivates?
Personal allowance (salary) and bonus → work length
Produce new things and positive feedback →work quality
Fear, punishments → work length
Self directions (free use 20% of work time) → work quality
What kind of skills the motivation factors boost?
First see the following video about the "Candle problem"
Money narrows your focus, and can make any change on your mechanical skills. Real world problems cannot be solved only with mechanical skills
Personal allowance (salary) and bonus (work length) [boosts mechanical skills]
Produce new things and positive feedback (work quality) [boosts cognitive skills]
Fear, punishments (work length) [N/A]
Self directions (free use 20% of work time) (work quality) [boosts cognitive skills]
Choose the recognition level in the company
Recognition level means, when you will say as a leader to the employee that "this is good job".
"This work is mediocre. I would be embarrassed to show this." (Steve Jobs)
or
"This is incredible! Really, insanely great! You are a star!" (Steve Jobs)
Working with Steve Jobs means, that you should do extraordinary good work. The level of recognition in this case is very high. This working culture suggests that you should outperform your boundaries.
Excellence, perfect, strong
Limit negative feedback within the company, teach the leaders to correct feedbacking
The basic rules of giving negative feedback as a leader are the following:
Do not stall negative feedbacks, the best time is right after you noticed the bad thing
(As soon as possible after the event)
Find private space, give only face to face feedback
Judge the person's behaviour not the him- or herself
(Focus on their actions, not on the person)
Take exact example and be specific, tell what is expected and why is it good to do this way
(If you say you got bad attitude, you don't give an exact situation where he/her did something wrong)
Be objective and calm
(You should focus on personal development, you don't give negative feedback just because, you give negative feedback because you want him/her to develop, be a better person)
Listen him or her
(Let him or her to talk, what he or she thinks about the event and example, so you will recognize, what he or she recognized and learned from the talk)
Give positive feedback
Yes, you should also give positive feedbacks, because one positive feedback could be stronger than a negative one. We can teach people with positive feedbacks, and there are also some rules of it:
Give the feedback in public, it should be given publicly
If you praise someone, you should every time tell, (1) why and (2) how good the job was
Never mention any negative "but" things during the talk
(If you say "It was a very good jub, but next time be more specific, with numbers" you will tell with this that, he or she did something wrong, even if the whole job is extraordinary. In this way it's a negative feedback)
Be aware of your or companies recognition level, do not praise someone if the job isn't as good as it should be, or didn't meet the companies recognition level
This article is about a phenomena, that can boost your co-workers during you everyday work. No its not something you can teach them, more than help them to feel it. But the first question is that are you already passionate about your work?
The phenomena
I work in web development, where personal and team performance is very important. During everyday development it is an often emerging situation when a lot of script didn't want to work properly, on a scrum review the product fails to operate even and there are lot of small mistakes, that makes the whole picture a great mass.
If we work in Scrum development or even in classic Project Management we always give User Stories or Tasks to the developers, but we have no really impact on how will these small pieces come togther in one product. Ok we can control them, check them, audit them, but afterwards they will feel themself as a robot, and their creative self disappears. Its a mouse trap: the developers working more imprecisely, the project managers should use more control, and so on. How can we quit from this circle? You should see one clear vision that you feel passionate about it and starting to say WE not you and me.
How can we evolve product enthusiasm?
If you belive in your product and in its vision than it is the first step to be passionate about it.
1.) Ideologies your product!
Why is your product more than average? If you could not answer this question clearly, your product is not better than the others, than you are in the "long tail" of products.
Never use bullshits like "we are more efficient", "we have more feature".
Google has only two features in their original search engine, (1) it has a really simple interface (one field) and (2) gived relevant search results.
You should not be better than others, you should be the best among the others. Perfection is the key, which will raise you above other companies.
2.) Use vision building meeting and let all developers to take part!
It is not a fast meeting you should hold, but you should give time, to people feel more and more enthusiasm about the product.
3.) Found a new company culture
The headline of your new company culture should be:
Feel every product your are working on should be a masterpiece
The hardest thing to start this, because you should start it with yourself. You should show the example how to be passionate and focused with your product, you should not satisfied only with the best results.
Peoples who were passionate
And finally let me show you some great people, who were passionate about they doing.
Jamie Oliver
"What I've enjoyed most, though, is meeting people who have a real interest in food and sharing ideas with them. Good food is a global thing and I find that there is always something new and amazing to learn - I love it!"
Steve Jobs
"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them."
Steve Irwin
"I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it."
Could you recognize the common characteristics in their attitude?
They love(d) what they do
They belive(d) what they do
They are(were) honest with themself
They though(t) that it is the best thing they can do
Final word
Do you remember when Robin Williams stand on the table in movie Dead Poets Society? You felt that its not normal, you felt that it should mean something more deeper than just a silly move...
If you want to feel the same passion you should do also the same: "stand on your table".
These examples shows the first signs of the future. What are the main innovations that are already amongst us.
Huge glass surfaces
New type of surfaces to display information.
Big glass surfaces
Direct interfaces
We always want to avoid carrying displays with us, that is why these small things can come into our life.
Smart contact lenses
Mind interface
The future of mind interface is that we could use complex thoughts to control our smart things, that reacts in real time.
Mind interface
Personal Assistant
Another intresting and more inspirating things are the personal assistants. Their role would be to help us in everyday. Do not forget anything, and performing things without we even recognize forgetting that. These intelligent agents would help to orginize our life.
Abstract This article aims to predict the outcome of Hungarian parliamentary election in 2010. The research uses several text mining, and artificial intelligence techniques to give the best estimation about the possible outcome of the election.
1. Outlines The research consist of two main parts, (1) in the first part there is the collection of textual data, which is differentiated by the sources where the written text emerged (e.g. online news, social conversations like Twitter), (2) in the second part we process the collected data with angel framework, which is a network based natural language processing tool.
To determine which kind of data will be collected an effect analysis framework have been created, in which the we collected the effects that can influence the voter. The voters voting criteria also inspected, because we still don't know which is the most common choice criteria in parlamentary election.
In the results section the 'possible results' are collected due to different approaches, so we can compare them, which was the most effective prediction.
2. Effect analysis
Effect analysis
3. Criteria
Who will win?
(1) The party that is the most famous in media
(2) The party that brings out the most positive emotion to us
4. Collection of textual data
4.1 Online search engines
The first and most rough estimation came from the online search engines.
In this research we used Google Insight search, which collects the search phrases entered in Google search engine in a specific timerange. We inspected two timerange, first the year 2009 than 2010.
However the received data does not reflected the popularity of a party. Each party received near as much hits as the others.
4.2 People's interaction (communication)
We can follow the interaction among people by reading their online posts and comments. Nowadays most relevant sources in this field are social networking sites and twitter, however in hungary the usage of twitter is much behind than writing post in forums. Another place where opinons are shared among people is blogsphere. We choosed Blogpulse tool to analyse the interactions. We also take some effort to collect Twitter messages, but unfortunetly onyl the last 3 weeks of conversation is available for searching the parties name.
