” Given how they’ve performed, bankers’ pay just seems so patently unfair.
Bankers, of course, argue that fairness has nothing to do with it. And they’re right. Fair pay based on contributions is not the point, and it’s practically socialistic. Pay should be structured to recruit certain kinds of talent — yes, how you pay affects who applies — and it should help align individual goals with company goals.
More than anything, argue the bankers, pay should motivate: huge bonus cheques are to ensure superior performance from superior talent.
On this point, the bankers are wrong. We’ve recently gathered evidence suggesting that dangling exorbitant sums of money in front of workers doesn’t improve performance. If anything, it negatively affects it.”
Bankers’ pay
Google is run by scientists
Google is run by scientists, definitely not by marketers. In fact, even Larry Page is so anti-marketing that one year he only gave marketers within the company a total of 8 hours for meetings, press conferences, speeches or interviews according to one unnamed executive in a pretty good book called “Googled. The End of the World as We Know It.”
Google wouldn’t have run their ad if it wasn’t for statistics | Googling Google | ZDNet.com
Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
“Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.”
Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com
What word processor I use?
“I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. (…) Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening – really listening – to what people say about your writing.”
He talks the talk and walks the walk
Richard Stallman. Freedom campaigner (via Richard Stallman on The Setup)
I’d rather be smart
“I’d rather be smart than a movie star”
said Natalie Portman
Bibliography managers
I’ve been looking for a good bibliography manager to recommend to our Finance Masters’ students. I myself use Papers and I can only praise it. Nevertheless I cannot recommend Papers to most of my students mainly because it is only for Macs, and the majority of our students use Windows.
What I was looking for had to work at least in Linux, Mac and Windows, and preferably have some sort of social feature that would enable students to share papers with each other students and/or with their supervisors. Ideally it should be free for academic use, or have a very reasonable price.
I found two applications that satisfy those requirements and add a lot more: Mendeley and Zotero. There are two versions of Zotero available; version 2 is still in Beta (but is a stable one) and includes public and private groups along with other features. I will consider version 2 of Zotero here.
Both of them:
- Have automatic capture of citations
- Manage the PDFs library and allow the use of tags and collections to organize the library
- Allow over the cloud backup and sync of the library
- Create private and public groups to share references
- Include ways of adding notes
- Have a search tool for PDF’s and notes
- Are able to cite from within Word and OpenOffice and create an automatic list of references using a wide variety of styles
- Export and import references is various formats (including BiBTeX)
- Enable access to the library from anywhere through a web interface (if you choose to register and synchronize to the cloud).
Zotero is a Firefox plugin (minimum requirement is Firefox 3.0) and works with Mac, Linux and Windows. It has a very good selection of screencasts were you can easily learn more about its many basic functions. There is also a good resource of documents about the use and configuration of Zotero.
Mendeley is a stand alone program that works in different platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows. The getting started document is a good place to learn Mendeley basic features.
Now the differences: Zotero is opensource; Mendeley is not, but all the features that you get when you subscribe the service are, and will remain, free (in the future they will add features that will only be available to premium users for a fee).
If you start using one of these systems and then want to transfer your library to another program you can export your library to a standard format. Mendeley is even able to import a Zotero Library directly.
If you choose to sync to the cloud Mendeley web accounts are currently limited to 500MB and Zotero is limited to 100MB, both of them free. Zotero allows you to buy more space. Mendeley encourages users to ask for more space if they need it.
I started looking for one and found two very suitable bibliography managers: Mendeley and Zotero.