The Dallas Book Club

06/09/2019

W. Brian Arthur, one of the founders of the discipline of complexity economics, explores the impact artificial intelligence and automation will have on the economy.

05/23/2019

“Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Where are they honest with themselves, and where are their blind spots? And then it is the coach’s job to raise that self-awareness further and to help them see the flaws they don’t see for themselves. People don’t like to talk about these flaws, which is why honesty and humility are so important. If people can’t be honest with themselves and their coach, and if they aren’t humble enough to recognize how they aren’t perfect, they won’t get far in that relationship.” - Trillion Dollar Coach, by Eric Schmidt

04/15/2019

To multiply two numbers with 1 billion digits would take a modern computer 30 years. Luckily, a better way has just been discovered. Researchers have found that by breaking large multiplication problems into smaller ones and making use of a technique from the field of signal processing called the fast Fourier transform, they can multiply large numbers far faster. The question then becomes: Just how fast can we go? New work has found the fastest possible method:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-discover-the-perfect-way-to-multiply-20190411/

04/13/2019

J.C.R. Licklider's proposals for

03/30/2019

“U.S. workers spend a staggering 710 million hours per week on internal compliance activities such as budgeting and planning. That’s 16 percent of our working lives. Yet, by some estimates, roughly half of all compliance activity isn’t adding value. What equates to the work of 9 million people is being wasted each year on bureaucratic theater, and this show has no intermission.” - Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work

03/28/2019

Now on display: the original copy of Jan Amos Comenius’ Opera Didactica Omnia

‘People shouldn’t get their wisdom from books, but from heaven and earth, from oaks and beeches, which means they should examine the things themselves and not other people’s observations.’ That is what Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) wrote about education. Comenius was a Czech pansophist and education reformer who thought education should be for everyone, boys and girls, regardless of class or background. His thoughts on education are astonishingly modern, so last February we celebrated the publication of a new Dutch translation of his ‘Didactica Magna’.

The Embassy of the Free Mind owns an original copy of Comenius’s ‘Opera Didactica Omnia’, which was printed in Amsterdam in 1657 and which is on display now until 25 April. So come and have a look!

More about the new translation: https://www.ritmanlibrary.com/books/books/jan-amos-comenius/pre-order-jan-amos-comenius-allesomvattend-onderwijsleer-didactica-magna/

www.embassyofthefreemind.com

03/21/2019

What’s hiding inside each of our organizations is a set of assumptions that we rarely notice or reconsider. We’ve inherited them from those who came before us. These assumptions, and the practices they inspire, are kind of like an operating system (OS), running silently in the background, the foundation upon which everything else is built. - Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work

03/13/2019

We’re starting the Dallas Book Club up again. We’ll be meeting April 24th. The book we’ll be reading and discussing is:

“This is the management book of the year. Clear, powerful and urgent, it's a must read for anyone who cares about where they work and how they work.” —Seth Godin, author of This is Marketing “This book is a breath of fresh air. Read it now, and make sure ...

02/26/2019

02/20/2019

Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist, was born on February 20, 1844. He laid the foundations for statistical mechanics by developing an equation that accounts for the change of distribution of energy between atoms because of atomic collisions. Much of his work was misunderstood for years, and there are still big questions left today: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150721-famous-fluid-equations-are-incomplete/.