Ponderings
Let's stop calling them 'soft skills.' They're the hardest ones to master
We do our students a disservice when we teach them how to code but not how to communicate, or how to calculate but not how to collaborate. We handicap their potential when we separate technical and human education into silos. And we shortchange society when we undervalue the disciplines that teach us how to be human together.
The future doesn't belong to those who can merely execute technical tasks. It belongs to those who bring the full spectrum of human capability to our most complex challenges.
Fast Company, 06 May 2025
Why We Need to Know Cybernetics
The computers at the time weren't powerful enough to run such calculations. But Wiener had established a principle that would have implications far beyond planes: That past behavior can be used to model the future behavior of complex systems, using statistical means ...
Wiener realized that almost all complex systems are driven by feedback loops of information. That is, communication isn't linear, flowing just from a sender to a receiver. Rather, in many systems it forms a loop. A thermostat senses the temperature in a room, compares it to its setting and activates the furnace. As the room heats up, it cancels out the thermostat's alert, and the furnace deactivates. And so forth. The system becomes “intelligent” if it can retain memories of past performances and use them to improve over time ...
He also foresaw the dangers of AI. Wiener predicted that automation would eliminate many jobs, creating social tensions. And he warned that intelligent machines might not always make decisions in ways that humans would foresee - or want. For that reason, the control given to AI should be limited, Wiener advised: “The machine's danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.”
by Amber Case
Medium, 18 January 2023
Economist
Business | Bartleby: The CEO's alternative summer reading list
Bookshops are stuffed with management tomes on how to be a good leader, inspire others, survive office politics, navigate cultural differences and win negotiations. But executives would do well to ignore the corporate self-help shelves and head instead for the classics section. Great works of literature, with their piercing examination of the human condition, have much to teach the aspiring chief executive about business—values of honesty, empathy and commercial acumen, as well as insights into vanity, pettiness, greed and ruthless ambition, all of which punctuate the journey from cubicle to corner office.
Something else
Red Baraat and the Brooklyn Public Library
We at NPR Music leave a lot of variables out in the wild when we make Field Recordings. That's especially true when we commission new music for the annual Make Music New York festival, as we have for three years.
Since we're not using a traditional stage and people are roaming around, we don't know exactly what the performance will sound like (though we're lucky to work with fantastic engineering colleagues). It's always held outdoors, and we can't be sure what the weather will be.
And in two of these three years - the first and this one - we've flung the doors open and invited anyone who wanted to perform to come play alongside professionals. Pretty risky, right?
But what we've found, and what is so incredibly gratifying, is that amazingly talented and generous people join in - this year, about 350 of them on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library. With a new piece by Sunny Jain of Red Baraat, the beat and the heart were there already, but the spirit burst to life when all those musicians came out to play.
Credits: Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Saidah Blount, Anastasia Tsioulcas; Audio Engineers: Kevin Wait, Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Mito Habe-Evans, Colin Marshall, Christopher Parks, Maya Sharpe, A.J. Wilhelm, Marina Zarya; Special Thanks: Make Music New York, Brooklyn Public Library, Red Baraat, Mark and Rachel Dibner of the Argus Fund, our many volunteers and all the participating musicians; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann