CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-20 20:54:45 (8 comments, 3 reshares, 16 +1s)

Outside the Dept. of Justice in DC (just blocks from my office) hundreds of protesters have gathered for a sit-in, protesting foreclosures of their homes and the fact that bankers have been fined for fraud but not prosecuted since the financial crisis began in 2008. They are calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute banks for illegal activities.

This will probably get a lot of news coverage in the next day or two, since some arrests have reportedly happened, and a taser has reportedly been used by police. The protest was organized by Occupy Our Homes.

2013-05-20 20:47:03 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 11 +1s)

These Three Laws That Would Actually Reform Wall Street Deserve Your Support. See Why.

Sometimes Wall Street reform seems completely hopeless. After all, it’s been over four years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and we still haven’t seen much change.

However, there’s good reason to keep up the fight.  Right now there are three laws aiming to reform Wall Street that actually have teeth and could make a real difference. Here’s a very brief introduction to each and an explanation of why each is worth supporting.

(View this post with embedded hyperlinks here: http://goo.gl/wYitm)

1. SB 985 to Restore Glass-Steagall

Last week—exactly 80 years after the original Glass-Steagall bill was introduced—Senator Tom Harkin introduced a bill to restore Glass-Steagall. This depression-era law separated vanilla commercialbanking from ... more »

2013-05-20 16:29:46 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 13 +1s)

USA Today op-ed endorses the call to break up the banks. The pressure's building...

"At least six financial institutions — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — remain too big to fail. Collectively, they hold $9.4 trillion in assets. That's more than twice the annual spending of the U.S. government.

These banks, and their lobbyists, have worked to weaken the 2010 law, fighting agency by agency to water down the regulations. Just last week, they won a major victory in a regulation that allows the market for credit derivatives — the financial instruments that helped inflate the housing bubble and bring down insurance giant AIG — to remain concentrated in a handful of institutions.

But now comes a bipartisan plan that would end too-big-to fail once and for all."
Read ... more »

2013-05-16 17:12:01 (3 comments, 14 reshares, 81 +1s)

2013-05-16 01:12:47 (3 comments, 8 reshares, 49 +1s)

An article about +Larry Page.
Worth reading in my view. 

2013-05-15 23:43:31 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

Should Big Banks Be Broken Up?

Today The Economist held an online debate between two world-class economists about whether it'd be smart for the US to break up the biggest banks.

Simon Johnson from MIT argued for the motion, while Charles Calomiris from Columbia argued that there are better solutions. 

Johnson says that the megabanks "bear little resemblance to any form of traditional banking" and are instead "primarily large international speculative trading houses." He argues that simplifying them by breaking them up would return these banks back to normalcy and help us avoid future bailouts.

Calomiris, on the other hand, asserts that "breaking up global banks is not necessary for avoiding 'too big to fail' because there are other less draconian measures—which have not been tried and which are very likely towo... more »

2013-05-15 15:06:06 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 15 +1s)

Will definitely be checking this out after I/O.

2013-05-15 14:17:57 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

Best guerrilla marketing so far at I/O -- someone handing out cards for android crash reporting to thousands of Google I/O attendees waiting in line outside the Moscone Center.

2013-05-11 01:33:17 (1 comments, 6 reshares, 24 +1s)

Any good Scratch stories out there?

2013-05-07 21:09:57 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Sobering.

2013-05-06 18:31:46 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 21 +1s)

Citi offered Jack Lew a $1 million exit package when he left in 2008, but the contract said that the only way he'd get the million bucks is if he secured a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.”

Do you understand how insane that is? 

Citigroup invests big money to get people into Washington where they know they'll get returned favors. And it works. After all, Citi received $476.2 billion in cash and guarantees after the financial crisis—by far the most of any Wall Street bank. In other words, the reverse revolving door pays.

Unfortunately, this article from The Nation shows that "far from an aberration, such bonuses appear to be fairly common on Capitol Hill." It's something that the public shouldn't stand for.

2013-04-27 09:48:19 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

One of Facebook's earliest outside investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, is leaving the company's board ... Here's a funny story about how he first put money into "Thefacebook."

2013-04-26 01:55:53 (10 comments, 1 reshares, 17 +1s)

Yes, it's true. We are selling our Provo, Utah dream home. Pulling up roots from this awesome community that generally ranks very high in most of the quality of life lists that come out: best place to raise a family, best place to start a business, best place to build your career. Gallup said earlier this year that Provo is the most optimistic people in the U.S. And Provo ranks among the happiest communities as well. (It's no wonder Utah Valley natives call this place Happy Valley -- because statistically speaking, it's true.)

My wife and I have decided to move our family to the Washington DC area. There are a lot of reasons for this decision, which I won't go into now. But I'm sure I will later. We're making this move later this month.

So, if you know someone who is planning to move to Utah, perhaps a BYU business school or law school faculty member, an... more »

2013-04-25 23:45:46 (8 comments, 4 reshares, 20 +1s)

Awesomely creepy: Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell's voice recovered from 'unplayable' record http://bit.ly/Y75fjz

2013-04-25 23:29:17 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 19 +1s)

Features I Hadn't Seen Before in Google Translate

I'm impressed with what those Googlers have done--they've made some terrific improvements to the online version of Google Translate. I use the mobile app all the time--it's great for copying and pasting tweets from Russian when I see words I don't know (which is becoming more and more infrequent--yay!). But I hadn't used the desktop version for a while.

The new feature that shows a variety of possible words that might match the input term is fantastic--especially because of the frequency bar. So is the new My Phrasebook. Now all your efforts to translate words can be turned into efforts to review them later and memorize them. Bravo. Love it.

Благодаря Перевести команды!

2013-04-25 20:38:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

We just launched a tool sharing data from 36K Analytics clients and millions of conversions -- all to help you make better decisions and better value your digital marketing efforts. Check it out.

2013-04-25 11:45:03 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Creativity loves constraints.

2013-04-23 02:30:50 (7 comments, 16 reshares, 43 +1s)

The author Les Leopold wrote an explosive piece last week about the problem with hedge funds in the United States. We recommend reading it in full, and we agree with both his complaints about hedge funds (that they manipulate markets and thrive on insider trading), as well as his suggestions to fix the system (by implementing the Robin Hood Tax and full disclosure laws).

Hedge funds play in the same markets as the Wall Street banks, and they often use the same shady strategies to siphon money off the top of a otherwise productive economy.

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/americas-new-math-1-wall-street-hour-21-years-hard-work-rest?paging=off

2013-04-23 01:02:37 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 15 +1s)

2013-04-22 14:26:28 (2 comments, 6 reshares, 5 +1s)

List your personal favorite quantified self tracking tool in the comments.

2013-04-20 07:12:24 (2 comments, 15 reshares, 20 +1s)

Best countries to work on a startup if you have almost no money
http://fundersandfounders.com/where-to-start-your-startup-best-value-destinations/

2013-04-18 12:13:33 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

Bill Gurley with another article that is sure to become a classic. How does he do this every time?

2013-04-18 00:57:42 (18 comments, 12 reshares, 59 +1s)

Hoping this is legit.

2013-04-17 11:45:19 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

2013-04-16 21:16:13 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 17 +1s)

Very cool.

2013-04-15 23:49:40 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 16 +1s)

There will no longer be a need for Wesley (the dread pirate Roberts) to spend years developing an immunity to iocane powder. #nanosponges

2013-04-15 17:01:04 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Have you ever heard of "rural sourcing?" 

I came across a company in Atlanta today that has been doing rural sourcing since 2003 -- by hiring skilled IT resources at Development Centers located near colleges and universities in 2nd and 3rd tier cities in America. It is aptly named -- Rural Sourcing, Inc.

What do you think of this approach?

2013-04-15 15:26:00 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

LinkedIn has come a long ways since they announced their second round of funding back in 2004, and they had 1.2 million users. Here's my blog post from October 2004: http://goo.gl/3PxIs

2013-04-12 17:54:16 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

Did terrible in college?

Don't lose hope.

So did Gallup CEO Jim Clifton.

But then he found a way to live his life around his strengths -- and you should too!

2013-04-11 16:21:20 (5 comments, 3 reshares, 15 +1s)

You may not want to read this. It might feel better (temporarily) to keep our heads in the sand. But I agree with Jim Clifton: "we need a heavy dose of truth-telling."

2013-04-10 22:24:43 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

The Wall Street Ticking Time Bomb That Could Blow Up Your Bank Account

It's like this: Derivatives traders on Wall Street (with the help of Congress) have rigged the law so that in the event of a bankruptcy they and their clients will be the first to receive payouts. This is great for them because it means they can be relatively reckless in a lucrative market without facing extremely harsh losses when things go bad.

It's not so great, however, for the rest of us. As shown in the article linked to below, in the event of another large-scale derivatives blowup, FDIC insurance will be strained tremendously. After all, the derivatives market represents trillions of dollars and the FDIC can only tap into $25 billion in reserves and their $100 billion line of credit from the Treasury before it has to turn for backing from the US government (which would have an incredibly... more »

2013-04-10 20:36:03 (7 comments, 8 reshares, 27 +1s)

Scientists never cease to amaze.... 

"A single leaf in a quart of water can provide 100 watts of energy, 24 hours a day."

2013-04-09 16:34:43 (2 comments, 14 reshares, 26 +1s)

Good talk on API driven development by Python-Requests author Kenneth Reitz.

"simplicity is better than functionality" - Pieter Hintjens

2013-04-09 01:08:16 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Been checking out Gumroad today...

Here's a good video interview of 20-year old Gumroad founder on TechCrunch TV before launch, and before raising millions to power his cool startup: http://goo.gl/MbYzj

This is all old news (2011-ish), but still worth reviewing, especially if you are a young developer wondering whether to go to college or join a startup...

In brief:

He had access at age 13 to thousands of dollars worth of Adobe software at his school

Tried to learn PHP in a month back then--he hated it and wasn't good

When iPhone came out he spent 10+ hours a day for a month learning iOS and got back into development

Learned Python, it was fun, he loved it

Built app called Remember to take notes using URL - not logged in

Best thing he ever did in his life was to start blogging - it let people... more »

2013-04-07 03:21:29 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 12 +1s)

Great interview.

2013-04-07 03:12:46 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

I want one.

2013-04-05 21:41:37 (7 comments, 5 reshares, 25 +1s)

61% of Americans think big banks are too big. We should use that leverage to make them smaller. See full study here: http://goo.gl/A3Ucw

2013-04-05 21:39:23 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

Last month a bipartisan group of Senators repealed restrictions on derivatives, the financial instruments at the heart of the financial crisis.

MapLight, a nonprofit that shines light on money in politics, researched the funding behind the vote and released their findings yesterday. The findings show that those who voted Yes received an average of 7.8 times as much money from the biggest banks compared to those who voted No. This doesn't bode well for people like us who are desperate for real reform on Wall Street. We've shown in detail just how bad derivatives can be on our derivatives timeline:

http://www.switchyourbank.org/derivatives_timeline 

It's no wonder, then, that Senator Peterson had extremely strong words to say about the vote. Pay particular attention to his last sentence:

"Two of the worst votes I ever made in this... more »

2013-04-04 22:30:27 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

Largest. High School. Hackathon. Ever.

Great advertising!

(+Caleb Allen you going?)

2013-04-04 15:44:51 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Has anyone thought about teaching strengths via Skillshare.com? It's a great online learning marketplace, where anyone can become a teacher, and anyone can sign up for a class.

Here's one interesting class about finding a job that you love: http://www.skillshare.com/How-to-Find-Work-You-Love-A-Guaranteed-Start/1848119417

2013-04-04 14:04:26 (1 comments, 10 reshares, 22 +1s)

Republic, Lost

My hero, Lawrence Lessig, condensed his normal 1-hour lecture into a 18 minute TED talk.  We have lost our republic and he is focused on showing us all how to get it back.  If you're a conservative, a liberal, or somewhere in-between the policies you'd like to see implemented are thwarted every election cycle by the "funders" of Congress.  This issue is the "first issue" in that everything else in politics flows from this problem; solve it and we get our republic back (left, right, and center).  Check it out (and if you're interested, his book "Republic, Lost" is superb).

#rootstrikers.org #rootstrikers #republiclost #lawrencelessig #tedtalks #ted #politics #politicaleconomy #campaignfinance #campaignfinancereform

2013-04-03 05:09:40 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 30 +1s)

Yes!

2013-04-03 04:59:05 (1 comments, 7 reshares, 16 +1s)

This is huge!!!

2013-03-29 16:27:36 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Would love to see more debates like this...

2013-03-28 15:30:38 (12 comments, 10 reshares, 53 +1s)

It's time for a Git system for legislation

Good post +Brett Stubbs, even though it was on Facebook, where I don't have 57,000 followers. So I'm gonna share it this way here.

Here's the Salon article: http://goo.gl/dbAa9

2013-03-28 15:22:07 (4 comments, 4 reshares, 14 +1s)

Share This If Your Life Was Blessed By A Great Teacher

I will never forget the teachers who had the biggest impact in my life (Pam Jeppson, Dee Allred, Tess Morris, Marty Monson, Todd Parker among them)--and I'm incredibly grateful to the teachers who have inspired and guided my own kids, including Karen Reeder, Beverly Wood, Terri McGuire, +Justin Kennington, +Matt Kennington, Masasue Watabe, Susan Black and so many more!

The world would be a bleak place without great teachers.

Why don't you take a minute and thank a teacher in your life -- right here on Google+?

Let's fill up this comment section right here and now!

I've never known a great teacher who did it for the money -- they do it for the love of kids and the love of sharing their knowledge and interest and passions with the next generation. God bless 'em. The fact... more »

2013-03-28 14:51:38 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

You think life sucks for teachers?

Think again.

Gallup finds K-12 teachers have 2nd highest well-being of 14 major professions (behind physicians and just ahead of business owners), and teachers ranked #1 on whether they "smiled or laughed yesterday" and whether they experienced joy and happiness the day before the survey.

NY Times article: http://goo.gl/XlLAK

2013-03-27 01:09:26 (16 comments, 35 reshares, 83 +1s)

Price of storage per Gigabyte over time:

1981 - $300,000
1987 - $50,000
1990 - $10,000
1994 - $1,000
1997 - $100
2000 - $10
2004 - $1
2012 - $0.10

2013-03-27 01:01:39 (1 comments, 20 reshares, 30 +1s)

Dizzying but invisible depth

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let's simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. Those are actually such incredibly... more »

2013-03-26 22:32:03 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 18 +1s)

And perhaps the most important principle of innovation is that "engaged employees" (about 30% of US workers) bring their most creative ideas to work and that "actively disengaged" (about 20% of US workers) do not.

Here's the full Gallup Business Journal article: http://goo.gl/OrSCI