Cultivating failure

I tend to excel at standardized tests. It is how current education system and society define success. People with good scores are entitled great incentives for their "merits" (sometimes as the loss to people who can't keep up in the system). The definition of "merits" then comes under my analysis. Would we limit definition of "merits" to just the scores of standardized tests? And let others fail?

I have spent my life, it seems, in and around schools. For complicated reasons, I attended a score of them, both in the United States and abroad; I taught in Louisiana and Los Angeles for more than a decade; I have volunteered in all sorts of schools, and am now a mother of elementary-school students. I have never seen an entire school system as fundamentally broken and rudderless as the California public schools, a system in which one out of five high-school students drops out before graduation, and in which scarcely 60 percent of the African American and Hispanic students leave school with a diploma. These young people are cast adrift in a $50 billion system in which failure is almost a foregone conclusion.

Above is an abstract from an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/school-yard-garden) by an educator highlighting how the education system determine "failure" instead of educating all in benefit of society.

In my opinion, society is like lotuses in a pond; only when water-level comes up, lotuses could rise. It is not so wise to polarize individuals just with results of standardized tests.

Failure as a strategy

Quite an ironic angle of view at making failure. I stumbled upon two examples where such strategy is being used.

"Joyful failures" at IDEO: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fast-company-staff/fast-company-blog/failure-success-strategy

Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work."
...
British entrepreneur James Dyson reports that he built 5,127 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum before getting to one that was commercially successful.

Al Qaeda's potential use of failure as a strategy in recent Nigerian belt bomber case: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/failure-as-a-strategy.html

If al Qaeda did embrace failure as a strategy, we could expect them to:

 

  • Increase the frequency.  Since the level of effort required is very small, do more to generate substantive returns in red ink/securitization/bureaucratization.  Since suicide isn't even a requirement for the attacker, it would likely make it easy to hire them (payment to families for the effort would attract a vast pool of applicants).
  • Expand the venues.  Attack more types of places.  Schools, malls, etc.  Terrorist attacks are treated differently than even much more violent attacks by postal citizens in the same venues.  Why?  They are outsiders and the fear is that these attacks will be systemic rather than one offs.
  • Embrace more ethnicities/races to expand the profile of the terrorist.  The use of a Nigerian student is a first step on this.  Expand this profile to include Chinese, Indonesians, etc. to generate sweeping fear of all "outsiders."  Spread the bureaucratic restrictions on travel that would be generated in reactions to these attacks far and wide.    
As I have mentioned earlier, take on failure as a strategy could be extreme despite it merits. However, the essence is in embracing and accepting failures as part of achieving successes.

Also it is good to note that disruptive technologies during their inception are usually dismissed as FAIL.

bank failures

I totally disgust how loopholes in banking industry fail the whole society.

Leverages (investment tools?) are boasted as if new groundbreaking technologies found to help humanity.

In fact, those are just ploys to deceive people who have no means to understand at all. I bet bankers themselves have little clues too.

Now taxpayers money are used to save those big banks that some suggest now is the good time to start a bank.

Anyway, check out the video visualizing bank failures:

Adding disruption

I restrain myself not to add too many tags on my posts in an effort to be minimal.

But I am much inclined to add the tag: disruption

Disruption is a form of change challenging a norm, a usual way of doing, a comfort zone...

Disruption is the very foundation of innovation... and startups are driven by innovations...

Project::raise for instance is a disruption to normal fundraising method

The purpose of this post is not to boast about myself... but to highlight new way of paying...

a disruption to payment system... check out SQUARE!

Find out why it is disruptive and how it got started:

Fundraising idea for OLPC

not sure whether it is sane or not, but i am writing it down as it comes to me when i am thinking of social fundraising

please feel free to steal the idea... or else i might end up doing :)

the idea is based on: 

  • social interaction (donor-beneficiary engagement) 
  • group push (multi-donors per laptop)

each olpc has 1,080,000 square pixels (1200 x 900) - a small but visible facebook/twitter user icon/avatar is 576 square pixels (24 x 24), a normal one is 5776 square pixels (76 x 76) - donors can buy up avatars to contribute to the cost of a laptop

donors who contributed would appear on the virtual wall in the laptop (easily accessible in navigation)

donors messages/comments are also included in the wall

assuming the rate is at $0.001 cent per pixel, a small avatar costs only ~$0.05 and a normal avatar costs only ~$0.50

the whole screen can accommodate about 186 normal sized avatars

why this is interesting:

  • the child recipient and donors can interact when the child browses through the wall (via facebook, twitter)
  • the donor walls are also accessible on the web
  • donors would also be informed of "filtered" activities carried out in the laptop (olpc has activity log feature) which would be posted on to the wall (get donors involved)
  • as it is micro-donation happening across social media platforms, i guess there is some viral element and the group push effect

related prior examples:

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

http://fixoutlook.org/

http://www.chapter.org/redevelopment/brick.html

http://www.myactionaid.org.uk/RebeccaHall/sponsor-a-brick-lego-house

http://blamedrewscancer.com/

similar idea:

http://www.slideshare.net/michaelsprague/olpc-micropayment-strategy

 

hyper local micro-news

Just found out about this great startup utilizing sms messaging to deliver hyper local micro-news via local "reporters".

What is more interesting is that this technology company is started up by someone who has never attended a university.

I have talked about project::relay in here. And the idea is all powered up by goodwill for reporting and operation services. I have been figuring out about monetizing options and sustainability to successfully deploy across rural communities.

The revenue model of smsone could be the way for project::relay.

Crunchpad fails

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I ain't a gadget guy but this gadget intrigues me because Michael Arrington shares development process in detail. It got yummier when Mike enlisted a Singapore startup to do product development.

18 months of work with so much potential, Mike broke the news:

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication

I am interested to find out who the shareholders are and also why Mike, as a lawyer himself, overlooked legal issues.

Most important of all, a very fine case study for failure.

We'll see

A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses. The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man’s only son, breaking both his legs.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer’s son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

A close friend of mine used to talk about it (in her personalized format). She told me at least twice. It stays in my memory well because of special situation I was going through.

In life, we dwell on options that come into our lives too much that we forgot to live.

Do live and we'll see.