Build a better mousetrap

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pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

11Keith Plocek, “Most Popular Marxist Board Game,” Mental Floss, August 12, 2014, http://mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-struggle-americas-most-popular-marxist-board-game. 12Quoted in Plocek, “Most Popular Marxist Board Game.” 13Molleindustria, “Phone Story,” Phone Story, 2011, www.phonestory.org. 14Stuart Dredge, “Apple Bans Satirical iPhone Game Phone Story from Its App Store,” Guardian, September 14, 2011, www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/apple-phone-story-rejection. 15Molleindustria, “Phone Story.” 16Dredge, “Apple Bans Satirical iPhone Game.” 17Molleindustria, “To Build a Better Mousetrap,” 2014, http://www.molleindustria.org/to-build-a-better-mousetrap. 18Joseph Bernstein, “The New Marxism Comes to Computer Games,” BuzzFeed, May 5, 2014, www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-new-marxism-comes-to-computer-games. 19David Leblanc, “Working at Play: Alienation, Refusal, and Every Day the Same Dream,” First Person Scholar, December 14, 2016, www.firstpersonscholar.com/working-at-play. 20Quoted in Leblanc, “Working at Play.” 21Leblanc, “Working at Play.” 22John Walker, “Wot I Think: Papers, Please,” Rock Paper Shotgun, August 12, 2013, www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/12/wot-i-think-papers-please. 23Walker, “Wot I Think: Papers, Please.” 24Keith Stuart, “War Games – Developers Find New Ways to Explore Military Conflict,” Guardian, July 15, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/15/war-games-developers-military-conflict. 25Marijam Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power of Political Video Games,” Kotaku, February 8, 2018, www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/02/08/the-uber-game-shows-the-latent-power-of-political-video-games. 26Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power.” 27Marijam Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes of This Week’s British Election,” Waypoint, June 6, 2017, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3zvpp/corbyn-run-highlights-the-stakes-of-this-weeks-british-election. 28Quoted in Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes.” 29Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes.” 30Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power.” 31The Supergamers, directed by Chris Boulding, London: BBC, 2016. 32Mark R.

Molleindustria may not have reached its goal of raising enough to fund organizations fighting in the resistance, but the money did benefit someone within the brutal phone supply chain. There are a range of other games released by Molleindustria that take different experimental angles on politicizing videogames. To Build a Better Mousetrap is a “management” videogame in which the player runs a “semi-abstract” mousetrap factory, employing and choosing how much to pay the mice-workers.17 As one commentator noted, “[Pedercini’s] done something very difficult, which is to clearly, concisely and with a shockingly dark sense of humor explain the way that our economic system is gamed against working people, by making players recreate it.”18 Molleindustria also released the part-videogame, part–digital art installation May-Day NetParade, developed in 2004 for the political day of action known as EuroMayDay.

, 21 Spec Ops: The Line, 122–24 Spielberg, Steven, 116 Splinter Cell, 120–21 Sports Interactive, 42 Srnicek, Nick, 52 STAGE, 20 Stahl, Roger, 55 Stalinism, 132, 143 Star Fox 2, 28 Starrick, Crawford, 4, 5, 7 Star Wars, 126 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, 126 Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, 105 State of Play, 42 Steam, 31, 52–53 Steam Spy, 52 Street Fighter Alpha 2, 2 Street Fighter II Turbo, 28 Strike Fighter Consulting, 55 Strong National Museum of Play, 18 Stuart, Keith, 55 Summers, Alicia, 153 SuperData, 37–38 Super Mario Kart, 28 Super Mario World, 28 Super Nintendo Entertainment System, 28 Super Star Trek, 23 Sweden, 144 Switch, 32 Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo, 94, 95, 99 SYNTEC, 94 T Taylor, Frederick, 75, 78 Taylorism, 76, 78 Tech Model Railroad Club, 21 Tech Workers Coalition, 91, 92, 101 Telegraph, 41 Television (Williams), 107 Tencent, 38, 46–47 Tetris, 2, 28, 168 Texas Instruments, 24 Thatcher, Margaret, 145 The Order: 1886, 82 This War of Mine, 144 To Build a Better Mousetrap, 141 Tomb Raider, 29 Toronto, 92 Trubshaw, Rob, 25 Trump, Donald, 145, 154–55 Tsang, Raymond, 146 Turing, Alan, 19 Twitch, 32, 39, 147, 148 Twitter, 11, 96, 99 U Uber, 102, 144–145 Uber Game, The, 144 Ubisoft, 3–4, 46, 48–49, 51, 64 United Kingdom, 39–43, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56–57, 87, 98–102, 145 United States, 95, 159 anti-videogame crusade in, 29 Atari in, 24, 26 China and, 47 Clancy on, 120–21 elections in, 91 guns and, 56–57, 122 GWU in, 98 Iran-Contra affair of, 119 Japan and, 27 logistics industry in, 44 Microsoft in, 30 politicians in, 41, 145 retail in, 49–50 Soviet Union and, 20–21 Tech Workers Coalition in, 91 videogame market in, 39, 153 workforce in, 87, 148 University of Essex, 25 Unmanned, 142 Upadhya, R.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

And while creating a healthy information diet requires action on the part of the companies that supply the food, that doesn’t work unless we also change our own habits. Corn syrup vendors aren’t likely to change their practices until consumers demonstrate that they’re looking for something else. Here’s one place to start: Stop being a mouse. On an episode of the radio program This American Life, host Ira Glass investigates how to build a better mousetrap. He talks to Andy Woolworth, the man at the world’s largest mousetrap manufacturer who fields ideas for new trap designs. The proposed ideas vary from the impractical (a trap that submerges the mouse in antifreeze, which then needs to be thrown out by the bucket) to the creepy (a design that kills rodents using, yes, gas pellets).

., 48. 221 “support for his idiosyncrasies”: Ibid. 222 “psychological equivalent of obesity”: danah boyd. “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media,” Web2.0 Expo. New York, NY: Nov. 17, 2007, accessed July 19, 2008, www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html. 223 how to build a better mousetrap: “A Better Mousetrap,” This American Life no. 366, aired Oct. 10, 2008, www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/366/a-better-mousetrap-2008. 223 you’ll catch your mouse: Ibid. 223 “jumping out of that recursion loop”: Matt Cohler, phone interview with author, Nov. 23, 2010. 226 organ donation rates in different European countries: Dan Ariely as quoted in Lisa Wade, “Decision Making and the Options We’re Offered,” Sociological Images blog, Feb. 17, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/02/17/decision-making-and-the-options-were-offered/. 229 “only when regulation is transparent”: Lawrence Lessig, Code (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 260, http://books.google.com/books?


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

What Wilson avoided by going this route was the prosaic path of corporate product development: layers and layers of approval processes, which tend to favor the conventionally tried and true over real innovation. As Carlye Adler put it in Wired: Build a better mousetrap and the world is supposed to beat a path to your door. It’s a lovely thought, one that has inspired generations of American inventors. Reality, though, has fallen somewhat short of this promise: Build a better mousetrap and, if you’re extremely lucky, some corporation will take a look at it, send it through dozens of committees, tweak the design to make it cheaper to manufacture, and let the marketing team decide whether it can be priced to return a profit.


pages: 194 words: 36,223

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

Chapter 1 HITTING THE HIGH NOTES I n March 2000, I launched the website Joel on Software1 by making the very shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.2 1. www.joelonsoftware.com 2. Joel Spolsky, “Converting Capital Into Software That Works,” published at www.joelonsoftware.com on March 21, 2000 (search for “Converting Capital”). 2 Smart and Gets Things Done For the last five years, I’ve been testing that theory in the real world.


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

We hoped it would help to calm market fears and stabilize the situation, without artificially sustaining the financial boom. We didn’t intend to provide any more government support for the financial system than was necessary to protect the overall economy. Capitalism depends on creative destruction. Someone builds a better mousetrap, so incumbent mousetrap makers must adapt or die. Automakers wipe out buggy-whip manufacturers, then the market determines which automakers survive. The same principles normally apply to financial firms. The strong, nimble, and reliable thrive, while the imprudent and mismanaged get devoured.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

This is not an appeal to racist nationalism or jingoism as much as it is a matter of common sense and a pragmatic way to envision a broader movement for bicycle transportation that can include, and should rightfully praise, the labor of bicycle factory workers, welders, independent bike builders, tinkerers, artisans, and a multitude of small businesses and communities that stand to gain from an american vélorution. Building a “Better Mousetrap” Industry One of the major problems facing bicycle transportation activists in the twenty-first century is that the totalizing logic of globalization and the realities of free market capitalism frame the prospects of a successful bicycle culture around the importation of bicycles and the enhancement of retail and repair industries, as opposed to encouraging more centralized, more localized, or at the very least, more geographically regionalized modes of production.

That is to say, instead of promoting non-motorized transportation through more localized, democratic modes of production and distribution, their prevailing modus operandi uncritically promotes further deregulation and consolidation of the bicycle industry—a scenario that ironically makes cheap oil a prerogative of bicycling advocates inasmuch as the low price of fuel is currently the sole factor enabling bicycle corporations to outsource, subcontract, and otherwise ship bicycles and parts across the globe. Finale as langdon Winner points out in his otherwise problematic critique of the appropriate technology movement, people have always been able to build a better mousetrap in hopes of transforming society, but such technological solutions are fundamentally and perpetually constrained by the larger cultural and political contexts in which they are deployed. Understanding these contexts and daring to ask a more critical set of questions about the relationships between technologies, social change, and everyday life is a crucial task, but by no means the only task, in the broader struggle to create a better world. indeed, the goal is not simply to interpret technologies but to change the ways in which they are used, namely, by creating the cultural and political conditions in which technologies can be put to work in service of equality, social justice, environmental sustainability, and mutual aid.


pages: 199 words: 57,599

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Donald Trump, fear of failure, high net worth, Maui Hawaii, Parkinson's law, passive income, retail therapy

They can hope that everyone’s going to scour the land searching for them, but the truth is that the marketplace is crowded with products and services, and even though theirs may be the best, no one will ever know that because they’re too snooty to tell anyone. You’re probably familiar with the saying “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Well, that’s only true if you add five words: “if they know about it.” Rich people are almost always excellent promoters. They can and are willing to promote their products, their services, and their ideas with passion and enthusiasm. What’s more, they’re skilled at packaging their value in a way that’s extremely attractive.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

And let’s be honest; you wouldn’t want a union that just exists to protect workers’ reputations, just as we don’t organize offline unions only around issues of worker reputation. Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and protection into our other organizing work. We can’t let reputation management become disaggregated from the platforms on which workers get work. So build a better mousetrap. We should take a lesson from Dave’s union too, and build organizations that can evolve as the technology work evolves. 12. COUNTERANTI-DISINTERMEDIATION DMYTRI KLEINER In Chapter 33 of Capital, Karl Marx introduces us to the character of Mr. Peel, recounted from E. G. Wakefield’s England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Regulatory rents do harm not just by suppressing entrepreneurial energy but also by misdirecting it. The economist William Baumol speculates that a key variable influencing innovation and growth is how institutions allocate entrepreneurship between productive and unproductive activities.19 If the policy environment is such that the best way to get rich is building a better mousetrap, entrepreneurial energy will be directed toward innovation; however, if it’s easier to get rich by winning favors through the policymaking process, that energy will be diverted to negative-sum rent-seeking. Accordingly, a rise in rent-creating policies can lead to a drop-off in productive entrepreneurship.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Today they’re working with a major fast-food dining chain to put sensors on every single piece of kitchen equipment in order to create a “responsive” menu that can better handle surge demands. They’re helping farms build networks of insect pheromone detectors that automatically spray dispersants rather than using pesticides, leading to healthier food. They’re even working to build a better mousetrap: an automated trap that monitors activity and effectiveness, certifies that it’s meeting regulations that restaurant chains and grain elevators must abide by, and notifies the manager of any problems. All that innovation probably won’t make much of a difference to the mouse, but it’s still pretty impressive.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Suppose that the group contains no experts on the question at issue, but that a fair bit of information is dispersed among group members. If those members consult with one another, the group may turn out to be expert even if its members are not. No individual person may know how to fix a malfunctioning car, to build a better mousetrap, or to repair a broken computer, but the group as a whole may well have the necessary information. Or suppose that the group contains a number of specialists, but that each member is puzzled about how to solve a particular problem, involving, say, the most effective way to respond to a natural disaster or the right approach to marketing a new product.


pages: 231 words: 73,818

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

A NOTE ABOUT DESIGN THINKING So what is this design thinking stuff, anyway? Design thinking is a set of general practices a group of us has developed over the years that are effective in solving design challenges. A design challenge can apply to just about any kind of product or experience. It’s not just about how to build a better mousetrap (though that’s part of it); it’s also about things that are not physical objects: how to improve the wait time at a popular amusement park, how to clean up a highway, how to more efficiently get food to needy people, how to improve online dating, and so on. Design thinking is an amorphous concept that was given its name by David Kelley, another Stanford professor and cofounder of IDEO, when he was trying to explain that successful designers have a different mind-set and approach from most people.


pages: 279 words: 76,796

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Over the past few years, a new crop of entrepreneurs with background in engineering, finance, and policy has arrived on the scene. They see the knotty problems that characterize consumer financial services and they are driven to solve them. Like all successful entrepreneurs, they get energized by figuring out how to deal with tough challenges. They think they can build a better mousetrap. And some of them believe they can make the world a better place while providing safe, affordable financial products and services to the growing number of people who need them. Two of the six innovative firms profiled here, Oportún and Fenway Summer, offer new loan products targeted at people who use payday loans.


pages: 280 words: 75,820

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The American dream is no longer just to get rich quick, but also to enjoy doing it, and new captains of industry offer various best-selling decalogues for achieving this goal. Their tips range from the philosophical (learn from your failures) to the practical (never handle the same piece of paper twice). There’s one insight into both productivity and satisfaction that they inevitably share, however: the importance of laserlike attention to your goal, be it building a better mousetrap or raising cattle. Unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period. Whether she’s herding sheep in the high alpine desert or negotiating a settlement in a law office, Burke is right there, as attentive as a bird dog.


The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

This article outlines how the Four Forces technique can provide insight into both customer acquisition and retention. The author offers a short, but very helpful video to explain the concept. Rhea is an active thought leader and practitioner of JTBD techniques with a wealth of useful advice on his website. ADOPTION OF INNOVATION Building a better mousetrap does not guarantee that people will adopt an innovation. Many would-be breakthroughs fail for not taking human factors into consideration. You don’t need to look further than the nonadoption of offerings like the Segway, Zune, Amazon’s Fire phone, and even Google Glass. To increase chances of adoption, organizations must understand people’s needs and desires.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

But in the absence of sufficient pressure by regulators, a brand-new market design is seldom adopted before a market becomes so dysfunctional that its users grow desperate for something new (or until an entrepreneurial market maker sees a way to compete with existing markets by offering a better design). It’s not clear whether the financial markets have reached that state of dysfunction yet. As the tale of these financial markets makes clear, a superior market design isn’t always implemented. Building a better mousetrap isn’t always rewarded when the mice have a say in the matter. Financial markets are part of an enormous industry. The current winners in the race for speed were simply responding to the extant market design. They wouldn’t be happy if their big investments in faster microwave channels were rendered useless.


pages: 278 words: 83,504

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business by John Newhouse

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, corporate governance, demand response, high-speed rail, legacy carrier, low cost airline, MITM: man-in-the-middle, upwardly mobile

Then, Airbus experienced a similarly hard blow when Boeing began selling sizable numbers of 787’s to carriers that had been flying A330’s in the middle market and had been counted on by Airbus to buy its newer version, the A350. In short, Boeing started turning itself around by not just building a better mousetrap but selling it at concessionary prices to airlines of possibly pivotal importance that might instead have bought the other party’s paper airplane. Boeing had altered its strategy, and apparently put behind it at least some of the problems that had been the talk of the industry. Some of the credit goes to Scott Carson, who took charge of the sales force and wasted no time in changing its attitude and lack of edge.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The richest people in advanced countries are not aristocrats but entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates.’ The magazine went on to celebrate today’s super-rich, arguing that ‘to become rich in the first place, they typically have to do something extraordinary. Some inherit money, of course, but most build a better mousetrap, finance someone else’s good idea or at least run a chain of hairdressers in a way that keeps customers coming back. And because they are mostly self-made, today’s rich are restless and dynamic.’ In fact, entrepreneurs make up a very small portion of today’s top earners, estimated at ‌less than 4 per cent.17 Today’s super-rich elite is composed mostly of corporate and financial professionals, who account for some 60 per cent of those in the top-earning 0.1 per cent (with lawyers and real estate developers accounting for another 10 per cent).


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Everyone was a critic. Finally, before the last train left for San Francisco, I had the chance to buttonhole a VC in line at the bar. He nodded, glassy-eyed, as I delivered my pitch. Although only in his thirties, the VC, a former engineer, had grown jaded. “It almost doesn’t matter if you build a better mousetrap,” he said. “It’s all this other shit”—like slick branding, good timing, personal connections, and, of course, dumb luck. So much for that plan. I realized I’d come to Cougar Night for all the wrong reasons. * * * Ultimately I resigned myself to embracing the last resort of all fresh-off-the-boat Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: I could pay to pitch my idea to investors.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

twenty-six HITTING THE HIGH NOTES Monday, July 25, 2005 In March, 2000, I launched my site, Joel on Software, with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company (www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ fog0000000074.html): The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works. For the last five years, I’ve been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September 2000 can be summarized in four steps: It’s a pretty convenient formula, especially since our real goal in starting Fog Creek was to create a software company where we would want to work.


pages: 357 words: 98,854

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

There are major efforts being made to learn how to understand this code, with multiple labs throughout the world collaborating or competing in the use of the fastest and most complex technologies to address this problem. The reason for this is that although we may not be able to read the code properly yet, we know enough about it to understand that it’s extremely important. Build a better mousetrap Some of the key evidence comes from developmental biology, the field from which so many great epigenetic investigators have emerged. As we have already described, the single-celled zygote divides, and very quickly daughter cells start to take on discrete functions. The first noticeable event is that the cells of the early embryo split into the inner cell mass (ICM) and the trophoectoderm.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Only some form of communication can close the distance between “those who want and those who have.” He thinks most of the gap is filled by advertising. “Edison didn’t actually say, ‘Who makes the best mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door.’ If he had said it, it would have been absurd. If you build a better mousetrap and you’re in the woods, until somebody knows you’ve got the better mousetrap, there’s no point in building it.” He cites the former Soviet Union and its satellites: “Look at Communist countries. No advertising. None of the consumer goods companies thought it necessary or worthwhile to innovate because if you do something that’s quite interesting but you can’t tell anyone about it, and your competition are not doing it, why bother?”


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Among the many papers on the schedule for the conference, though largely unnoticed, was one by two Stanford undergraduates, entitled ‘The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine’. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then 25 and 24, were setting out their idea of a better search engine; given the rapidly growing number of pages and users on the world wide web (devised only six years earlier), it was the modern equivalent of building a better mousetrap. The idea was that the world would beat a path to their door – or click its way to their web page. They weren’t the first who had had the idea of how to index the web, nor the first to have thought about indexing it in the way that they did. But they were to do it by far the best. They created a system for searching the content of the net – hardly a new idea, since Yahoo and dozens of other companies were already doing exactly the same.


pages: 486 words: 132,784

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern

Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, driverless car, game design, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, value engineering, Yogi Berra

Today, at the dawn of the nexus of the future, ideas for inventions stand only a small chance of being realized and competing in the marketplace unless they’re generated or picked up by corporations that can marshal teams of scientists and lawyers underwritten by enterprise-scale capital and infrastructure. Nonetheless, millions of individuals still cherish the dream of inventing and building a better mousetrap, bringing it to market, and being richly rewarded for those efforts. Americans love their pantheon of garage inventors. Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are held up as culture heroes, celebrated for their entrepreneurial spirit no less than their inventive genius.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

In 1962 Sperry Rand brought in an aggressive new manager from ITT, Louis T. Rader, who helped UNIVAC address its deficiencies. But despite making a technologically successful entry into computer systems for airline reservations, Rader was soon forced to admit: “It doesn’t do much good to build a better mousetrap if the other guy selling mousetraps has five times as many salesmen.” In 1963 UNIVAC turned the corner and started to break even at last. Yet the machine that brought profits, the UNIVAC 1004, was not a computer at all but a transistorized accounting machine, targeted at its existing punched-card machine users.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

This clarifies the physical environment in which all R&D must take place, but the R&D itself, the development of pattern-detection “devices” that can refine the ore, find the needles, is a process that we are only now beginning to understand in a bottom-up way. Up until now we have been able to reason about the semantic-level information needed for various purposes (to inform rational choices, to steer, to build a better mousetrap, to control an elevator) independently of considerations of how this semantic information was physically embodied. As Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, once put it (1961, p. 132): “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism that does not admit this can survive at the present day.” 23Colgate and Ziock (2010) provide a brief, useful summary of some of the history of definitions of information growing out of the work of Shannon and Weaver. 24Giulio Tononi (2008) has proposed a mathematical theory of consciousness as “integrated information” that utilizes Shannon information theory in a novel way and has a very limited role for aboutness: it measures the amount of Shannon information a system or mechanism has about its own previous state—that is, the states of all its parts.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

Those qualities cut both ways. "Larry and Sergey were always skeptical about traditional marketing," Cindy recalls. "They wanted Google to stand apart from others by not doing what everyone else was doing ... Let the other guys with inferior products blow their budgets on noise-making, while we stayed focused on building a better mousetrap." That skepticism translated into constant questioning about everything marketing proposed. The department only existed because someone (a board member or a friend from Stanford) had insisted the founders needed people to do all the stuff that wasn't engineering. Cindy pushed back against the constant pressure to prove her department was not a waste of payroll, but she also let us know that expectations were high.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

A key part of the mythology of the American Dream was – and still is – that if the little guy (or gal) comes up with a brilliant idea, they can acquire great wealth through the operation of the market, as long as the invention is protected by patent law. As the nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said: ‘Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.’i American universities were certainly not little guys, but what became known as the Bayh–Dole Act encouraged them to focus their attention on the possibilities of getting rich quick through patents and involvement with business, in particular through the application of genetic engineering.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

While, by and large, this has moved corporations toward greater efficiency and away from vague notions of doing social good, it has also undermined their public support by legitimizing actions the community believes are grossly unfair. Corporations have compounded their political vulnerability by attempting to enhance profits, not just by building a better mousetrap, but by influencing rules and regulations in their favor. As a result, not only is the private sector more dependent today on state benevolence to sustain such anti-competitive barriers, which make it a less effective counter to state power, it is also less likely to enjoy broad public support if the state moves against it because it is seen as part of the crony swamp.


pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

Following this “small (r)evolutionary accomplishment,” he recalls, designers across the industry were more likely to “get a curve into a machine” as a way to accommodate the natural curves of human bodies.44 The industry’s increasing amenability to curves was evident during a G2E 2005 panel titled “Building a Better Mousetrap: The Science of Ergonomics,” when a representative from Atronic Gaming described the development of her company’s “emotion” machine. A review of focus group data from around the world had revealed that players were complaining of arm pain from reaching to play without support, and that machines’ sharp corners and hard metal were uncomfortable to lean into.


The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, Rand Fishkin

AltaVista, barriers to entry, bounce rate, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, cloud computing, content marketing, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, linked data, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, optical character recognition, PageRank, performance metric, Quicken Loans, risk tolerance, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steven Levy, text mining, the long tail, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, web application, wikimedia commons

Results indicating that users may have a strong emotional preference for Google Fundamentally, testers find (again and again) that the brand preference for Google outweighs the logical consideration of the quality of the search results. Search engines that plan to take market share from Google are going to have to think differently. If Microsoft or a start-up search engine wants to capture market share, it’s going to have to think less like a technology company trying to build a better mousetrap and more like a brand trying to win mindshare from a beloved competitor. How did Pepsi take share away from Coke? Or Toyota from Ford? That is beyond the scope of this book, but it is a process that can take more than a great idea or great technology. It requires a massive psychological shift in the way people around the world perceive the Google brand in relation to its competition.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And the cosmopolitan heroes who understand that minds don’t have to be just like us to be embraced as valuable— I read those books. I once believed them. But the beauty that jumps out of one box is not jumping out of all boxes. If you leave behind all order, what is left is not the perfect answer; what is left is perfect noise. Sometimes you have to abandon an old design rule to build a better mousetrap, but that’s not the same as giving up all design rules and collecting wood shavings into a heap, with every pattern of wood as good as any other. The old rule is always abandoned at the behest of some higher rule, some higher criterion of value that governs. If you loose the grip of human morals and metamorals—the result is not mysterious and alien and beautiful by the standards of human value.


Programming Python by Mark Lutz

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Build a better mousetrap, business logic, business process, cloud computing, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, Guido van Rossum, iterative process, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, MVC pattern, natural language processing, off grid, slashdot, sorting algorithm, web application

Consult Tk and tkinter resources for options not listed explicitly here. Although other tkinter tools are analogous to those presented here, the space I have for illustrating additional widgets and options in this book is limited by both my publisher and the finite nature of trees. Chapter 10. GUI Coding Techniques “Building a Better Mousetrap” This chapter continues our look at building GUIs with Python and the tkinter library by presenting a collection of more advanced GUI programming patterns and techniques. In the preceding three chapters, we explored all the fundamentals of tkinter itself. Here, our goal is to put them to work to add higher-level structures that will be useful in larger programs.