http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/06/08/evil-book-22-immutable-laws-of-branding/ apophenic pretentia Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:48:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.11 http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/06/08/evil-book-22-immutable-laws-of-branding/#comment-60472 Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:03:06 +0000 http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2009/06/08/evil-book-22-immutable-laws-of-branding/#comment-60472 [...] The writer/editor, Bryan Bergeron, teaches a course on technology and the future of healthcare at Harvard Medical School. Each year, a session of the class simulates the creation of a business to give students a brief sense of the hours, adrenaline rush, complexity, and many dimensions of a tech start-up. This year, he did something new. He had his class break into two teams and gave each of them a Lego Mindstorm NXT kit and an hour (another link here). The assignment was to “design, build, and program a robot that could traverse 32″ and then stop just before the obstacle.” (This is a classic, and continually revisitable, robotics program - a combination of “hello world” and a sorting algorithm. There are a million ways to have a robot measure/detect/sense/calculate the distance it has traveled with various tradeoffs around accuracy, amount of code, use of resources, speed, etc.) The winner would be whichever person’s robot got closest to the goal. (In the case of a tie they would look at business plans. This course didn’t teach the immutable law of marketing that quality and performance just don’t matter, apparently.) [...] […] The writer/editor, Bryan Bergeron, teaches a course on technology and the future of healthcare at Harvard Medical School. Each year, a session of the class simulates the creation of a business to give students a brief sense of the hours, adrenaline rush, complexity, and many dimensions of a tech start-up. This year, he did something new. He had his class break into two teams and gave each of them a Lego Mindstorm NXT kit and an hour (another link here). The assignment was to “design, build, and program a robot that could traverse 32″ and then stop just before the obstacle.” (This is a classic, and continually revisitable, robotics program - a combination of “hello world” and a sorting algorithm. There are a million ways to have a robot measure/detect/sense/calculate the distance it has traveled with various tradeoffs around accuracy, amount of code, use of resources, speed, etc.) The winner would be whichever person’s robot got closest to the goal. (In the case of a tie they would look at business plans. This course didn’t teach the immutable law of marketing that quality and performance just don’t matter, apparently.) […]

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