Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

11 Random Facts About Conversation Agent on its 11th Anniversary

In 2006, I published the first article. Conversation Agent celebrated 11 years this month. I was inspired by an article on Recode about Google's Anniversary for the random facts bit. Before we form thoughts and insights, facts are coming at us randomly... I'm not releasing anything special, the journey itself has been remarkable. 1. Community: For the first four years using the native comment plugin the back and forth with readers was very active ― 10,354 nuggets, which very often became quotes in subsequent posts. After I installed the Disqus plugin, due to the timing coinciding with the explosion of... Read more →

Learning by Thinking

We understand a topic well when we can explain it to someone else who's not familiar with it and cannot provide feedback and give us additional insights. Because we're forced to make sense of it for it to make sense to them. But we don't need to have someone else to talk with to make it work. Thinking things through is a good exercise to experiment. In other words, we learn by thinking. Galileo used what we call thought experiments to formulate his heliocentric theory, which holds that Earth moves around the Sun at great speed. Galileo demonstrated that falling... Read more →

What we can Learn from the Reality we Create

People are quicker to adapt to the use of technology than business. This trend has been fairly steady for a number of years. Research by Deloitte Center for the Edge in 2011 found that it's connected individuals, not companies, that are harnessing flows and have more power because of it. We have access to information from more trusted sources to evaluate choices based on data and facts rather than claims. It's never been easier to learn and expand our capacity for creative ideas through an open mind. The most successful and smartest people — Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Oprah Winfrey,... Read more →

The Single Most Important Thing we Must Do

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” [attributed to Albert Einstein] It's the most attractive value proposition ― making things simple. Simplicity takes more work. Simple is not the same as easy. But it's worth it, because people will remember it. The reason we like compact stories is they are memorable. We like summaries, and we like to simplify, that is to reduce the dimension of things. We store patterns in our memory so we no longer need to memorize all the information. My elementary school teacher taught us a very short story to remember all... Read more →

The Difference Between Selfless Givers and Otherish Givers

“There are two great forces in human nature: self-interest, and caring for others.” [Bill Gates] Interactions with others lead to success, but there are differences between givers who end up on top and givers who don't fare as well. In Give and Take, Adam Grant's says giving creates opportunity for both the giver and the beneficiary. Best of all, it accrues over time. Being a giver is good, but we want to understand where to draw the line and still create a context that will help us succeed. While most of us are safe as givers in our personal lives,... Read more →

Leading Roles and Supporting Actors

In a short-term world, where we live quarter to quarter, program to program, and month to month, we bob on the ebb and flow of the emotional up and downs of valuations. Even our body weight fluctuates from day to day, and from morning to night. In this kind of world, everything seems to have leading role importance. Anyone with a little bit of experience has seen this fluctuation over years and decades rather than just over months. When our work takes a long-term horizon there's a more defined sense of what and who is in leading roles and what... Read more →

What we can Learn from the Lives of Others

In 1308, a poet set out to write an ambitious work ― composing in a style never used before for such a project, and using a language that until then was confined to colloquial exchanges. The Comedia took twelve years to complete, taking its author, Dante Alighieri, from his middle age to nearly the end of his life. The poem is considered one of the greatest works of world literature and Dante's imaginative vision of the afterlife representative of the medieval world-view as influenced by the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan language as the standardized Italian language. On... Read more →

Networking as a Practice

How we see others is a reflection of what and how we think, our personal culture, and the influence of our environment and social interactions on us, the culture where we live and work. Culture is dynamic and determines what and how we acquire and maintain as knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits. The science of networks pervades everything we do ― nothing happens in isolation, most occurrences and developments are connected, caused by, and interacting with a large number of other pieces of a complex puzzle. Added with culture, we have the potential... Read more →