Author: Robert Schouwenburg

Sunday Morning Ritual

My favorite cherished Sunday morning ritual is reading PostSecret with a coffee. Wherever I am, it’s a small moment of peace and contemplation. I can hide from “the world” for a few minutes. What I like about PostSecret, is that it puts me in touch with my own feelings. They’re little jolts of empathy and […]

Staff composition is an important driver

Median pay of S&P500 companies

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on median pay of S&P 500 companies which contains a few of the tech giants.

Focusing on the human side of business

Jeff Bezos interview

Excellent interview of Jeff Bezos by Axel Springer talking about how to deal with criticism, regulatory scrutiny, work-life balance and philanthropy.

Do not disturb

I came across this article dumber phone and it expresses well how I feel about my computing devices today: "Smartphones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever increasing percentage of our minds. In that a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do."

The Kamprad Test and Moravec’s Paradox

It took a pair of robots, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time. Moravec's paradox is at play here.

Centralization of data is not conducive to innovation

Unbundling the internet and data ownership

AOL used to be internet in the US, there was Minitel in France and i-mode in Japan. All of them were widely successful in their day but turned into obscurity when disrupted by more open and distributed solutions. There’s a law which says something like “any institution always strives to become more powerful over time”. I can’t find the source of this law, but it applies to any organization - commercial or non-commercial. In their strive to become more dominant in a market or sector, they typically strive to centralization of power, influence, usage and product.

Bye Medium and Squarespace

Back to the future – hello WordPress

After a journey of a few years to Medium and then Squarespace, my blog is back on a self-hosted Wordpress site. I've been blogging for a decade and hosting my own website for two. Here's the story.

Who still uses RSS newsreaders right?

Trying something new – RSS to email

There are quite a few blogs I like to follow and I visited them regularly to see if there was an update. But since the update intervals for each of these were very different, regularly visiting wasn’t really working for me. There must be a better solution to this.

11% of US households have cut the cable

I cut the cable 5 years and have not looked back since, but I am still in the minority. Only 11% of the households in the US have cut the cable and went exclusively to streaming.

Mere Potential Can Be More Important Than Achievement

In a series of experiments set in different contexts, we found that high potential can be more appealing than equally high achievement.