Equity and inclusion

This is a personal story about workplace bias. In my first management gig, between 2004 and 2013, I built an all male team. “Keep the company mostly male” was never a goal. In fact, if anyone had said that kind of crap out loud –…

Full disclosure, I’m really quite interested in unconscious bias, understanding the impacts of diversity, and also on being as impactful as I possibly can. I would like to be aware of the context, and to do a good job within it. I have opinions on…

I’ve been reading Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier. It’s a good book, and you should probably read it. It’s particularly important if you’re a person who participates in the economy – which is most of us. Among the good points he makes is…

This is a follow-up to my earlier rant about unicorns. As with the data challenges of genomics, I feel like we’ve been talking about this unicorn thing forever, or at least long enough that it’s awkward to keep pretending that it’s a new thing. There…

A very smart and well informed colleague recently shared a thought that disturbed me. I’m writing it here mostly to get it out of my head, and also in the hopes that the eminently quotable Admiral Rickover will once again be proved right: “Weaknesses overlooked…

In biotech these days, I hear a lot of talk about “unicorns.” Sometimes they are rare fancy unicorns … purple, or glittery. At Bio IT World, I found myself moderating a conversation that involved herds and farms of these imaginary animals. Of course, we were…

This weekend I spent three days at PAX East. PAX stands for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a convention / exhibition of games and gamers. It’s also something of a movable-feast nerd mecca. This year, like last year, it was at the Boston Convention…

I was reading Matt Taibbis most recent blog post, and I feel moved to build on his points. America is losing its competitive edge. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one if them is almost certainly the fact that we pay our…

Jessica Alqhuist is a student at West Cranston High School in RI. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one who noticed that her school still displayed its “School Prayer” (a relic from the 50’s) on a large banner (a relic from the 60’s) in…

I recently read Griftopia by Matt Taibbi. He’s the Rolling Stone blogger who came to national attention with his 2010 Vampire Squid characterization of Goldman Sachs. To wit: The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most…