John Hagel has a brilliant summary of talent acquisition and how to avoid talent drain.

… we are seeing a new rationale for the firm emerge – firms exist to accelerate talent development. This is increasingly the reason why people choose to affiliate with firms.

The winners in the global economy will be the firms that can find ways to break this vicious cycle and harness network effects for talent development both within and across firms.

Some of the areas covered include:

1. Attract and retain vs. develop.
2. Training vs. learning.
3. Attract and retain vs. access and motivate.
4. Automation vs. amplification.
5. Strategic importance of growth.

I highly recommend reading the whole article. John doesn’t post often, and when he does it is something insightful - well worth adding the RSS feed.

There are a few threads that I’ve been attempting to unravel that don’t quite justify their own post. However, as each is proving to be very interesting, I’ve gathered them together:

• Arrows - “Arrows are a new abstract view of computation … [that] serve much the same purpose as monads — providing a common structure for libraries — but are more general.”

  A monad generalises a computation across its output. An arrow generalises computation for both input and output.

  For fun, a Kleisli arrow will lift a monad abstraction to an arrow abstraction, but the interesting arrows are the ones that can’t be made into monads. Essentially, the arrow abstraction is a super-set of monadic abstractions.

  If you want to understand the why of arrows, read [Hug00]. If you want to understand the how of arrows, read [Hug05]

  As usual with Haskell, the interesting bits are in research papers.

• Software Transactional Memory (STM) - “a quantum step forward from locks and conditionals” in concurrent programming.

  Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris were recently interviewed by Channel 9 on STM. The discussion covers the motivation of STM and outlines the types of problems it solves.

  STM is available today in Haskell, as a GHC extension.

• Types and Programming Languages - If you have an interest in computational theory and type systems, I cannot recommend this book enough. Autrijus blamed this book for him starting the pugs project.

  I’m only part way through the book, and it is stretching my brain in interesting ways. The benefit is that much of the terminology in research papers in functional programming is becoming more clear.

  I haven’t had this much fun since writing a monadic based lambda calculus parser at uni.

• Category theory - this is floating around the edges of a number of topics. There are veiled and direct references to how category theory is responsible for concepts such as monads and arrows.

  From [Hug05]:

  Arrows in Haskell are directly inspired by category theory, which in turn is just the theory of arrows — a category is no more than a collection of arrows with certain properties.

  For now, category theory is on my “to read” list, having piqued my interest.

To keep up to date with what it happening in the Haskell community, I highly recommend the Haskell Weekly Report (rss).

Do it like this: Seth Godin

Create a bond of trust,
By providing relevant and insightful content,
That shines light on a useful topic,
Using conversational language and a personal connection,
To help your readers to grow.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

zefrank provides insight on how to survive the holiday.

(For those without Thanksgiving, the advice works equally well for any large family holiday)

Beauty is in the eye of the cheque book holder

- Dean Collins

The quote above is from a recent episode of the LightSource podcast, where Kirk Voclain shares his secrets with Bill and Ed. Kirk identifies his inspiration for lighting to be the late Dean Collins.

I originally heard about Dean Collins courtesy of David Hobby’s Strobist site. I’ve come to trust David’s recommendations, so when he was enthusiastic about the Dean Collins DVDs they were an instant purchase.

Having watched the four DVDs through, the way in which I see is altered. Not just when I’m looking through the viewfinder, but in day to day life.

I notice more about lighting. Looking at other’s photography, I’m seeing how things are lit. These were skills I was starting to develop thanks to David, and Dean’s videos took things rapidly to the next level.

I’ve noticed is that it isn’t just the situations that I’m controlling the light where things have improved - my photography in general has improved. My hypothesis is that by learning how to control light, you also develop better vision for how light falls. This means that my natural light photography has improved as a result of learning the basics of studio lighting.

For me, Dean Collins is the best teacher of lighting I’ve come across. The modern teachers of lighting I found that are good? They learnt from Dean Collins.

If you are just getting into lighting, start by reading through the Strobist site and listening to the LightSource back catalog. Once your interest is piqued, the Dean Collins DVDs can provide the next step up.

Bonus Link

The Lighting Journey - 7 stages of learning about light.

In the age of digital everything, using reality makes you stand out.

Watch the Heart of Sound video by The Softlightes (.mov).

Melbourne Cup Day.

Hyped locally as “The Race that Stops a Nation”, is the highlight of the spring carnival for horse racing. As a Melbourne resident for most of my life, I’d assumed that other states merely had a passing interest.

I may be wrong.

Queensland doesn’t have a holiday for Cup Day, but my office has chosen to host a party for the day. This involves watching the race, drinks, fancy dress competitions, etc.

At first, it seemed like an isolated incident. Trolltech looks after its employees, so can also use the event as part of general morale and team building. Then I discovered that my netball team also can’t play due to the Cup, and that other teams would also have player availability issues.

Maybe this race, for Australia, really does stop the Nation.

Then again, I am generalizing from a very small data set. Either way, happy Cup Day!

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You’re crazy.” Plus they’re going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

– Diane Arbus

via MoCP.