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The federal government has an interesting group called the Office of Evaluation Sciences that works on conducting randomized controlled experiments around interventions to improve the public welfare. I first became aware of this methodology when I worked in politics. Sasha Issenberg chronicles the use of this method in his book The Victory Lab and many of the techniques used by Democratic campaigns have been influenced by an organization called the Analyst Institute. I believe this sort of rigorous evaluation is important for deciding what is worth doing as an organization.

An interesting piece of background in WIRED on the Boston school bus algorithm:

Over the past few weeks I have been doing lots of traveling. I went to North Carolina for Code for America Brigade Congress a couple weeks ago. Then over the past two weeks I was in London and Spain for vacation. While these are fun and important trips, they also infringe on an important part of my routine. On Sundays I usually reboot by going through all my to do items and reconciling my finances. My inbox is cleared, groceries are ordered, and I ready myself for the week.

This morning I tried the Swift Playgrounds application that Apple offers for free to its iOS device users. A friend suggested I try it as a way to learn Swift. I initially ignored this tool because it seemed to be aimed at people who did not know how to code at all, but Apple did a really great job on this app. You can download a series of well designed tutorials that teach you not only the basics of programming but provide you with content for augmented reality and machine learning development. I even found a GitHub repo with interesting third party playgrounds. This is a much more fun and interactive way to learn coding material than the usual book method.

In organizations there are two types of communication that people can engage in: synchronous and asynchronous. I find synchronous communication to be best for trying to get agreement or dig into beefy topics. Asynchronous communication can often work for everything else. However the challenge with asynchronous communication is it is easily ignored. This leads to needing synchronous communication for things that would otherwise work asynchronously. Since synchronous communication is massively more expensive, this slows down progress.