Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?

“In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, ‘Where’s electronic mail? That would be so cool.’ And they said, ‘Oh, there’s no time to write that. It’s not important.’ And we said, ‘Well, can we write it?’ And we did. And then it became part of the system.”

Published: Jun 19, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,093 words)

Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.” It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect?

Published: Jun 20, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,434 words)