Eran Dror's Blog, page 2

Apple: Forget Skeuomorphism, Bring Back Some Physicality!

(Originally published on Quora on September 20th, 2013)

A lot has been written about skeuomorphism, the idea that digital objects should look like their physical counterparts. Speculation went wild from the day that Jony Ive, Apple’s former head of industrial design, had taken the helm for software design as well after the letting go of Scott Forstall.

Steve Jobs, the rumors said, was an advocate of skeuomorphism, and so was Forstall. But Ive was a famous objector, and had many supporters withi...

Stress and Coping: How do I get over the feeling of stress?

(Originally published on Quora on August 15th, 2013)







The essential antidote for stress is to be able to concentrate fully on what you are doing at any given moment, instead of worrying about what comes next. I will simply list the elements I believe are critical for this:

Don’t Hold It All In Your Head -get todos/projects off your head and onto some trusted system (read up on Getting Things Done or other productivity methodologies.)
Make Decisions -If there are decisions you’ve been avoiding mak...

What can people do to cope during times of uncertainty?

(Originally published on Quora on May 9th, 2013)

This is a timely question for me, and a topic I’ve wrestled with quite a bit in the last couple of years. I think that dealing with uncertainty is primarily an issue of attitude. In Western society we are generally well equipped to rationally evaluate various courses of action with multiple risk factors. We can think about these things on a very high level and come up with a pretty good understanding of most situations.






Still, for many (and certa...

Working with Imperfect Models (Part 1)

What does your prediction of an acquaintance’s reaction to a piece of news have in common with the weather forecast? They are both based on models of incomprehensibly complex systems; models that approximate, but do not fully capture the underlying reality, and can therefore prove very wrong.

I use the term “model” here to mean any of the condensed mental constructs we use to represent a far more complex reality. These include concepts, principles, visual models such as maps, mathematical repr...

How effective are yoga and meditation at healing old traumas?

(Originally published on Quora on October 21st, 2012)

I can only speak from personal experience with my own meditation practice, as I’m not involved in any type of research and have not looked at any statistics on the subject.







So here goes: After reading about Vipassana, or Insight Meditation in a post on Sam Harris’s blog (see here -http://www.samharris.org/blog/it…), I became curious and took an 8 week class at a local center.

The technique, though very challenging in practice, is very simple...

Low-Bandwidth Teams: Remaining Human from Afar

The past twenty years have seen a rampant increase in what I call Low Bandwidth Relationships:Work or personal relationships that are based around video, audio, or textual communication with little or no face to face interaction. If in the past being remote meant that you couldn’t communicate very much at all, we now have emails, texts, instant messaging, group chats, social networking, and video conferencing tools that account for a growing percentage of our daily interactions.

These tools ha...