Deck of Cards Workout for iOS and Android. Pick a card, get the 3 of Spades, do 3 pushups.

Couple of other things though, I wouldn't put too much stock in the idea of him not writing his own blog posts. It's my opinion that he just writes them in bulk and then queues them up. It would really break the entire authenticity aspect of his brand if he weren't doing his own writing, and while I'm as cynical as it comes with marketing, I'd like to think that the Seth Godin/Tony Hsieh ideal is somewhat transparent. If it weren't and Godin et al., could propagate the ideas he writes about over and over again (a lot of the time for free), that be one hell of a game to keep up with, both in terms of longevity and consistency, and he doesn't seem to be slipping on either.

However, I wouldn't go so far as to say the article's idea is an all around bad one. If the described sister companies were how new ideas got brought to the Google table, and only after their success were they integrated into the moat, then Google can persist with their current business model (Castle-Moat), and the rest of the world can get sans-barnacle developed products. I think this might actually fit into that entire "returning to startup roots" initiative that Larry Page keeps mentioning. If you think about it this moves all the development overhead mentioned to the integration with Google rather than the core feature development of the product, so no good idea gets hindered by red tape, and integration can then thereafter be prioritized by the degree of each products success.

I realize I'm talking abstractly, from a far, an without any account for constants, project nuances, or implementation details, but I wanted to post about the techcrunch moat/castle article, and when I saw you had already posted it, decided to give a brain-dump instead. Enjoy! haha...

  > The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, 
  > but does not expect mastery.  
  > We encourage you to experiment [and fail], but we do expect mastery.

Imagine a world where the baseline level of education is produced by a Khan style system. Schooling wouldn't be as tractable (i.e., it might take 2 to 6 (or more) years to go through high school instead of a nice predictable 4), but everyone that would come out of said system would have the same (ideal) level of knowledge needed in order to move on to the next best thing (e.g., college, work, life's passion, etc.). There wouldn't be kids competing for GPA's or stuffing their resumes, and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes; there would be kids who KNOW calculus, kids who UNDERSTAND physics, and kids who GET American history. The variation would be in the idiosyncrasies of the topics, as opposed to the core concepts.

Now imagine further to what this does for higher education. In this proposed system, it would simply be a fact that graduating kids would know - at mastery level - what their school's curriculums listed off; it's the equivalent of everyone having a 1600 on their SAT's. College acceptance becomes less of a selectivity problem, and more of an efficiency problem; where are all these geniuses going to study!

Ahhh, the potential is so exciting...

That being said, as sort of an aside I think it's noteworthy to say that the idea of fixing the tuition-based University model is a bit more complex than the high school model, but as user arjn said bellow, there are plenty of free lecture repositories out there already; perhaps if prior educational systems encouraged and indoctrinated students to be more self-proficient (as in the Khan system), University learning becomes more about educating yourself, and those free lectures will (naturally) replace the pay-to-learn model. I don't know, but it's a thought...

I've met at least a few people who, being charitable, I would be extremely hard pressed to see passing a calculus exam. I'd agree that for some it's down to motivation but the motivation may come 20+years later or not at all.

Certainly though I'm extremely wary of declaring that all people can attain the same intellectual level which appears to be what you claim.

I'm not going to say it's impossible but I think you must have missed a step where you do some sort of brain augmentation or injection of nanobots to build knowledge pathways without any need to apply a learning process ...

Regardless, I don't think the existence of can't-be-motivated learners compromises the ideals of a Khan-like system. Sure there are kids that aren't going to get it no matter what, but their productivity in any system is going to be nill, Khan, tradtional, or otherwise.

I think this point is actually addressed by the Khan Institute's method of teaching. Lectures are kept very high level, short, and tend to build on each other. So rather than learning in a waterfall fashion, you have the (encouraged) option to go back and learn fundamentals before proceeding. The comments section of his website is actually very good for this; for example, in your situation rather than reading a book in 3 hour stints to learn about, say, game theory, you'd instead be watching a handful of encapsulated 20 min lectures, during which, if you ever ran into trouble, you could query the community and get the more granulated information you'd need to be successful in learning the higher level concept.

> This is how we were taught at Oxford. The only problem was, the unmotivated/disorganised students (like myself) often didn't do the reading/studying in our own time and so had to have these extremely painful tutorials one on one with the tutor.

I actually think this idea (of which I am also a culprit) is also addressed by the Khan Institute. In normal lecture style learning environments this would happen to me, and the next day if I still didn't get the topic (due to a lack of motivation, aptitude, or both) the class would move on, and students like you and I either got screwed or forced into motivation - which one - screwed or motivated - was kind of random depending on the day. But in the Khan method, there's no reason for a student to move on if they don't get the topic, which still leaves the necessity for students like you and I to get motivated, but (in theory) completely removes the option of a student getting screwed by a class that's moving past said student's current level of comprehension.

That being said, I think the latter part of your comment this could be a good question. I think asking him what issues he ran into - which might be more appropriate after he explains what the particulars of the project were/are - might be a little more generic though.

As an aside, after I posted this I went and did a little research on IBM's site - which is more marketing fluff than technical explanation - and one of the things they emphasized was that Watson was built as a custom solution to overcome some (ambiguous) lack of technical feasibility with existing hardware. One of the questions that came to mind after hearing this was why they couldn't just use the same algorithm/ of a blue gene/X. Basically, what differentiates Watson from any other distributed super computer, if anything (significant). I imagine theres no big difference, probably just tweaks in networking types, cpu counts/speeds, etc. - things that would've made Watson doable, but not optimally doable.