A Beautiful Mind and Broken Body For Silicon Valley

pacopico writes "About 30 years ago, a young Marine and math savant named Ramona Pierson was out for a run when she got hit by a drunk driver and had her body shattered. As Businessweek reports, Pierson ended up in coma for 18 months, came out blind and emaciated and was sent to live in an old folks home. Her remarkable story takes off from there to include bike racing through Russia, a PhD in neuroscience, a stint fixing Seattle's public schools, and now Declara, a social network run by Pierson and funded by billioniare Peter Thiel, who put the original money into Facebook. One of the more original start-up tales to have ever come out of Silicon Valley or really anywhere."

Comments

Re:Another social network

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually, the world *does* need this. It's called knowledge management. It's the one thing we suck at right now, at an increasing scale. The "social" part isn't about people reposting stupid stories but about individuals with specific pieces of specialist knowledge forming specific links and lines of communication. I'd assume that it's not the only part of the equation; NLP and IR techniques working on unstructured texts are most likely a huge part of it, too.