- Study shows some political beliefs are just historical accidents (Ars Technica) — "Obviously, these experiments aren’t exactly like the real world, where political leaders can try to steer their parties. Still, it’s another way to show that some political beliefs aren’t inviolable principles—some are likely just the result of a historical accident reinforced by a potent form of tribal peer pressure. And in the early days of an issue, people are particularly susceptible to tribal cues as they form an opinion."
- Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick. (Lapham's Quarterly) — "An archivist’s dream is immaculate preservation, documentation, accessibility, the chance for our shared history to speak to us once more in the present. But if the preservation of digital documents remains an unsolvable puzzle, ornery in ways that print materials often aren’t, what good will our archiving do should it become impossible to inhabit the world we attempt to preserve?"
- So You’re 35 and All Your Friends Have Already Shed Their Human Skins (McSweeney's) — "It’s a myth that once you hit 40 you can’t slowly and agonizingly mutate from a human being into a hideous, infernal arachnid whose gluttonous shrieks are hymns to the mad vampire-goddess Maggorthulax. You have time. There’s no biological clock ticking. The parasitic worms inside you exist outside of our space-time continuum."
- Investing in Your Ordinary Powers (Breaking Smart) — "The industrial world is set up to both encourage and coerce you to discover, as early as possible, what makes you special, double down on it, and build a distinguishable identity around it. Your specialness-based identity is in some ways your Industrial True Name. It is how the world picks you out from the crowd."
- Browser Fingerprinting: An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead (The Tor Project) — "This technique is so rooted in mechanisms that exist since the beginning of the web that it is very complex to get rid of it. It is one thing to remove differences between users as much as possible. It is a completely different one to remove device-specific information altogether."
- What is a Blockchain Phone? The HTC Exodus explained (giffgaff) — "HTC believes that in the future, your phone could hold your passport, driving license, wallet, and other important documents. It will only be unlockable by you which makes it more secure than paper documents."
- Debate rages in Austria over enshrining use of cash in the constitution (EURACTIV) — "Academic and author Erich Kirchler, a specialist in economic psychology, says in Austria and Germany, citizens are aware of the dangers of an overmighty state from their World War II experience."
- Cory Doctorow: DRM Broke Its Promise (Locus magazine) — "We gave up on owning things – property now being the exclusive purview of transhuman immortal colony organisms called corporations – and we were promised flexibility and bargains. We got price-gouging and brittleness."
- Five Books That Changed Me In One Summer (Warren Ellis) — "I must have been around 14. Rayleigh Library and the Oxfam shop a few doors down the high street from it, which someone was clearly using to pay things forward and warp younger minds."
- “Things that were considered worthless are redeemed” (Ira David Socol) — "Empathy plus Making must be what education right now is about. We are at both a point of learning crisis and a point of moral crisis. We see today what happens — in the US, in the UK, in Brasil — when empathy is lost — and it is a frightening sight. We see today what happens — in graduates from our schools who do not know how to navigate their world — when the learning in our schools is irrelevant in content and/or delivery."
- Voice assistants are going to make our work lives better—and noisier (Quartz) — "Active noise cancellation and AI-powered sound settings could help to tackle these issues head on (or ear on). As the AI in noise cancellation headphones becomes better and better, we’ll potentially be able to enhance additional layers of desirable audio, while blocking out sounds that distract. Audio will adapt contextually, and we’ll be empowered to fully manage and control our soundscapes.
- We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know (LA Review of Books) — "A good question, in short, is an honest question, one that, like good theory, dances on the edge of what is knowable, what it is possible to speculate on, what is available to our immediate grasp of what we are reading, or what it is possible to say. A good question, that is, like good theory, might be quite unlovely to read, particularly in its earliest iterations. And sometimes it fails or has to be abandoned."
- The runner who makes elaborate artwork with his feet and a map (The Guardian) — "The tracking process is high-tech, but the whole thing starts with just a pen and paper. “When I was a kid everyone thought I’d be an artist when I grew up – I was always drawing things,” he said. He was a particular fan of the Etch-a-Sketch, which has something in common with his current work: both require creating images in an unbroken line."
- What I Do When it Feels Like My Work Isn’t Good Enough (James Clear) — "Release the desire to define yourself as good or bad. Release the attachment to any individual outcome. If you haven't reached a particular point yet, there is no need to judge yourself because of it. You can't make time go faster and you can't change the number of repetitions you have put in before today. The only thing you can control is the next repetition."
- Online porn and our kids: It’s time for an uncomfortable conversation (The Irish Times) — "Now when we talk about sex, we need to talk about porn, respect, consent, sexuality, body image and boundaries. We don’t need to terrify them into believing watching porn will ruin their lives, destroy their relationships and warp their libidos, maybe, but we do need to talk about it."
- Drones will fly for days with new photovoltaic engine (Tech Xplore) — "[T]his finding builds on work... published in 2011, which found that the key to boosting solar cell efficiency was not by absorbing more photons (light) but emitting them. By adding a highly reflective mirror on the back of a photovoltaic cell, they broke efficiency records at the time and have continued to do so with subsequent research.
- Twitter won’t ruin the world. But constraining democracy would (The Guardian) — "The problems of Twitter mobs and fake news are real. As are the issues raised by populism and anti-migrant hostility. But neither in technology nor in society will we solve any problem by beginning with the thought: “Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.” Retweeting won’t ruin the world. Constraining democracy may well do.
- The Encryption Debate Is Over - Dead At The Hands Of Facebook (Forbes) — "Facebook’s model entirely bypasses the encryption debate by globalizing the current practice of compromising devices by building those encryption bypasses directly into the communications clients themselves and deploying what amounts to machine-based wiretaps to billions of users at once."
- Living in surplus (Seth Godin) — "When you live in surplus, you can choose to produce because of generosity and wonder, not because you’re drowning."
- You Should Own Your Favorite Books in Hard Copy (Lifehacker) — "Most importantly, when you keep physical books around, the people who live with you can browse and try them out too."
- How Creative Commons drives collaboration (Vox) "Although traditional copyright protects creators from others redistributing or repurposing their works entirely, it also restricts access, for both viewers and makers."
- Key Facilitation Skills: Distinguishing Weird from Seductive (Grassroots Economic Organizing) — "As a facilitation trainer the past 15 years, I've collected plenty of data about which lessons have been the most challenging for students to digest."
- Why Being Bored Is Good (The Walrus) — "Boredom, especially the species of it that I am going to label “neoliberal,” depends for its force on the workings of an attention economy in which we are mostly willing participants."
- 5: People having fun on the internet (Near Future Field Notes) — "The internet is still a really great place to explore. But you have to get back into Internet Nature instead of spending all your time in Internet Times Square wondering how everything got so loud and dehumanising."
- The work of a sleepwalking artist offers a glimpse into the fertile slumbering brain (Aeon) "Lee Hadwin has been scribbling in his sleep since early childhood. By the time he was a teen, he was creating elaborate, accomplished drawings and paintings that he had no memory of making – a process that continues today. Even stranger perhaps is that, when he is awake, he has very little interest in or skill for art."
- The Power of One Push-Up (The Atlantic) — "Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a person’s overall health—which can otherwise be totally impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly. If we had to choose a single, simple, universal number to define health, any of these functional metrics might be a better contender than BMI."
- How Wechat censors images in private chats (BoingBoing) — "Wechat maintains a massive index of the MD5 hashes of every image that Chinese censors have prohibited. When a user sends another user an image that matches one of these hashes, it's recognized and blocked at the server before it is transmitted to the recipient, with neither the recipient or the sender being informed that the censorship has taken place."
- It's Never Too Late to Be Successful and Happy (Invincible Career) — "The “race” we are running is a one-person event. The most important comparison is to yourself. Are you doing better than you were last year? Are you a better person than you were yesterday? Are you learning and growing? Are you slowly figuring out what you really want, what makes you happy, and what fulfillment means for you?"
- 'Blitzscaling' Is Choking Innovation—and Wasting Money (WIRED) — "If we learned anything from the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century, it’s that in an environment of abundant capital, money does not necessarily bestow competitive advantage. In fact, spending too much, to soon on unproven business models only heightens the risk that a company's race for global domination can become a race to oblivion."
- Deepfakes will influence the 2020 election—and our economy, and our prison system (Quartz) — “The problem doesn’t stop at the elections, however. Deepfakes can alter the very fabric of our economic and legal systems. Recently, we saw a deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bragging about abusing data collected from users circulated on the internet. The creators of this video said it was produced to demonstrate the power of manipulation and had no malicious intent—yet it revealed how deceptively realistic deepfakes can be.”
- The Slackification of the American Home (The Atlantic) — “Despite these tools’ utility in home life, it’s work where most people first become comfortable with them. 'The membrane that divides work and family life is more porous than it’s ever been before,' says Bruce Feiler, a dad and the author of The Secrets of Happy Families. 'So it makes total sense that these systems built for team building, problem solving, productivity, and communication that were invented in the workplace are migrating to the family space'.”
- You probably don’t know what your coworkers think of you. Here’s how to change that (Fast Company) — “[T]he higher you rise in an organization, the less likely you are to get an accurate picture of how other people view you. Most people want to be viewed favorably by others in a position of power. Once you move up to a supervisory role (or even higher), it is difficult to get people to give you a straight answer about their concerns.”
- Sharing, Generosity and Gratitude (Cable Green, Creative Commons) — “David is home recovering and growing his liver back to full size. I will be at the Mayo Clinic through the end of July. After the Mayo surgeons skillfully transplanted ⅔ of David’s liver into me, he and I laughed about organ remixes, if he should receive attribution, and wished we’d have asked for a CC tattoo on my new liver.”
- Flexibility as a key benefit of open (The Ed Techie) — “As I chatted to Dames and Lords and fiddled with my tie, I reflected on that what is needed for many of these future employment scenarios is flexibility. This comes in various forms, and people often talk about personalisation but it is more about institutional and opportunity flexibility that is important.”
- Abolish Eton: Labour groups aim to strip elite schools of privileges (The Guardian) — “Private schools are anachronistic engines of privilege that simply have no place in the 21st century,” said Lewis. “We cannot claim to have an education system that is socially just when children in private schools continue to have 300% more spent on their education than children in state schools.”
- I Can't Stop Winning! (Pinboard blog) - “A one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business. You're not going to feel any worse. You've already got the main skill set of staying up and worrying, so you might as well make some money.”
- How To Be The Remote Employee That Proves The Stereotypes Aren’t True (Trello blog) — “I am a big fan of over-communicating in general, and I truly believe that this is a rule all remote employees should swear by.”
- I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked. (The New York Times) — “Ad campaigns that manipulate searchers’ behavior are frighteningly easy for anyone to run.”
- Road-tripping with the Amazon Nomads (The Verge) — “To stock Amazon’s shelves, merchants travel the backroads of America in search of rare soap and coveted toys.”
- Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent (Elizabeth Ayer) — "I certainly don’t need a reputation as being underhanded or an organizational problem. Especially as a repeat behavior, signalling builds me a track record of openness and predictability, even as I take risks or push boundaries."
- When will we have flying cars? Maybe sooner than you think. (MIT Technology Review) — "An automated air traffic management system in constant communication with every flying car could route them to prevent collisions, with human operators on the ground ready to take over by remote control in an emergency. Still, existing laws and public fears mean there’ll probably have to be pilots at least for a while, even if only as a backup to an autonomous system."
- For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird (The Atlantic) — "Unencumbered by a shell, cephalopods became flexible in both body and mind... They could move faster, expand into new habitats, insinuate their arms into crevices in search of prey."
- Cannabidiol in Anxiety and Sleep: A Large Case Series. (PubMed) — "The final sample consisted of 72 adults presenting with primary concerns of anxiety (n = 47) or poor sleep (n = 25). Anxiety scores decreased within the first month in 57 patients (79.2%) and remained decreased during the study duration. Sleep scores improved within the first month in 48 patients (66.7%) but fluctuated over time. In this chart review, CBD was well tolerated in all but 3 patients."
- 22 Lessons I'm Still Learning at 82 (Coach George Raveling) — "We must always fill ourselves with more questions than answers. You should never retire your mind. After you retire mentally, then you are just taking up residence in society. I do not ever just want to be a resident of society. I want to be a contributor to our communities."
- How Boris Johnson's "model bus hobby" non sequitur manipulated the public discourse and his search results (BoingBoing) — "Remember, any time a politician deliberately acts like an idiot in public, there's a good chance that they're doing it deliberately, and even if they're not, public idiocy can be very useful indeed."
- It’s not that we’ve failed to rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve not even tried. (The Guardian) — "Surveillance capitalism is not the same as digital technology. It is an economic logic that has hijacked the digital for its own purposes. The logic of surveillance capitalism begins with unilaterally claiming private human experience as free raw material for production and sales."
- Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — "The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood."
- What makes a good excuse? A Cambridge philosopher may have the answer (University of Cambridge) — "Intentions are plans for action. To say that your intention was morally adequate is to say that your plan for action was morally sound. So when you make an excuse, you plead that your plan for action was morally fine – it’s just that something went awry in putting it into practice."
- Your Focus Is Priceless. Stop Giving It Away. (Forge) — "To virtually everyone who isn’t you, your focus is a commodity. It is being amassed, collected, repackaged and sold en masse. This makes your attention extremely valuable in aggregate. Collectively, audiences are worth a whole lot. But individually, your attention and my attention don’t mean anything to the eyeball aggregators. It’s a drop in their growing ocean. It’s essentially nothing."
- Some of your talents and skills can cause burnout. Here’s how to identify them (Fast Company) — "You didn’t mess up somewhere along the way or miss an important lesson that the rest of us received. We’re all dealing with gifts that drain our energy, but up until now, it hasn’t been a topic of conversation. We aren’t discussing how we end up overusing our gifts and feeling depleted over time."
- Learning from surveillance capitalism (Code Acts in Education) — "Terms such as ‘behavioural surplus’, ‘prediction products’, ‘behavioural futures markets’, and ‘instrumentarian power’ provide a useful critical language for decoding what surveillance capitalism is, what it does, and at what cost."
- Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game (Stratechery) — "Certainly Facebook’s audacity and ambition should not be underestimated, and the company’s network is the biggest reason to believe Libra will work; Facebook’s brand is the biggest reason to believe it will not."
- The Pixar Theory (Jon Negroni) — "Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why."
- Mario Royale (Kottke.org) — "Mario Royale (now renamed DMCA Royale to skirt around Nintendo’s intellectual property rights) is a battle royale game based on Super Mario Bros in which you compete against 74 other players to finish four levels in the top three. "
- Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think (The Atlantic) — "In The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution scholar and an Atlantic contributing editor, reviews the strong evidence suggesting that the happiness of most adults declines through their 30s and 40s, then bottoms out in their early 50s."
- What Happens When Your Kids Develop Their Own Gaming Taste (Kotaku) — "It’s rewarding too, though, to see your kids forging their own path. I feel the same way when I watch my stepson dominate a round of Fortnite as I probably would if he were amazing at rugby: slightly baffled, but nonetheless proud."
- Whence the value of open? (Half an Hour) — "We will find, over time and as a society, that just as there is a sweet spot for connectivity, there is a sweet spot for openness. And that point where be where the default for openness meets the push-back from people on the basis of other values such as autonomy, diversity and interactivity. And where, exactly, this sweet spot is, needs to be defined by the community, and achieved as a consensus."
- How to Be Resilient in the Face of Harsh Criticism (HBR) — "Here are four steps you can try the next time harsh feedback catches you off-guard. I’ve organized them into an easy-to-remember acronym — CURE — to help you put these lessons in practice even when you’re under stress."
- Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online (WIRED) — "Tagging systems are a way of imposing order on the real world, and the world doesn't just stop moving and changing once you've got your nice categories set up."
- The fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions (BBC News) — "For two years from late 2015, an individual or individuals impersonating France's defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, scammed an estimated €80m (£70m; $90m) from wealthy victims including the Aga Khan and the owner of Château Margaux wines."
- No, You Don’t Really Look Like That (The Atlantic) — "The global economy is wired up to your face. And it is willing to move heaven and Earth to let you see what you want to see."
- Can You Unwrinkle A Raisin? (FiveThirtyEight) — "Back when you couldn’t just go buy a bottle of wine, folks would, instead, buy a giant brick of raisins, soak them in water to rehydrate the dried-out fruit and then store that juice in a dark cupboard for 60 days."
- What Ecstasy Does to Octopuses (The Atlantic) — "At first they used too high a dose, and the animals “freaked out and did all these color changes”... But once the team found a more suitable dose, the animals behaved more calmly—and more sociably."
- The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years (Nautilus) — "The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. "
- What do cats do all day? (The Kid Should See This) — "Catcam footage from collar cameras captured the activities of 16 free-roaming domestic cats in England as they explored, stared, touched noses, hunted, vocalized, and more."
- These researchers invented an entirely new way of building with wood (Fast Company) — "Each of the 12 wooden components of the tower was made by laminating two pieces of wood with different levels of moisture. Then, when the laminated pieces of wood dried out, the piece of wood curved naturally–no molds or braces needed."
- What Did Old English Sound Like? Hear Reconstructions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casual Conversations (Open Culture) — "Over the course of 1000 years, the language came together from extensive contact with Anglo-Norman, a dialect of French; then became heavily Latinized and full of Greek roots and endings; then absorbed words from Arabic, Spanish, and dozens of other languages, and with them, arguably, absorbed concepts and pictures of the world that cannot be separated from the language itself."
- Adversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a more civilized age to slay today's monopolies (BoingBoing) — "This kind of adversarial interoperability goes beyond the sort of thing envisioned by "data portability," which usually refers to tools that allow users to make a one-off export of all their data, which they can take with them to rival services. Data portability is important, but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you're in the process of migrating away from."
- Fables of School Reform (The Baffler) — "Even pre-internet efforts to upgrade the technological prowess of American schools came swathed in the quasi-millennial promise of complete school transformation."
- Apple created the privacy dystopia it wants to save you from (Fast Company) — I'm not sure I agree with either the title or subtitle of this piece, but it raises some important points.
- When Grown-Ups Get Caught in Teens’ AirDrop Crossfire (The Atlantic) — hilarious and informative in equal measure!
- Anxiety, revolution, kidnapping: therapy secrets from across the world (The Guardian) — a fascinating look at the reasons why people in different countries get therapy.
- Post-it note war over flowers deemed ‘most middle-class argument ever’ (Metro) — amusing, but there's important things to learn from this about private/public spaces.
- Modern shamans: Financial managers, political pundits and others who help tame life’s uncertainty (The Conversation) — a 'cognitive anthropologist' explains the role of shamans in ancient societies, and extends the notion to the modern world.
- Britain's equivalent to Tutankhamun found in Southend-on-Sea (The Guardian) — "Gold foil crosses were found in the grave which indicate he was a Christian, a fact which has also surprised historians."
- Writer James Vlahos explains how voice computing will change the way we live (The Verge) — "If you’re only presenting one answer, it better not be junk. I think the conversation is going to more turn toward censorship. Why do they get to choose what is deemed to be fact?"
- Prisoner’s dilemma shows exploitation is a basic property of human society (MIT Technology Review) — "The next question this kind of work must answer is how exploitation can be avoided or what strategy exploited individuals must use to change their lot."
- What Can Video Games Teach Us About Instructional Design? (John Spencer) — "The best video games provide instant feedback. Players know where they have been, where they are, and where they are going. They don’t have to stop what they are doing in order to see their progress."
- It's Getting Way Too Easy to Create Fake Videos of People's Faces (Vice) — "Instead of teaching the algorithm to paste one face onto another using a catalogue of expressions from one person, they use the facial features that are common across most humans to then puppeteer a new face."
- Why Do You Grab Your Bag When Running Off a Burning Plane? (The New York Times) — it turns out that it's less of a decision, more of an impulse.
- If a house was designed by machine, how would it look? (BBC Business) — lighter, more efficient buildings.
- Playdate is an adorable handheld with games from the creators of Qwop, Katamari, and more (The Verge) — a handheld console with a hand crank that's actually used for gameplay instead of charging!
- The true story of the worst video game in history (Engadget) — it was so bad they buried millions of unsold cartridges in the desert.
- E Ink Smartphones are the big new trend of 2019 (Good e-Reader) — I've actually also own a regular phone with an e-ink display, so I can't wait for this to be a thing.
- Netflix Saves Our Kids From Up To 400 Hours of Commercials a Year (Local Babysitter) — "We calculated a series of numbers related to standard television homes, compared them to Netflix-only homes and found an interesting trend with regard to how many commercials a streaming-only household can save their children from having to watch."
- The Emotional Charge of What We Throw Away (Kottke.org) — "consumers actually care more about how their stuff is discarded, than how it is manufactured"
- Sidewalk Labs' street signs alert people to data collection in use (Engadget) — "The idea behind Sidewalk Labs' icons is pretty simple. The company wants to create an image-based language that can quickly convey information to people the same way that street and traffic signs do. Icons on the signs would show if cameras or other devices are capturing video, images, audio or other information."
- The vision of the home as a tranquil respite from labour is a patriarchal fantasy (Dezeen) — "[F]or a growing number of critics, the nuclear house is a deterministic form of architecture which stifles individual and collective potential. Designed to enforce a particular social structure, nuclear housing hardwires divisions in labour, gender and class into the built fabric of our cities. Is there now a case for architects to take a stand against nuclear housing?
- The Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train (Longreads) — "In the twenty-first century, the word “anarchism” evokes images of masked antifa facing off against neo-Nazis. What it meant in the early twentieth century was different, and not easily defined. "
- Wet Plate Photography Makes Tattoos Disappear (PetaPixel) — the photographic technology in the 1800s used to photographic the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand didn't show their facial tattoos.
- Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent (The Guardian) — entertaining, but also pretty tragic if you think about the number of young women 'sent away' to convents in the past.
- Why Do People With Depression Like Listening To Sad Music? (The British Psychological Society) — no definitive answers, but seems to back up the commonsense assumption that high-energy music when you're feeling down is just annoying.
- We studied what 10,000 people love online. The results would make Freud blush (Fast Company) — dark nudges, disaster porn, and harder/faster/weirder algorithms.
- The Case for Doing Nothing (The New York Times) — reminiscent of Jocelyn K. Glei's question: "who are you without the doing?"
- Ape using a Smartphone (YouTube) — staring and scrolling is a primal urge, it would appear!
- Firefox Reality coming to SteamVR (Mozilla Mixed Reality blog) — the web on Valve's devices, with a few tricks to ensure users don't have to pull out of the immersive experience to click on stuff.
- How Banksy Authenticates His Work (RepRage) — so simple, yet so effective. Elegant solutions do the job without needless complexity.
- These tiny homes for ladybugs and spiders are designed to help them thrive (Fast Company) — very cool, although I wish the 3D printed designs were available for download!
- A Million People Live in These Underground Nuclear Bunkers (National Geographic) — incredible photos from Beijing, China.
- Fake News about the Future of Education
- Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy
- 10 New Principles Of Good Design
- Want to Change the World With Your Business? Grow Slow
- How children’s TV went from Blue Peter to YouTube’s wild west
- Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy: Lessons in Justice, Equity, and Self-Management
- The Great Attention Heist
- Android Users: To Avoid Malware, Try the F-Droid App Store
- Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization
- Will tech giants move on from the internet, now we’ve all been harvested?
- Your Pills Are Spying On You
- The Olympics are a mass propaganda tool for countries to assimilate their citizens
- Truly open education will require sweeping changes
- The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences
- Humanity's Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space
- The usefulness of dread
- The Internet Isn't Forever
- Algorithmic Wilderness
- Are We Ready For a Post-Work World?
- If the elite ever cared about the have-nots, that didn’t last long
- Education in the (Dis)Information Age
- How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life
- If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
- Twitter is not a public utility
- The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
- Small, Regular Doses of Caffeine Offer the Biggest Mental Boost
- Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous.
- Beyond the Tree Octopus – Why we need a new view of k12 (digital) literacy in a Cambridge Analytica world
- I work therefore I am: why businesses are hiring philosophers
- Critical Thinking for Educators
- Researchers develop device that can 'hear' your internal voice
- 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
- What Comes After The Social Media Empires
- Coming up with a title
- Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950-2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More
- An Open Education Reader
- Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires
- Say Goodbye To The Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now
- Why co-operative education needs a rethink
- A Modest Guide to Productivity
- Alfie’s Army, misinformation and propaganda: The need for critical media literacy in a mediated world
- Hot Prospect: Designer Richard Holbrook’s Three-Year Quest to Understand the World’s Most Creative Companies
- Chromebooks are ready for your next coding project
- Tech firms can't keep our data forever: we need a Digital Expiry Date
- How to achieve happiness and balance as a remote worker
- Create Kid Skills for Alexa
- Should Africa let Silicon Valley in?
- Autocrypt: convenient end-to-end encryption for email
- Scouts' new visual identity designed to diversify membership
- A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS
- Do platforms work?
- Why read Aristotle today?
- The Uncertain Future of OER
- Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
- The Theology of Consensus
- Building a Cooperative Economy
- What’s right for your company? Decision making in 3 different organizational structures
- The ethics of ceding more power to machines
- UTC is Enough for Everyone... Right?
- It’s impossible to lead a totally ethical life—but it’s fun to try
Friday feudalism
Check out these things I discovered this week, and wanted to pass along:
Friday fizzles
I head off on holiday tomorrow! Before I go, check out these highlights from this week's reading and research:
Image from Dilbert. Shared to make the (hopefully self-evident) counterpoint that not everything of value has an economic value. There's more to life than accumulation.
Friday federations
These things piqued my interest this week:
Image: Federation Square by Julien used under a Creative Commons license
Friday ferretings
These things jumped out at me this week:
Image from Guillermo Acuña fronts his remote Chilean retreat with large wooden staircase (Dezeen)
Friday frustrations
I couldn't help but notice these things this week:
Image via @EffinBirds
Friday feeds
These things caught my eye this week:
Header image via Dilbert
Friday fancies
These are some things I came across this week that made me smile:
Image via webcomic.name
Friday feastings
These are things I came across that piqued my attention:
Friday fathomings
I enjoyed reading these:
Image via Indexed
Friday fabrications
These things made me sit up and take notice:
Image via xkcd
Friday fumblings
These were the things I came across this week that made me smile:
Image via Why WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure (Pavel Durov)
Friday finds
Check out these links that I came across this week and thought you'd find interesting:
Image from These gorgeous tiny houses can operate entirely off the grid (Fast Company)
Fascinating Friday Facts
Here's some links I thought I'd share which struck me as interesting:
Header image: Keep out! The 100m² countries – in pictures (The Guardian)
A little Friday randomness
Not everything I read and bookmark to come back to is serious. So here for the sake of a little levity, are some things I've discovered recently that either made me smile, or think "that's cool":
Header image: xkcd
We're back (with lots of new links!)
After a wonderful August, travelling with my family and taking time off from Thought Shrapnel, I’m back.
This is the 420th post here. I collect potential posts as drafts, which means I’ve currently got a backlog of 157 potential posts. Obviously, the vast majority of those are never going to see the light of day, so I thought I’d just link to them below.
Here’s a list of 10 articles from each of the first six months of 2018. They’re links that I never got around to writing about, but I think might interest you. Note that I’ve listed them in terms of when I discovered them, which is not necessarily when they were originally published.
January
February
March
April
May
June
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Some great links for Product Managers
As I’ve mentioned before, my new role at Moodle is essentially one of a product manager. I’ve done things which overlap the different elements of the role before but never had them in this combination:
Product managers are responsible for guiding the success of a product and leading the cross-functional team that is responsible for improving it. It is an important organizational role — especially in technology companies — that sets the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for a product or product line. The position may also include marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. In many ways, the role of a product manager is similar in concept to a brand manager at a consumer packaged goods company.As a result, I found this list of resources from Product Manager HQ very useful. I reckon I'd come across about 50% of the tools and apps listed before, so I'm looking forward to exploring the other half!
Here’s a few that I hadn’t heard of before:
Mockingbird: Helps you you create and share clickable wireframes. Use it to make mockups of your website or application in minutes.The definition at the top of this post comes from a whole guide put together for new Product Managers by Aha!TinyPM: Lightweight and smart agile collaboration tool with product management, backlog, taskboard, user stories and wiki.
Roadmunk: Visual roadmap software for product management.
Sprint.ly: Agile project management software for your whole team.
UXCam: Allows you to eliminate customer struggle and improve user experience by capturing and visualizing screen video and user interaction data.
Sources: Aha! / Product Manager HQ