Month: May 2013

Friday Reading #21

I assume many people who work for massive corporations have dreamed of working somewhere smaller in the hope that they can see the impact of their work and not feel like a useless tiny cog in a gigantic mega machine. Not me of course, I would not want to work in some cool purpose driven startup. Not at all. Especially not after reading the excellent piece by Alex Payne, One of the key developers of Twitter’s API and one time CTO of Bank Simple, on startup life and all its pros and cons. Read the rest of his blog as he is one hell of a writer (and coder).  Other nice collections of words that made me think include things about Television, formalised dress codes, company transparency, hacked newspapers, innovation classics, typing, two examples of idiot gatekeepers and a story about Sheffield, music drugs and gangsters as a cheery little dessert. And as a little amuse-bouche here is a lovely cartoon that made me smile a bit too knowingly.

Nest of ideas

by the very amusing Mr Wowser

 

Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup

I recently interviewed a young man. I asked him where he wants to be in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he replied. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business. That’s what he had gone to school for, after all.

 

After the Like and After the Spike

In fact, the last 50-60 years have been a blip – a time in which the relationship between storytellers and audiences was effectively broken. We’re coming to the end of that blip now, and we’re seeing a transition as interesting and profound as the beginning of the 20th century, when storytelling moved from the live performance circuits of music hall and variety to the new mass mediums of cinema and broadcasting.

 

A question of clarity and certainty

The company agreed that a small group of senior directors, with an independent fashion adviser, would hear complaints from employees who felt their ties had been unreasonably rejected. Some of these directors were heard to mutter that this was not what they were paid large salaries for. But since no-one knew what they were paid large salaries for, the criticism did not go much further.

 

Buffer’s extreme transparency: inspiring or dystopian?

What would happen if everybody in your company knew everything about your business – your revenue, everyone’s salaries, how the company pitches itself to investors, even how much you slept last night? This might sound like the premise of a sci-fi novel, but it’s what’s happening right now at social media tools startup Buffer, a company with a small, distributed team that takes transparency to extremes.

 

A sobering day

About 10 days ago, the hacker or hackers calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) carried out a very targeted cyberattack against the FT. We’re not the first to be targeted and in fact as I write this we’re not even the most recent. But the experience taught me an important lesson. Targeted attacks against a single large corporation are not like the random, almost embarrassingly fake emails you get telling you to reset your PayPal account. They’re painfully, soberingly realistic. Those that were sent to the FT compromised scores of our corporate Google accounts. And one of those was mine.

 

Innovation: Good Reads On Courage, Diversity, Ecosystems And Principles

Innovation leaders generally operate in a world of “what if”  and must constantly project the consequences and outcomes of complex systems.  And the systems, because they are made up of human beings, tend to be messy, unpredictable, and highly variable. Thomas More shows us the power of narrativizing ideas and principles and the power of “the story” to make real that which is not real.  More important, though, Utopia is a wonderful example of what it means to think about the ecosystem as a whole when thinking about innovation.

 

Innovation

But I immediately blurted out something like, “Innovation is two things. First, you obviously have to spot something that people aren’t doing yet. But second, most importantly, you need to have the courage to do something different than what you’ve grown comfortable doing.”

 

I type, therefore I am

Onscreen, today’s torrents of pixels exceed anything Auden could have imagined. Yet the hyper-verbal loneliness he evoked feels peculiarly contemporary. Increasingly, we interweave our actions and our rolling digital accounts of ourselves: curators and narrators of our life stories, with a matching move from internal to external monologue. It’s a realm of elaborate shows in which status is hugely significant — and one in which articulacy itself risks turning into a game, with attention and impact (retweets, likes) held up as the supreme virtues of self-expression.

 

The Story Behind the WWW Hypertext 91 Demo Page and UNC and me

Not long after, Jim got email from Tim saying that he was submitting a paper on what was now called more briefly WWW at the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference Hypertext 91 in San Antonio in December. Tim made plans to stop by UNC and visit with us before going on to Texas. He was confident given the immediate acceptance of WWW on newsgroups and as seen in his logs that he would get a good speaking slot at the conference. A few weeks later, we learned differently.

 

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title

From: Comedy Script Editor, Light Entertainment, Television
Room No. & Building: 4009 TC
Tel. Ext.: 2900
date: 29.5.1974.

Subject: “FAWLTY TOWERS” BY JOHN CLEESE & CONNIE BOOTH

To: H.C.L.E.

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title. 

It’s a kind of “Prince of Denmark” of the hotel world. A collection of cliches and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.

 

Gangsters, Drugs and Bassline – Sheffield’s war on Music

Niche’s notorious owner Steve Baxendale talks frankly about the rise and fall of Niche. Of how the Sheffield underground rave scene flourished around 1992, the time he set up Niche as an all-night House club. Bought, as one of Sheffield’s many abandoned cutler warehouse, quite different from the luxury brand it became. “Everyone was sick of the commercial clubs and the military regime that they incorporated. They wanted throbbing underground music and to chill out in peace.”

Have a lovely weekend.

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What to do with the war cards?

I have been approached by the good people in the HSBC UK archives to help with a little project. The archives contain, amongst many other fascinating things, four boxes of war cards. Rachael Porter from the UK Archives team explains;

‘”Next year marks 100 years since the start of the First World War. Here at HSBC Archives we are keen to mark this anniversary and, in doing so, also showcase some of our records relating to this period. We have a set of index cards, naming Midland Bank staff members who went off to serve in the armed forces during the conflict. Each card records detailed information about the employee, and in some cases unique information about his service record, which cannot be found anywhere else. We’d love for members of these men’s families, and military history enthusiasts, to be able to access these records; and a project centered around digitizing them and making them available, whilst also tying in with the anniversary, would be a real achievement for us.”

The question is how to do that? And where to do that? To ensure people get the most value out of this amazing and important data as possible. I am after a bit of help.

The how/where? (a few quickly thrown together ideas)

The boxes contain approximately 5,000 index cards. They have typed field names and hand written details with things such as staff name, branch, rank, regiment etc. The back of the card includes notes on their time in the forces.

War cards 2a

I think it would be great to scan the cards front and back and store them on a platform capable of  allowing other people to transcribe and add to the data. The actual scanning is tricky/time intensive (and there may be no way round that) due to both the volume and the fact these are 100 years old and sticking them in a duplex scanner maybe a little risky. If anyone has experience of scanning index cards with these kinds of machines I would love to know more. Have you been involved in any projects that had to scan in a large set of paper based data?

A platform like the one built (in a week) for the Guardian MP’s Expenses investigation sprang to mind. This allowed masses of PDF scans to be uploaded and then provide some simple yet powerful tools for annotating and categorising the data. Unfortunately the site is no longer live but there are some good reads on how and why they built it.

Another good example of the genre is Old Weather, which published thousands of old nautical weather logs and asks people to transcribe them. Whether it is feasible for the project to build something to this level is debatable, small budget and short timescales as usual, but it would be great to try because it would become reusable for future data sets rather than just be a one off set of scanning and tagging of data.

I am looking for any platforms that support this kind of data load and amendment. At a basic level we could use Flickr to upload the images then use tagging, sets (or whatever they are called now), comments etc to try and build a usable and searchable set of data. Evernote was another tool that sprang to mind, to capture and attempt to transcribe the data but I am not sure if it really suited to this kind of task, especially if you wanted to build something else on top of it.

backofwarcard

I am also looking for suggestions of other tools that would assist with this. Whether it be a platform like Flickr or a set of open source tools somewhere. Anything we can have a play with.

Also are there any organisations/people that specialise in this, other archives or museums for example. Any specialist military history sites? Once the data is scanned and annotated where should it live? Submitting the data set to the National Archives was a good suggestion by my colleague as it seems they have a nice looking API.

This was a very quick scrawl of ideas. The key for me is tools to help with the capture, storage and annotation of the data. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to get in touch via the comments below or Twitter if you prefer.

Update 14:30 29/05/13

I have had some lovely ideas shared via Twitter and on our internal blog at work. Mechanical Turk has had many mentions and I was foolish to not include it. Simon shared the brilliant looking open hardware book scanner. Please keep them coming you lovely people.

Update 10:30 31/05/13

I have had some pointers to Guardian staff that worked on the MP’s expenses system and an offer to help code such a system from a brilliant man who used to work for the Guardian. We may have a solution from our Central Scanning department in Coventry but we cannot test it until the week of June the 10th due to system access requirements, fingers crossed. Rachael has been in touch with the Imperial War Museum. Things are looking good.

Update 15:40 26/06/13

It has been slow progress over the last few weeks then some interesting things happened within a couple of days. First we have the go ahead and the means to scan the cards. This will be happening next Wednesday in Coventry, where we will be running the cards through these scanning beasts. We also had a great meeting with Luke Smith (see his great comment below for links to some interesting resources) from the Imperial War Museum who is working on the fantastic looking Lives of the First World War http://www.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/. We have also received some very good advice/pointers/introdcutions to interesting people from Kim Plowright. It is getting a bit exciting.

Friday Reading #20

Don’t watch the news read some things that will make you smarter and less despondant. Lots of things caught my eye this week and here I share them with you to see if you enjoy them as much as I did.

 

Inside Google’s Secret Lab

Thrun always thought of corporate labs as playgrounds for lifetime employees who were overly absorbed by the abstractions of pure research. He wanted to focus on research that was at least commercially plausible and let talent come and go as projects evolved. Thrun says he seriously considered calling the new group the Google Research Institute, but that carried exactly the kind of sleepy connotations he was trying to avoid. Google X, he says, was a placeholder, a variable to be filled in later.

 

‘Trading can take over your life – but only if you let it’

“When I was working as a derivatives trader in a small European country my routine went like this: I’d come into the office just before 8am and switch on my seven screens. There are many programs to log into. I sort each data feed to update me preferentially on news in the underlying names I trade and on macro developments. I ensure my connections to all relevant exchanges are functioning. I calculate hedge limits and input them into the order book. I make sure all this is done before 8.45am, as the market opens at 9am.”

 

Look on the dark side

Darkness is powerful. It is powerful in destruction. It has the ability to make us feel wretched and alone, tear down our confidence, sabotage our progress through life. But darkness is also powerful in creation. It has the ability to transform itself from a destructive force into something that can unleash the most essential, most indispensable element of your person.

 

 The truth about being ‘done versus being ‘perfect’

Whenever I spend time in boardrooms across the world, I can’t help but notice that courage seems to be a limited currency. No matter how the company presents itself, it seems CEOs rarely have the power one would imagine. The fact of the matter is that companies of this magnitude tend to be run by committees that make the tough decisions and take the risks. The problem is that committees rarely have courage–only people do.

 

The Perceptive Radio: a project for BBC R&D

The design challenge was to demonstrate how a networked object could deliver tailored media experiences that are sympathetic to domestic environments, without being disruptive or jarring.

 

Roof Bug-fixing

You see, when we find a bug in our software, we try and recreate it. Then we know when we’ve fixed it. And something I was starting to notice here was that this wasn’t happening. It was as if I had noticed the timeout, and made a configuration change in the general area, then marked the story as done and walked away. We don’t do that, with software. And yet this situation that was making my life pretty inconvenient – three months in, my flat was covered in mould, smelt of damp and all my furniture was in one room while I waited for the leak to be be fixed – was being dealt with by people who seemed to be making general stabs in the direction of the problem, without any kind of theory or analysis.

 

Why getting new things makes us feel so good: Novelty and the brain

Having just moved to a new country, I’m currently surrounded by novel sights, sounds and experiences. It’s an overload of new for my brain. However, after only being here a week, I’m surprised how ordinary my house and my street seem. After walking the same route to the train station three or four times, it quickly became boring.

 

You are your data: The scary future of the quantified self movement

As we document and share more of where we go, what we do, who we spend time with, what we eat, what we buy, how hard we exert ourselves, and so on, we create more data that companies can and will use to evaluate our worthiness – or lack thereof – for their products, services, and opportunities. For those of us who don’t measure up compared to the rest of the population, the outcome won’t be pretty.

 

Microinteractions (Sample chapter from the upcoming book by Dan Saffer)

A 56-year-old man punched his fist through the glass and into the electronics of the machine. “Yes, I broke the machine and I’d do it again,” he told the security guards. (He was sentenced to 90 days in jail.) Another man, 59-year-old Douglas Batiste, was also arrested for assaulting a machine—by urinating on it. A woman caused $1,800 in damages to another machine by slapping it three times. And 67-year-old Albert Lee Clark, after complaining to an employee and getting no satisfaction, went to his car and got his gun. He came back inside and shot the machine several times. What device is causing so much rage? Slot machines.

 

The humble hero

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

 

How social media improved writing

A woman I know says only after the internet arrived did she realise her mother was semi-literate. Previously they’d always communicated by phone, but now Mom was suddenly sending her emails full of “!!!!”s and “……”s. Email kicked off an unprecedented expansion in writing. We’re now in the most literate age in history.

 

 Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr – review

(unsurpisingly this features lots of swear words)

Swearing doesn’t just mean what we now understand by “dirty words”. It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths. Consider for a moment the origins of almost any word we have for bad language – “profanity”, “curses”, “oaths” and “swearing” itself.

 

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Friday Reading #19

I am fascinated by the ‘acquihire’, the act of a large company buying a smaller company to either take on its excellent staff members or to take its competitive prodcut out of the market or for numerous other reasons. Ever since Facebook acquihired my once beloved FriendFeed, a four man startup, in 2009 for around 50 million dollars I was fascinated by the trend. The main acquihire was the CTO of FriendFeed Bret Taylor who became CTO of Facebook, until he left last year to start up again. He had previous with Google on their Maps product and is clearly a clever chap (lots of features that FriendFeed had years are ago are still drip feeding into Facebook). The interesting thing though is the attempts to shoe horn in these founders to a larger corporation, many don’t last, Bret included as they year for the freedom and challenge of their own company but what about the others staff members? How do they fare? What about the users who helped build these companies with their usage only to see them left to rot, ala FriendFeed or closed down with a cheery ‘our incredible journey‘ type message.  I wanted to write something about this but time, ability and focus means I haven’t but thankfully someone else has that is better than anything i could have dribbled out (see first link of the week). Other topics for reads of the week include the failure of hackathons, the destruction of the middle class, advertising tyranny, Ikea love, AI love, Apple photo hate and an interview with Jason Fried. Enjoy.

 

The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires

I know the buyers try the best to believe that [insert well known founder name here … David Sacks, Max Levchin, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois] will stay and help lead their company in a totally new direction. But evidence suggests otherwise.

 

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown? Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

 

The tyranny of digital advertising

Let’s be clear: big businesses have grown up around the availability and theory of mass media and buying attention. Any big client older than15 years old will have grown up with the reassuring ability of tv and print advertising to reach mass audiences. Those were methods of advertising predicated on guaranteed access to peoples’ attention through interruptions in mass media.

 

Jason Fried: Interview

Are you satisfied creatively? Yes, but I’m also impatient. I’m satisfied in that I get to build what I think is right. I don’t feel repressed in that way. I have a lot of friends in this business who feel repressed because they have an idea, but can’t act on it for whatever reason. I feel very free, but I’m also always slightly frustrated with the fact that there are more ideas and more things I want to do, but can’t because I don’t have time or knowledge to do them yet.

 

The ‘IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love (PDF & free subscription required)

Labor leading to value thus appears to be a very basic process, and an effort justification account predicts that effort and valuation increase in lockstep. We suggest, however, that the psychological process by which labor leads to love requires consideration of an additional crucial factor: The extent to which one’s labor is successful.

 

Dear Apple, let’s talk about photos

So Apple, I think you’ve got a bit confused. Don’t worry about sharing, we don’t need you for that. Your job is to take photos, organise them and make sure they don’t get lost. So let’s talk about how you can do that.

 

Hackathons Don’t Solve Problems

– and certainly not big problems. The big problems are big for a reason. They’re hard, bordering on intractable, and people are working to solve these problems constantly, spending much more energy and resources than a single hackathon could ever do. There is nothing magical about putting a bunch of technologists and creatives in a room which will suddenly solve disasters, world crises, the economy, or anything else.

 

Love machines

Then again, isn’t love always uncertain? And isn’t the fear that our children will turn against us also an aspect of love? Partners and children might indeed abandon us, regardless of what good we did for them. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way. MIRI suggests that we should embed a fail-safe program in all future AI to prevent them from ever hating us.

 

Bonus self promotion link – Web Curios the spreadsheet edition

This week I made a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet version of the wonderful Web Curios. You can read about it here and see it mentioned in this weeks Web Curios here. While you are there read the rest of it, every single bit of it.

 

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Web Curios The Spreadsheet Edition

I assume that everyone reads Matt Muir’s excellent weekly(ish) round up of interesting things from the web that might be slightly related to digital media industries? If not you should go here and subscribe immediately. It is a brilliantly written thing and shows a curious, intelligent humourous and slightly warped mind in all its glory. I am a massive fan of smart people collating interesting things and providing them to me on a plate as I am lazy and it saves me doing anything like work. Web Curios is also a long read and contains a lot of links and this got me wondering how long would it take for a person to consume a whole episode of Web Curios? Every link? Every video? Every thing?

I produce a few similar things to Web Curios both on this blog and at work but nothing quite on the scale or humour or quality of Matt’s rambling delights. At work our team produce a monthly newsletter made up of news, blogs and interesting links that relate to our work/interests. We often ask ourselves how much time do these things take to consume (or delete without reading)? What if you clicked on every link and read every post. If only we had a tool that you could feed a bunch of links and it would give you the answer as if we could come up with some perfect amount of time it should take. Well to the best of my knowledge no such tool exists (it better bloody not do after the amount of work I did on this i.e. about 2 hours).

As a ‘little’ experiment I decided I would have a go at working out how long it would take to consume an entire edition of Web Curios. Instead of actually reading/viewing/playing with it all I made a spreadsheet instead. I chose an edition from a four day working week so in theory it should have been a bit shorter but as I began the task it became clear shortness is relative.  You can find the edition of Web Curios I chose at http://www.imperica.com/news/web-curios-10-05-2013 and you should of course read it from beginning to end (and then let me know how long it took you).

What did I actually do?

The first job (after reading it and enjoying it) was to capture all the links in it. This involved me opening the links, copying them into a Google Docs spreadsheet, giving them a basic categorisation (words, pictures, video, tool etc) and then doing some horribly basic and assumption riddled maths on consumption time. It was a grind of a task but strangely rewarding.

The answer I came up with was as follows…to consume the 10th of May 2013 edition of Web Curious would take 7 hours, 8 minutes and 33 seconds, which is a good chunk of a working day and would probably be better than work. Web Curios itself has over 4,000 words and contains 102 links. The links lead too 57,016 words, 1 hour, 48 minutes and 35 seconds of video, 525 pictures, 9 tools/services, 4 games and a 1 hour and 41 seconds long mix tape to listen too while you do all that reading (you would actually have to listen to it five times though).

This is based on assumptions such as average reading time of 215 words per minute, 3 seconds per picture, a minimum noodling time (technical term) with the tools/sites. I only took into account the first page visited for most links unless it was a multi page article. Like I said basic and assumption riddled. My very rough calculations do not take into account any rabbit hole falling down you may do, any addictive game playing time or time taken to tweet Matt Muir about NSFW links that you were not warned about and opened at work. Thankfully this weeks edition was relatively clean. My normal interactions with Web Curios is to read it all and open some links for reading once I have finished, I assume most people do the same.

I am pretty sure nobody clicks every link (apart from me this week) and consumes every item but I just wanted to put some almost meaningless figure on if they did. I have no conclusion or no great insight into what this means. I would of course like a tool that automates this for my own work, giving Friday Reading posts an average reading time for example would be a nice feature. It was just an idea that had been in my head a while and I wanted it out and there is nothing like the reward of completing an almost pointless task.

You can see that very exciting spreadsheet embedded below or over here if you prefer links/can’t see the embed/want the full interface.

Friday Reading #18

Friday you are a welcome sight after a tiring busy week. Not had much chance to read this week but here are a few things that caught my eye/brain. As I get back into work it seems I have an interest in posts about making things and I like people that share their working out so that is a bit of a theme. I am rubbish at making things. I have been wanting to write about that but well…like I said I am rubbish.

 

Restructing Britain

The problems we face today are those same problems that brought down modernism. We can’t control them with one solution, strategy or ‘five circled grid’. But just because you can’t control something, doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

 

Citibank: a flawed innovation process? No, but a ruthless one

I could tell you a lot more about the process and project, but I will not as I was sent a bunch of internal confidential documents by someone disillusioned with the process.

 

The New Kind of Worker Every Business Needs

To use a term I introduced in an earlier piece, people like these are engaged in “socialstructing” — that is, bypassing established institutions and processes for building new things, and instead working to create what they find missing in the world by communicating the need to their social networks, mobilizing whatever resources they have at their disposal, and pursuing solutions collaboratively.

 

How Do You Create A Data Driven Organisation?

A lot of companies play lip service to the idea but when it comes down to making decisions they end up being made by those that are more senior (by HiPPO: highest paid person’s opinion) or, worse, loudest, based on gut instinct, experience or opinion.

 

Fifteen modifications later, he threw it into her fantasies – The Warren Ellis Gun Machine remix

I like the idea of “Making Things Fast“, however I seem to end up making things slowly – which is why I’ve decided just to say “to hell with it” and write up projects as I go along.

 

Interview: John McAfee Answers Your Questions

Did you really evade the police by dressing up in a speedo and screaming at people in German, as you describe here?

McAfee: I favor disguises that change character rather than looks when running from the police. The German Tourist disguise was terrific. I looked exactly like me but no-one searching for me paid me any mind.

 

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Friday Reading #17 – Post Paternity Leave Edition

Hello there, yes it has been a while. I have been a bit busy in April with the arrival of my second child so things like blogging took a back seat to changing picalli filled nappies, wiping up milky mouth discharges and forgoing any sort of decent sleep. It has been a joy, honestly it has. The reality of work has kicked back in and I have been reading something other than Gina Ford so I thought I would share them with you to keep you entertained on a Friday afternoon before a three day weekend, in the UK that is.

 

Experimentation beats expertise

Stop having meetings to argue about which design approach is better  – endless meetings with stakeholders full of defensiveness and crazy arguments where the people who tend to win are those who are loudest, most persistent or highest paid. Start making decisions based on lightweight research that provides evidence (sometimes stories, sometimes numbers) to support the design that most strongly supports the agreed goals.

 

An innovative approach

We need more grown-up talk about business and growth strategies. This has to be the year when adland’s innovation practitioners need to grow up or, put brutally, shut up. It’s time to make ourselves invaluable. If we can’t do that, then I think we should conclude that our industry innovation era has failed.

 

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette.

 

Meet the man who turned David Cameron onto open data

Senior civil servants wanted to include this text in all government pronouncements on open data:

“No government data shall be released unless its quality can be assured”

Silva refused. His argument was that sunlight would drive improvements in the data itself. “They kept writing that in – I kept taking it out. I got into an argument with the civil servants about it. That would mean essentially no data ever released. That would have choked off the open data agenda from day one. They said if we release poor quality data it will embarass the civil service – but I believed the only way to improve that data would be to release it.”

 

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet

A couple weeks later, I found myself among 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, pouring into New York’s Citi Field to learn from the world’s most respected rabbis about the dangers of the internet. Naturally. Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

 

“About the Word Design” by Vilém Flusser

The new form of culture which Design was to make possible would be [i.e.,] a culture that was aware of the fact that it was deceptive [i.e., designed]. So the question is: Who and what are we deceiving when we become involved with culture (with art, with technology—in short, with Design)?

 

Does alcohol improve ideas?

The experiment, in a nutshell, involved 18 advertising creatives, split into two equal teams according to their length of service in the industry. One team was plied with as much alcohol as they wanted, while the other team was assigned a liquid diet that the temperance movement would have approved of. They were each given three hours to work on a brief. And once it was all over, their work was judged by a team of big-shot creative directors.

 

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