Some stuff I read

  1. Read Making It In America along with this piece by my dad, Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms? Two interesting sides of the same coin, and makes me wonder what will happen next. 
  2. What the science of human nature can teach us (David Brooks) is one of the best things I’ve read in a long, long time. This is how we make sense of what we know. 
  3. Animals Saying Things On The Internet examines the horse_ebooks phenomenon, and why we are so oddly touched by it. Animals or not, I suppose we all just want to feel like there’s something out there who has something new to say, but still gets it. 
  4. Lockdown: The coming war on general purpose computing (Cory Doctorow) is one of the more interesting perspectives on the SOPA thing that I’ve read. And it is an imagining of a future that makes sense, but still seems wild and different and just a little bit scary. 

Readings of the week…

Oooohkay, so I’m super behind, as many of you have probably noticed. So I’m going to try to do this in sets, so neither you nor I are totally overwhelmed with a huge influx of articles…

  • One of my favorite things I read in the past few weeks months was the NYT Magazine’s “Youth Issue.” There were a couple of really fantastic articles in here. The Good Girl was an article talking about Miranda Cosgrove, the latest in tween pop sensations in the style of Hannah Montana. It’s focused primarily on the way in which these stars struggle with the transition from adolescene to adulthood due to the way they’re depicted - but it’s curious to think about how much these issues are reflected in teenagers’ experiences, particularly online. Online Poker’s Big Winner talks about young, self-made poker millionaires. Choice quote #1:
    “Patience is no longer rewarded. If an 18-year-old online whiz can play 12 hands at once, then by his 19th birthday, he is no less experienced than a career gambler who has sat for a dozen years at the big-money table at the Bellagio.”
    Choice quote #2: 
    “Most of us young kids who play at nosebleed stakes don’t really have any clear idea about the actual value of the money we win or lose,” Cates says. “Most of us see the money more as a points system. And because we’re all competitive, we want to have the highest score.”
    Next-Generation Scientists is a great piece of how, growing up with the right set of influences and peers, you can become passionate about a problem and have a lasting impact on that problem by applying yourself. As I always say, the idea that we can do things to the world at large is learned, and these kids have definitely learned it. The last of these articles, A Soccer Phenom Puts the ‘I’ in Team, describes Indi Cowie and her love of soccer and ‘freestyle,’ which I can only describe as a cross between juggling and dancing with a soccer ball. You have to admire the work ethic of a girl like this (and her insistence on hanging with the guys), and someone who’s still struggling to “make it” - the article feels a bit more raw and honest about how difficult this really is, rarely the way journalism looks when an athlete is covered in a retrospective. Finally, hat tip to her using the internet to keep in touch with her community of freestylers. Do yourself a favor and watch the video of her doing her tricks, they’re phenomenal. 
  • There is often this feeling among techies that every individual should have their own self-hosted, self-controlled “node” on the internet, and by gosh, if only the commoners were smarter, this is the way it would be! Anthony De Rosa (soupsoup) comes in and challenges this view with an intelligent description of the positives and negatives of being externally hosted in his blog post, The Death of Platforms.
  • Good article actually covering a lot of the different ways I’ve been observing teenagers using Twitter in Tweeting teens can handle public life by Alice Marwick and danah boyd. Choice quote:
     First, let’s get something straight: not all teens use Twitter, and those who do don’t all use it in the same way. The sense of what’s appropriate on Twitter varies wildly by social group and locale – is it OK to break up with someone on Twitter? To tweet a hundred times a day? Similarly, young people use Twitter in different ways.
    It’s one of those platforms - unlike what Facebook has become - where users can really choose and buy into the culture they want to participate in.  
  • Every once in a while you run into one of those articles that seemingly have nothing to do with what you’re working on, and yet, provide you with a totally different perspective on what you’re working on and thinking about. Mind vs. Machine by Brian Christian was one of those articles for me. It sort of reveals and explores one of the simple, banal truths about the Turing Test: it forces us to reflect on human conversation, and what that looks like and sounds like. The thing that really caught my eye? The “memory” of conversations… 
  • Scary coverage of how IANA will run out of (or has run out of, by this point) IPv4 addresses to give out in The Difference Enginge: No More addresses. More nerdery: The Memristor, “The first new passive circuit elements since the 1830s,” or more specifically, one of the basic components of a circuit.
  • Good opinion piece from Wired: Nintendo 3DS Is a Last-Gen Game Machine. This is interesting because it’s not just talking about video games, it’s talking about the properties of disruptive innovations within the context of games - and certainly the properties in that context can be carefully considered for their applicability outside that domain, as well. How do you make sure your new cool thing isn’t just a “fresh coat of paint”? 
    Choice quote:
    What Apple is doing to Nintendo is in great part what Nintendo did to Sony — finding some surprise hits with low-budget games on a cheaper platform built around disruptive technology.
  • A great creation story in Paul Kendall’s Angry Birds: the story behind iPhone’s gaming phenomenon. Here’s the thing about these creators that I admire: they had the balls to say, “I know what I’m doing, I understand this world and know it well, so I’m going to do what I know to create a successful product.” Surprisingly, few creators these days seem to have the balls to man up and do that. 
  • Paul Adams wrote an interesting article on Designing for Social Interaction, Strong, Weak, and Temporary Ties. There’s some good points that are worth taking into account if you’re thinking about building a social product, and why the standard models don’t really properly account for these different types of ties. However, I’ll call him out for two things: 1) these aren’t the only types of ties there are - and it’s silly of him to position his article this way. Annoying, to say the least. 2) We can see why he ended up at Facebook - he definitely shows the “IRL bias,” which is Facebook’s tedious tendency to assume that the only people that matter to us socially are the people we meet IRL. Meeting people on the internet is so passe. 
  • Found an old transcript of one of Clay Shirky’s talks - A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, a really interesting look at how groups, particularly online communities, behave, and how we can design social software for them. I love it because it incorporates a lot of the same conclusions and insights I had in designing Teethie. 
    Choice quote #1 (a short one but I love this statement): 
    The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
    Choice quote #2:
    Sometimes you can do soft forking. Live Journal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve ever seen, where the concepts of “you” and “your group” are pretty much intertwingled. The average size of a Live Journal group is about a dozen people. And the median size is around five.
    But each user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their friends, and so while the clusters are real, they’re not completely bounded — there’s a soft overlap which means that though most users participate in small groups, most of the half-million LiveJournal users are connected to one another through some short chain. 
  • There are three types of people out there talking about the internet, according to Adam Gopnik’s How the Internet Gets Inside Us. These are: the Never-Betters (“It’s never been better than now, when we have the internet”), the Better-Nevers (“It would have been better if we never had the internet”), and the Ever-Wasers (“New things like the internet are always going on. Big whoop.”). He dives into the most prominent of these, and asks, essentially, “Who is right?”
  • Shorties: Escape to a fascinating, different point of view: Mark Kulrnasky, the food sociologist by Ellen Kanner. Insert <discovery> here: the role of placeholders in science by John Timmer describes the way in which we see patterns, discover a missing piece, and look to fill that “hole.” Bryce Roberts wrote about Why I Heart Tumblr, which points out simply: sometimes messiness is a blessing, not a curse. The uncertainty seems to create a space of opportunity. Really interesting analysis of how more complex problems are changing the balance from individual geniuses to team geniuses in science from Jonah Lehrer in The Difficulty of Discovery (Shrinking Asteroids Version). More on video games in Videogames Need Auteurs, But Good Luck Finding Them by Jason Schreier. What video games seem to need is vision and commitment to that vision - but just like everything else, this simple formula for at least a chance at success is harder than it seems. 
Oooohkay, so I’m super behind, as many of you have probably noticed. So I’m going to try to do this in sets, so neither you nor I are totally overwhelmed with a huge influx of articles… One of my favorite things I read in the past few weeks months was the NYT Magazine’s “Youth Issue.” There were a …

Readings of the week…

More of them, slowly. This group really seems to be primarily profiles, but they are all are fascinating and interesting.

  • Digital Molting by Steven Lehrburger (Lehrblogger) - A great post by one of my good friends on designing webservices that take into account our natural urge to grow and change through life, as well as an insightful description of how this process currently looks like online. Interestingly, the tweets in the comments seem to offer a few different perspectives on what this post means.
  • Twitter Was Act One by David Kirkpatrick - I haven’t been a previous fan of David Kirkpatrick’s fanboying writing, but Jack Dorsey is just awesome. This is the classic story of the slow hunch - this life long obsession with something, and less of a thing, but more of a phenomenon, and rabid pursual of that interest that eventually leads to the uncovering of something great. Sometimes I think we should stop focusing on “domains of knowledge”, and more on “patterns of wisdom.” Does that sound corny? Oh well.
  • Foursquare, Facebook, Founders, and Passion by Jonathan Betz - Why sometimes founders with great amounts of passion beat out companies they have no business beating; ‘the passion gap.’ It’s probably all in the details - it’s amazing how digital products are so exacting: if you don’t have the details of interaction mechanics right, the product just flops, because it seems so emotionally flat and unengaging to a user. 
  • Sid/Ovie Part One, Two by Kent Russell - A brilliant description of not only how the game of hockey feels to someone on the ice, but two of the games’ greatest stars and how their own rivalry is reflected in the history of their own two countries’ interpretation and competition in the game of hockey. My favorite line from the piece is the very last one, which is reflective of watching anybody who is a true master and artist at what they do: “Watching them means having another consciousness ask you, Can you see what I see?”
  • How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200 billion Apple? by Rob Waugh - It’s Johnny freaking Ives. Why wouldn’t you have already clicked this link? Greatest about this link is its description of his process, how he informs himself creatively, and his legendary attention to detail. 
  • The $1 Billion Girl by Amy Larocca - More profiles: how Jessica Simpson built up a celebrity fashion empire where others have failed. Wow, I didn’t know even celebrity fashion empires were built on unique insights and customer understanding, but I guess it flies. 
  • Sparks Fly by Mike Antonucci - a piece on my advisor from school, David Kelley, and his vision of creativity that he has built into the d.school and product design program at Stanford. A profile that describes many of the insights that Kelley had into creativity and what makes effective designers and problemsolvers. 
  • Sad as Hell by Alice Gregory - This is actually a book review, but it’s the beginning and the end of this that was so arresting to myself. Yes, part of it is the usual (but unusually well-written) triteness about being overstimulated by information. More enticing is the way this forms and create friendships - are we surrounding ourselves by “all-or-nothing friends”? I’m not entirely sure this is true - often it seems like differences in information are a fact of digital life, due to the large amount of it coming in. However, the information that seems to be everywhere - Facebook’s latest privacy scanadal, for example - appears to be the fodder of everyday conversation. And maybe that’s not an entirely bad thing - there has to be something to talk about. But scoping that shared information may very well be part of digital life and social management, just as we scope the number of calories we consume by not arranging three ice cream or dinner dates in an evening. 
  • The Day the Movies Died by Mark Harris - Fascinating rumination on Hollywood’s fear of risk in execution - Hollywood doesn’t want to risk movies that must be executed well to be successful, and so sticking with cheesy, simple-ideas and repeatable principles are sort of the expectation here. It’s an analogy, similar, to many, many things and makes you think twice about the media and products you consume on a whole.
  • Why I don’t care very much about tablets anymore by Jon Stokes - a great piece on why the author doesn’t enjoy tablets - it comes down to two simple reasons: your hands are always in the way, making it difficult to really focus on what you’re doing, since you can’t see it; and because the tablet doesn’t do any one particular thing really well. I wonder, though, at the end of the day, if this is just because of what he does on the computer as an action-oriented user. On the other hand, one of the beauties of the internet is its ability to turn any user into an “extreme user,” when they manage to find that thing they are really passionate about. Then again, maybe many more people will get passionate about Angry Birds, rather than World of Warcraft. Who knows.
  • Shorties: Early Attachment May Predict Couples’ Recovery After Fights by Rick Nauert, PhD (articles like this always make me think about the things I need to do, the kinds of mental toughness you need, to live life well and happily). From Lulz to Labor Unions: The Evolution of Anonymous by Gillian Terzis (a detailed, thoughtful look into Anonymous and the ways in which its politics have grown and changed in the last year. It’s a difficult thing to study and understand, but in so many ways is indicative of how a larger Internet citizenry may act, and so I enjoy the thought experiment). How to tweet bile without alienating people. Or making 13-year-old girls cry by Charlie Brooker (On Rebecca Black, Twitter’s cesspool of vicious taunts, and insulting creatively). Let’s take better care of our rare earth elements by Mike Pitts (fascinating things we rely on, but don’t think about. There just seems to be so much that needs to be taken care of). If you own the infrastructure you get to charge rent: What Apple’s 30% charge teaches us about the attention economy by Garry Tan (on companies that own the infrastructure of the internet, and their difference from the companies relying on them). Bother Me, I’m Thinking by Jonah Lehrer (on why being easily distractable is sometimes a good thing. I guess this is one of the things you kind of want to spit in the pessimistic attention-researchers’ faces).

Readings of the week…

January 24th - 30th; and the first ‘readings’ that have been on-time in a longgg time. 

  • Networked Media by John Borthwick - John looks into some fascinating patterns of the real time web that he’s learned from his network of Betaworks companies…
  • On Overconfidence by James Fowler & Dominic Johnson - On why and how confidence evolved in humans, and why it may not be the best instinct to follow in modern situations.
  • How Do You Transform Good Research Into Great Innovations? by Jon Kolko - The beginning of a three essay series by the genius Jon Kolko for Fast Co. Design, this time covering what is often called the “murky middle.” It’s a simplistic introduction, but the basic principles apply. 
  • The Tragedy of Nepal 2011 by Andrew Hyde - On what the tourism industry has changed Nepal into.
  • The Difficulty of Discovery (Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?) by Jonah Lehrer - Lehrer asks a crucial question: are there less geniuses today then there were 100 or 200 years ago? I find the whole thing curious - how do our societal biases need to change and adjust themselves for the new importance of teamwork and collaboration? I’m particularly interested in what this means for creating teams that really respond to and collaborate with other members’ expertise.
  • Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility - I guess I was not the only one fascinated by warrens and plazas. And a lot of this thinking is actually exactly what attracted me to a new network structure - a network that evolves with some sort of intelligence in reaction to the needs of the people inside of it. 
  • Peer review: Trial by Twitter by Apoorva Madavilli - A discussion of how academia is embracing and using social media to discuss more, faster. But what do you do with that discussion, how do you make something useful from it, that contributes directly to our academic institutions? 
  • Gridiron Girls by Katie Baker - On why/how the NFL has become more appealing to women: focusing on stories, struggles, relationships and making that transparent to fans. Thought it would be particular interesting for my hockey friends, as well.
  • Body Snatchers by Dan P. Lee - Shocking, morbidly fascinating, paranoia inducing. That is all. 
January 24th - 30th; and the first ‘readings’ that have been on-time in a longgg time.  Networked Media by John Borthwick - John looks into some fascinating patterns of the real time web that he’s learned from his network of Betaworks companies… On Overconfidence by James Fowler & Dominic Johnson …

Readings of the week

Two weeks… 

  • The Decline Effect and The Scientific Method by Jonah Lehrer - Lehrer once again makes the unmissable for this week’s readings.. And he brings up what’s a simple point: if you don’t design experiments well, if you don’t understand statistics, the impact is larger than you think. Fascinating. 
  • Is Facebook Temporary? by Joshua Porter - Joshua’s great and uses his 52 weeks space to collect and present some findings and opinions on Facebook. And he winds down with some things that might kill Facebook - but I’m interested in the WHY these things are a threat to Facebook. That’s the opportunity. 
  • You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends by Robin Dunbar - Dunbar claims that Dunbar’s number applies, even on Facebook. Dunbar points out that Facebook lets us keep in touch with people we would have otherwise have fallen out of touch with; but she also contends that it allows us to reintegrate our networks, which is probably something I’d take issue with. 
  • How Facebook Ships Code - I’m not going to say much about this, other than, when I read this I thought to myself, “Ohhh, certain things make so much sense now..” Culture impacts product. 
  • Social Software Sundays #2 - The Evaporative Cooling Effect by Xianhang Zhang - I have mixed feelings about evaporative cooling, but it’s interesting to think about, and also, I love the concept of plazas & warrens; I think it’s pretty useful for thinking about these effects. 
  • Is “Undesigned” the Next Great Web Trend? Fat Chance by John Pavlus - Even the great web products that aren’t flashy, that don’t look like any thought going into the UI so to speak, are deliberate and built that way for a reason. 
  • The Wrong Man by David Freed - What’s it like to be a scapegoat? Captivating. 
  • Will an API propel Quora into the mainstream… and will that suck? by Charlie O’Donnell - Whether you agree with Charlie’s point or not, you’re going to have to face the undeniable fact that he’s making the argument, which means that’s what he wants as a user. Deal with it. 
  • Sure, RSS Is Dead — Just Like the Web Is Dead by Mathew Ingram - Let’s not get all dramatic here, OK? 
  • Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals by Steve Silberman - It’s funny that taking something that has been in front of our face for so long and just taking it at face value can reveal something so simple: if there’s a placebo effect, that means that placebos can be used as a medical tool, in a positive, healing way.
  • The Pleasure Principle: Not All Products Need To Be Painkillers by Prerna Gupta - Raising an interesting point: porn makes money too. That’s why designers focus on needs, not “bug fixes.” 
  • Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions by Ed Barnes - Oh, you know, Stuxnet, NBD, but pretty crazy to read about… 
  • What is an App? by Ian Bogost - We watch this whole revolution going on around us, but no one stops to take the time to think about it, ask about it. What does this really mean? Here’s a jumping off point to think about that question. 
  • The love-hate hormone, ingroup/outgroup wars, and the power of culture by David Dobbs - Everything has its upsides and downsides, particularly in complicated systems like the brain. Always worth remembering. 
  • Asleep and Awake by Tom Armitage - OK, breathe. We’re all done now; wind down with this quick and easy thought-inducer. 
Two weeks…  The Decline Effect and The Scientific Method by Jonah Lehrer - Lehrer once again makes the unmissable for this week’s readings.. And he brings up what’s a simple point: if you don’t design experiments well, if you don’t understand statistics, the impact is larger than you think. Fascin …

Readings of the week…

I suppose this is what happens when you get overly involved in a start up: you end up with a good month’s worth of readings of the week, all ready to be broken down and talked about. This might take a while, but here we go:

  • Socratic Fishing in Lake Quora by Venkat Rao: A great look at Quora and the social dynamics that effect the site. Some great links here into a treasure trove of related content and ideas that get the mind spinning.
  • Content, Context, Conduit: It’s Not Who You Know, But Where You Know by Stowe Boyd: An interesting analysis of the increasing importance of Twitter as a stream for content discovery, and how to best curate your twitter stream to get the best stuff.
  • How Instagram changes the way I look at things by Clive Thompson: In middle school and high school I was a huge camera person - I loved it because it gave me an opportunity to really notice the things around me, and see the beauty and peculiarity of everyday things. I tried to capture this with my Noticings series, but I have to admit that Instagram has really changed this for me, back to a little of what it was, and a little bit more, even. The visual representation of my life is vaguely interesting.
  • The Mismeasurement of Science by Michael Nielsen: Ever since reading Alfie Kohn’s What Does it Mean to be Well Educated?, I’ve been fascinated by the way we use metrics, when it’s appropriate and the repercussions of using metrics for evaluative purposes. The point towards the homogeneity of the evaluation metrics is a good one: it reminds me of decisions I’ve made to avoid metrics (rankings) within the social product I’m building right now - because it encourages a homogenization of communities. 
  • Storytelling 2.0: When new narratives meet old brains by John Bickle and Sean Keating: I’ve always been fascinated with the power of the self-narratives we construct for ourselves, and the way they change over time. Here’s an article discussing the neurological basis for this, as well as how it may be effected by new digital products and services. 
  • The Long & Short of Writing For the Web by Joshua Porter: I appreciate and agree with Porter’s dissenting view that people aren’t just looking for “dumb” content and that there’s plenty of long-form/”smart” content that people want to consume. It’s just much, much easier to product “dumb” content, so that becomes what we talk about.
  • The Shadow Scholar by Ed Dante: Dante does student’s homework - from every day writing and essay assignments to PhD theses - and this is his story. It’s shocking how much today’s students are lacking. What can we do to teach these kids to think critically and constructively? 
  • The Brain That Changed Everything by Luke Dittrich: Fascinating article on neuroscience - I find the history of these “accidental” discoveries so tragic and yet interesting at the same time. And somewhat related to this question of the emotional aspect of self-narration of events above, I was struck by this: 
     The first time Henry tries it, he performs poorly. But the funny thing is, the next time he tries, he does it a little better. And the next time better still. With each new attempt, he never remembers ever having attempted it before, but soon he’s completing the task as well as anyone. Even Henry recognizes the strangeness of this.
  • Facebook’s Messaging Platform: Color me skeptical by Charlie O’Donnell: You know me, I like people who come out with strong convictions, and if these convictions just happen to be laying the smack down on Facebook… Anyways, Charlie makes a great analysis of the product: this product is all about context, or the lack and misunderstanding of it. Ed Note: It appears this is old. I’m not entirely sure how it got here, but anyways. For more about this and some related articles, check out my post on Making Meaning in Web Products.
  • The Cognitive Cost of Expertise by Jonah Lehrer: Oh yes, the obligatory Jonah Lehrer piece. I love this one in particular because it talks about how we fall into certain modes of pattern recognition as we begin to exist in certain expert worlds. My impression is that this is very similar to that expression - he with a hammer will always see a nail, or whatever it is (I’m pretty sure it’s not so Confucian in its wording, but anyways), and the question we’ve got to ask ourselves is, in looking at the tides and patterns in a situation, are we writing over or ignoring key points?
  • Online Porn, Twitter, and my Very Personal Addiction by James Altucher: Part of the genius of real-time web products is the way in which they feed off our neurological rewards patterns, and makes many of us powerless against this. But Altucher raises this from the perspective of someone who can just feel himself growing addicted, and wondering how he’ll get out of this pattern.
  • Why Design Education Must Change by Don Norman: Don Norman is at it again in his crusade against the shittiness of the design world. I agree with this article in almost its entirety, and reinforces some of my own thinking on the topic (see: On Designers in Silicon Valley). Also worth noting is the contrasts and similarities between this and Gadi Amit’s piece on American Design Schools Are a Mess, and Produce Weak Graduates. Now, if it was that we could just agree on what we are trying to get to, perhaps we could get somewhere. My bet is this will always be part of the design landscape, and just something you’ll have to think about as your forge your way: what type of design thinking resonates with you?
  • Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction by Matt Richtel: Loved this. Really did. It kicked up quite a stir, so you may have already read it before, but in general, I think it provides a decent lens for what’s going on. The question now is, how do you take the advantages and opportunities that digital tools offer and use those while mitigating the disadvantages? And teaching our graduates to manage this as well and create a healthy environment for our brain is going to be important as well - but it’s discouraging that we haven’t even figured out how to teach this when it comes to our physical health, let alone our mental health.
  • USG and PTA by Thomas Friedman: Friedman’s reaction is also fantastic. I’m just gonna pull out two quotes that had me (figuratively) banging my fist on the table in agreement:
    As Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it to me in an interview, 50 years ago if you dropped out, you could get a job in the stockyards or steel mill and still “own your own home and support your family.” Today, there are no such good jobs for high school dropouts. “They’re gone,” said Duncan. “That’s what we haven’t adjusted to.” When kids drop out today, “they’re condemned to poverty and social failure.” There are barely any jobs left for someone with only a high school diploma, and that’s only valuable today if it has truly prepared you to go on to higher education without remediation — the only ticket to a decent job.
    And (emphasis mine):
    We need teachers and principals who are paid better for better performance, but also valued for their long hours and dedication to students and learning. We need better parents ready to hold their kids to higher standards of academic achievement. We need better students who come to school ready to learn, not to text. And to support all of this, we need an all-society effort — from the White House to the classroom to the living room — to nurture a culture of achievement and excellence. 
  • The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product by Gina Binachini: Ning being what it is, Gina still can really articulate some amazing insights. I really do love this entire list, it reinforces many of my own intuitions about developing a social product.
  • Bringing Design to Software by Mitchell Kapor: Another manifesto, but a really great one from 1996 discussing the need and potential roles for a new discipline - software designers. It’s funny we still struggle with so much of this today. 
  • “Cyber” Warfare and Hot Coffee by Sam Biddle: Fantastic article on why cyber warfare isn’t much of a threat, but rather a construct of people who benefit from the American public’s paranoia. 
  • How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver’s ‘Food Revolution’ Flunked Out by Arun Gupta: It’s sad that this didn’t work out, it truly is. However, the article raises a larger point that I feel like too many of us forget in this day and age: simple solutions don’t always exist to complex problems. Maybe I’ll amend that: obvious solutions don’t always exist - sometimes simple but non-obvious solutions do exist, but they take a lot of thinking to get to. Be careful before you underestimate the work of others.
  • Cancer World by Steven Shapin: A history of cancer and some of the issues plaguing that front.

Readings of the week…

Some scrumptious readings from last week…There are a lot of them, I guess I did a lot of reading? 

  • Generation Why? by Zadie Smith
    I really did love this article, it’s probably the best thing I read this week. Zadie Smith really drills down into the movie, but then segues into the larger question about why we’re allowing ourselves to be defined and quantified in this relatively two-dimensional medium. Choice quote?
    Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format? … In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore. 
  • I can’t seem to figure out who wrote this article, but it’s called “Too Asian?” and essentially is an article in a Canadian magazine discussing the high percentages of Asian students in top Canadian universities and the way their culture is effecting the overall culture of these universities. It’s pretty fascinating, and there’s a lot of controversial and yet thought-provoking content in this article. Mostly, I wonder if we’re doing these smart students a disservice, by allowing them to stick to their straight and narrow path through life, instead of using the university setting as a chance to challenge assumptions and grow as people. I guess I always expected that by the time I got to college, grades would probably not matter that much, and rather that we would be really preparing ourselves to learn and preform real, useful work. I was sadly mistaken. 
  • The Perfect Stride by Jennifer Kahn
    Sometimes I think we think we can just strong-arm our way to success. It’s a useful mindset, but another part of success is having the right mindset towards it, having a good idea of your own weaknesses and strengths, and having the courage to try something unique that no one else is doing, and that you think will work well for you. 
  • Fascinating cultural behavior: 4chan vs Tumblr, Risk reduction strategies on Facebook, Why Making Dinner is a Good Idea (obligatory Jonah Lehrer - I’m such a fangirl, but imagine if someone applied this logic to web startups), Low costs on Twitter (and see more in the comments for my thoughts here). 
  • Cataclysm Coming… by Tom Chatfield
    On emotional attachments to virtual worlds. It’s beautiful to me, to see someone honestly invested and emotionally engaged in their online experiences, and it worries me that more of the people building products aren’t thinking about building these resonant experiences. We’re selling the whole sector short by refusing to think that we could create relationships like this. This is the second time in recent ‘Readings’ that I’ve linked to an article about MMO’s, and it makes sense. We may think we exist in online spaces these days, but when we think about the relationships that the average MMO user has with their virtual experiences, it puts our usage of the internet to shame. If only it could be this special! I can’t wait until “MMO thinking” reaches outside of the MMO industry.
  • On medical policies and market structures, I read two fascinating articles that were quite literally, a world apart, but seemed to have some interesting parallels. “A Deadly Misdiagnosis,” by Michael Specter, discusses TB in India. “God Help You. You’re on Dialysis,” by Robin Fields discusses dialysis patients in the US. What strikes me is the opportunity for making changes before diseases strike in these settings, or have a chance to spread. I’m not sure what it says that many in the US are looking to the government to regulate our way out of these problems, while half a world away, they’re looking at technologies as pushing into the opportunity space. Kind of oddly related and scary: “The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine” by Brendan Kiley. 
  • Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom by Sara Corbett
    A few things about this: I think this is not so much about video games, but finding ways to engage students in truly learning. Learning material not just by memorization, but actually being able to DO something with what they’ve learned. And also, at the same time, giving students opportunities to do things and build up the confidence to feel like they can actually make and produce - a habit of mind that many American school children lack, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. 
  • Dirty Coal, Clean Future by James Fallows
    Another article on why doing and building, engineering and technology, is so important. 

x-posted to posterous