Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
Robb Lewis lays out everything you need to understand about the SEO industry in < 256 characters.
I’ve been with “professionals” who jeer at notions that content matters, or that you can get people to care/read anything longer than 300-500 words. Been told that my long form writing is a death sentence if I want to disseminate ideas. Words can’t express how glad I am I never took their “advice”.
A few years ago, he [Ken Anderson, Intel ethnographer] conducted an ethnographic study of “temporality,” about the perception of the passage and scarcity of time—noting how Americans he studied had come to perceive busy-ness and lack of time as a marker of well-being. “We found that in social interaction, virtually everyone would claim to be ‘busy,’ and that everyone close to them would be ‘busy’ too,” he told me. But in fact, coordinated studies of how these people used technology suggested that when they used their computers, they tended to do work only in short bursts of a few minutes at a time, with the rest of the time devoted to something other than what we might identify as work. “We were designing computers, and the spec at the time was to use the computer to the max for two hours,” Anderson says. “We had to make chips that would perform at that level. You don’t want them to overheat. But when we came back, we figured that we needed to rethink this, because people’s time is not quite what we imagine.” For a company that makes microchip processors, this discovery has had important consequences for how to engineer products—not only for users who constantly need high-powered computing for long durations, but for people who just think they do.
Graeme Wood, Anthropology Inc.
Speaks volumes about why social sciences are so important to development and engineering processes.
… test version of a data-mining tool in Delta’s offices, and he was surprised by the technology’s power to collect vast amounts of personal information using one start point. Jackson volunteered his Social Security number and watched the tool retrieve his address, the names of his neighbours, his wife’s name, and the date they were married, all from publicly available information. Some of the Delta employees had been test subjects already, and when his own personal information stated popping up for all to see, Jackson joked he’d seen enough. But the demo convinced him that the government had to have this capacity. Not because he wanted it. But because he was afraid he couldn’t do his job without it.
Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State
Marriage versus Ph.D illustration
I’m pretty sure I’ll lack the remorse after finishing. It’s actually surprising nice to know that I’m done with academe in a 6 months or so!
Frickin’ love this.
Reblog via &soweramble
This is also a pretty compelling argument for certain ideas in Open Culture.
Giving away and open-sourcing ideas has led to some of the greatest experiences of my life. It can be terrifying but it’s amazing to see what boomerangs back on you.
Powerful men may actually be the worst?:
As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.” … Sometimes they reach the level of stalking: One colleague had a high-profile member of Congress go out of his way to track down her cell-phone number, call and text repeatedly to tell her she was beautiful, offer to take her parents on a tour of the Capitol, and even invite her to go boating back home in his district.
This speaks depressing volumes about many individuals who are deeply invested in the political machinations of nation-states.
I’m being very careful not to generalize from this grieving experience. Someday other people close to me will die. It will not be like this. But this once, it can be and is like this, and I am grateful.
Along with all the multitudes of lessons to draw from Aaron’s life and death, I hope one can be an ongoing commitment to unconditional support for each other in times of great personal crisis.
The truth is, Aaron was very bad at asking for support. He didn’t want to be a burden on others. He believed he ought to be able to make it on his own. He demanded independence from those who loved him. He was eager to help anyone else, but to ask for help for himself was terrifying. That made his 2-year ordeal much harder in many ways.
I’ve learned what I believe are the right lessons from this, and I hope you all will as well. The world is often — though not always — naked and cold. Confronting it on our own is sometimes merely difficult, sometimes downright impossible. We have a responsibility to help each other through the hard times, and an equal responsibility to ask for help from each other.
I still think [Apple] should go back to Dropbox with a blank check and just ask how many zeros they need to put at the end to make it happen.
My friend Dave Zaffrann, practicing the art of Having a Decent Idea while lamenting iCloud’s future (via chartier)
I think that this is on the mark, in the sense that iCloud is gross and Apple needs to do better. I also hope it never comes to be, given how much I use Dropbox on non-Apple devices and products.
Excited Pixels