Category: Bookmark
November 17, 2016
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More Is More: Why the Paradox of Choice Might Be a Myth
It could be one of the most memorable economic studies of the last half century. Researchers presented an array of tasty jams and enticed shoppers to buy a jar. In one version, there were six varieties shown to shoppers. In another, there were 24 jams. The second, larger array attracted more…
November 9, 2016
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Using Spotify to measure the popularity of older music
Loading Timeless Music… Polygraph THE MOST TIMELESS SONGS OF ALL-TIME Using Spotify to measure the popularity of older music. This is a story about proving, with data, that No Diggity by Blackstreet is timeless. Until recently, it was impossible to measure the popularity of older music. Billboard…
November 1, 2016
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My Tablet Has Stickers — Learning By Shipping
My Tablet Has Stickers My tablet has stickers, with some room to spare. It also has several keyboards, waiting for a perfect one. Photo by author. When I received my new 9.7” iPad Pro I decided to break tablet tradition and personalize it with stickers, just as I’ve done on laptops (and my Surfaces)…
October 24, 2016
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Will we know extraterrestrial life when we see it?
Recognizing life on other worlds requires wiggle room in the definition of what it means to be alive By Tina Hesman Saey 12:00pm, April 18, 2016 LIFE ON MARS A Martian microbe, envisioned by planetary geologist Kathie Thomas-Keprta, would need a tough outer wall to withstand the elements and…
October 16, 2016
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Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.
TRANSLATIONS: 中文 (品玩) Lately, everyone’s talking about “conversational UI.” It’s the next big thing. But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It’s taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED , can do things traditional GUIs can’t. Matt Hartman equates…
October 8, 2016
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Is “the Hum” a Scientific Fact or a Mass Delusion?
Sue Taylor first started hearing it at night in 2009. A retired psychiatric nurse, Taylor lives in Roslin, Scotland, a small village seven miles outside of Edinburgh. “A thick, low hum,” is how she described it, something “permeating the entire house,” keeping her awake. At first she thought it was…
September 30, 2016
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Sine Cosine Tangent
Credit Design by Abbott Miller He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms,…
September 22, 2016
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Sorry Not Sorry: The Many Names for Non-Apologies
Being carved in wood indicates nothing about the sincerity of an apology. Pixabay, modified by Gretchen McCulloch This week’s 14-tweet " apology, of sorts " from Uber’s Travis Kalanick is the latest reminder of public figures’ unhappy habit of putting their foot in it. It’s a familiar news cycle…
September 14, 2016
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The Woman Who Co-founded Zipcar Is Now Building ‘an Internet of Moving Things’
The sharing economy has changed the way we rent cars, and if Robin Chase has anything to say about it, it will soon change the way we use our phones and computers. Chase, cofounder and former CEO of Zipcar, is credited with helping create this new business model, which has since spawned the likes of…
September 6, 2016
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How Your Brain Decides Without You – Issue 19: Illusions – Nautilus
P rinceton’s Palmer Field, 1951. An autumn classic matching the unbeaten Tigers, with star tailback Dick Kazmaier—a gifted passer, runner, and punter who would capture a record number of votes to win the Heisman Trophy—against rival Dartmouth. Princeton prevailed over Big Green in the…
August 29, 2016
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Five Questions for Steven Pinker – Undark
T he Undark Five — that would be five questions that we put to researchers who are influential, provocative, sometimes controversial — premiers this month with Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker . Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology, where he conducts…
August 21, 2016
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Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
According to medieval medicine, laziness is caused by a build-up of phlegm in the body. The reason? Phlegm is a viscous substance. Its oozing motion is analogous to a sluggish disposition. The phlegm theory has more problems than just a few factual errors. After all, suppose you had a beaker of…
August 13, 2016
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Why I Favor Jobs-to-be-Done Over User Personas
I like a good user persona. Figuring out the would-be customer, learning their demographics, and making educated guesses about what might affect their willingness or unwillingness to buy a product or service is fun. User personas are a tool built on a mashup of attributes and assumptions. Depending…
August 5, 2016
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An Algorithm For An Automated Meritocracy at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics
A Guest Post by Bennett Haselton A 2006 study by Matthew Salganik and his co-researchers at Princeton suggests that a huge amount of effort is wasted in many different areas of human endeavor, and the resulting outcomes are far less than optimal — but that there is a simple algorithm that could fix…
July 28, 2016
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What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’ – NYTimes.com
Illustration by Andrew Rae Donald Trump loves the word ‘‘deal.’’ The book he released with a co-writer in 1987 to summarize his views of the world was called, of course, ‘‘The Art of the Deal.’’ His view of trade with China is summarized in this quotation from his speech announcing his candidacy for…
July 20, 2016
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Unlocking our future past – Solve for Interesting
Recently, a man took his GoPro for a walk with a Neural Network . The program captioned what it saw: bikes, faces, skateboards. Boy, did it like the skateboards. We’re at a critical juncture in computers’ ability to understand the real world. Not just to describe it, as in the video above, but to…
July 12, 2016
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All about Network Effects – Andreessen Horowitz
Network effects. It’s one of the most important concepts for business in general and especially for tech businesses, as it’s the key dynamic behind many successful software-based companies. Understanding network effects not only helps build better products, but it helps build moats and protect…
July 4, 2016
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DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how AI will shape the future
Beating Go was just the start — DeepMind has designs on healthcare, robots, and your phone DeepMind’s stunning victories over Go legend Lee Se-dol have stoked excitement over artificial intelligence’s potential more than any event in recent memory. But the Google subsidiary’s AlphaGo program is far…
June 26, 2016
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On chat as interface – Solve for Interesting
There’s been a lot of talk lately about chat as an interface (something Dan Grover’s h it on first.) It’s fueled by the rapid adoption of Slack, and announcements that other companies, from Wechat to Facebook to Kik, are rolling out bots and opening APIs to let algorithms join us in chatrooms.…
June 18, 2016
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What’s Next in Computing?
What’s Next in Computing? The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and…
June 10, 2016
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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
L ike most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or…
June 2, 2016
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I Spent the Last 6 Months Planning My Online Death
When my friend Heather committed suicide in 2014, she left in her absence a heap of digital remains. She had deleted her Facebook account, but left up her Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter. These surviving versions of her—respectively whimsical, industrious and absurd—were like ghosts that haunted the…
May 25, 2016
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Breakthrough DNA Editor Borne of Bacteria | Quanta Magazine
On a November evening last year, Jennifer Doudna put on a stylish black evening gown and headed to Hangar One, a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center that was constructed in 1932 to house dirigibles. Under the looming arches of the hangar, Doudna mingled with celebrities like Benedict…
May 17, 2016
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Inside the Plan to Pull Sprint Out of Its Death Spiral
A Japanese billionaire and a Bolivian telecom vet think they know how to fix the ailing company. Marcelo Claure is a 6-foot-6-inch Bolivian who came to the U.S. 20 years ago and co-founded a company that sold mobile phones. Brightstar was based in Miami, where he partied with Jennifer Lopez and…
May 9, 2016
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How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name
Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of…
May 1, 2016
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Has DeepMind Really Passed Go? — Backchannel
DeepMind vs. the European champion of Go. Courtesy of DeepMind/Google. Go, Marvin Minsky, and the Chasm that AI Hasn’t Yet Crossed An expert in AI separates fact from hype in the wake of DeepMind’s victory over humans in the most challenging game of all In the very same week that Artificial…
April 23, 2016
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The Commercial Zen of Muji – The New Yorker
On its Facebook page, Muji describes its aim as creating “products that are really necessary in everyday life in the shapes that are really necessary.” Credit Photograph by Todd Heisler / The New York Times / Redux Last month, Muji, the Japanese life-style brand that sells household goods and…
April 15, 2016
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Kingdom by the SeaAmy Parker
I’m having a time. Love. Dolly Her Christian name being Dolores, her infant tongue could make nothing more explicit than Dodo. Dodo, she called herself, and then later, Dolly, and later still, there were other names. At home she was Lo. And she was both a doll and a haze during her teenaged years.…
April 7, 2016
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The Doomsday Invention
I. Omens Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is…
March 30, 2016
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Comcast’s data caps are ‘just low enough to punish streaming’
If you’re a cord cutter who lives in an area where Comcast has implemented its data caps and you constantly find yourself running up against your monthly limit, there may be a good reason for that. The Associated Press recently published an interesting report on Comcast’s plan to meter the Internet…