Category: Bookmark
March 22, 2016
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As PSA tests fall, will more men die of prostate cancer?
Physicians, scientists, and public health experts who long warned that PSA screening for prostate cancer is more harmful than helpful have finally gotten what they wanted: significantly fewer men are having the blood test today than in 2005, two studies reported on Tuesday. Now begins the crucial…
March 14, 2016
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The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker
The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Credit Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Map by Ziggymaj / Getty When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles…
March 6, 2016
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Spalding Gray’s Catastrophe – The New Yorker
What role did the car crash and the damage to his frontal lobes play in his decline? Credit Photograph by Noah Greenberg In July of 2003, my neurological colleague Orrin Devinsky and I were consulted by Spalding Gray, the actor and writer who was famous for his brilliant autobiographical monologues,…
February 26, 2016
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Inside Spotify’s Hunt for the Perfect Playlist
What kind of music do you listen to? Your answer is probably something like, “Oh, a little bit of everything.” Or maybe, “Anything but country and metal.” (And polka. Everybody hates polka.) The honest truth is, you probably don’t know. You just like good stuff, and leave it at that. If you use…
February 18, 2016
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The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t – The New York Times
O n July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service…
February 10, 2016
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The thing I wish I’d known about product development – Different Better Boo
Good product managers know what to build; great ones know what not to build. There are really four kinds of feature that we put in a product or service: Functional, acquisition, onboarding, and market development. If you’re building products, you usually have a list of features, which you…
February 2, 2016
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Why I Identify as Mammal – NYTimes.com
Arianna Vairo The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. How do you identify? In other words, what trait or aspect of your being is central to your idea of yourself, and your relationship to the world? The act of “identifying as” has…
January 25, 2016
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Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age
Stephen Chapman, a digital strategy manager at the Harvard Law library, stacked vacuum-sealed books on shelves after they had been scanned. Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the…
January 17, 2016
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The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses
How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses Soon, you’ll be able to go to the Olive Garden and order your fettuccine alfredo from a tablet mounted to the table. After paying, you’ll rate the server. Then you can use that tablet to hail an Uber driver , whom you’ll also rate, from one to…
January 9, 2016
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The Only Competitor That Matters – Inside Intercom
A clichéd piece of advice is to ignore your competitors. It’s universally agreed on, yet ask any founder how their competitors are doing and you’ll see it’s almost universally ignored. They’ll fly through a list of players providing commentary quicker than a sports announcer. The cost of any success…
January 1, 2016
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The Scientific Art of the Perfect Meal
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt / W. W. Norton Even the most elaborate cookbooks usually have pretty modest aims: to make us less forgetful or more adventurous. Some of the earliest recipe collections—like The Forme of Cury , a 14th-century scroll—were not much more than aids to memory, listing ingredients and…
November 27, 2014
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Be a Minimally Invasive Manager – Randy Komisar – Harvard Business Review
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. —Peter Drucker One of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to learn is that most of the time, the best thing they can do is get out of the way of the people actually doing the work. That’s the core tenant of what…
November 24, 2014
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The Magical iPad – stratēchery by Ben Thompson
This is part three in a series on last week’s iPad event. Part 1: Whither Liberal Arts? | Part 2: The Missing “Why” of the iPad | Part 3: The Magical iPad In The Missing “Why” of the iPad I wrote: Yesterday’s presentation covered the “What” and “How” of the iPad, but it had nothing about “Why.” Why…
November 21, 2014
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Users Know: Stop Making Users Explore
Often, entrepreneurs ask me something to the effect of, “What’s the best way to let new users explore my product?” My answer is almost always a variation of, “Stop it.” In order to be slightly more helpful, let’s look at why this is a terrible question. Users Don’t Care About Exploring Your Product…
November 18, 2014
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Mountain Equipment Co-op ditches the Mountain for the mainstream
(Illustration: Ryan Inzana) Careening down a steep, narrow, rocky trail amid the towering trees of North Vancouver’s Mount Fromme is not my idea of relaxing. But my guide, Jesse Macdonald, is convinced it will be fun. Terrifying and a bit nauseating, sure, but fun? The most hazardous thing I’ve…
November 15, 2014
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Adobe’s Subscription Model & Why Platform Owners Should Care | stratēchery by Ben Thompson
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Adobe’s announcement that all of their products will be solely available through Creative Cloud. No longer can you buy packaged version of Photoshop, for example, that are yours forever. Instead you can subscribe to different individual apps or suites.…
November 12, 2014
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Flat UI and Forms
This article is about two important four-letter words that start with “F”: “flat” and “form.”
Though some decry flat user interfaces as pure fashion, or the obvious response to skeuomorphic trends, many designers have embraced the flat approach because the reduction in visual styling (such as…
November 9, 2014
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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food – NYTimes.com
Grant Cornett for The New York Times On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills…
November 6, 2014
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On Being Good: the Secular Virtues – Alain de Botton
Once we’re over about 12 years old, we’re seldom encouraged to be nice. We’re expected to make efforts in all kinds of areas (chiefly around work), but the idea of expending energy thinking about, and then practicing the art of kindness sounds bizarre, even eerie. The notion of trying to be a ‘good…
November 3, 2014
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Be Unapologetically Focused: Why Having a Great Strategy Matters
Leadership Focusing Four questions to make sure we’re focused in a resource-constrained world. 0 We will never have enough time or resources to solve all the problems we want to solve. To be successful, we need to focus, and that’s why great organizations have strategies. S trategy is a chronically…
October 31, 2014
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Understanding Fairness is the Key to Keeping Customers – N. Taylor Thompson – Harvard Business Review
Remember Netflix — with the DVDs that came in the mail? In July 2011, Netflix decided to unbundle its streaming and DVD products. This move was textbook strategy. In fact, it is taught at HBS as an example of how economically informed decisions can benefit both company and customer. Textbook logic…
October 28, 2014
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Google Now: The Tip of A Very Long Spear | John Battelle’s Search Blog
Sharply observed, as always. RT @johnbattelle: Google Now: The Tip of A Very Long Spear http://t.co/klbBSwojk7
October 25, 2014
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Kirk Goldsberry introduces a new way to understand the NBA’s best scorers – Grantland
L eBron James is the best player in the world. That may be obvious to anyone who has watched basketball over the past few years, but for some reason it’s hard to find many statistics to support this claim. Back when Michael Jordan ruled the NBA, he would commonly lead the league in points per game;…
October 22, 2014
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The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government | IGP Blog
In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the…
October 19, 2014
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Why Most Startups Don’t ‘Get’ Press
"I can’t tell you how many times we’ve met with early-stage companies, and they start by telling us their big vision. They say, ‘This is what we’re about and what we want to change.’ But when we ask them what they actually do, they can’t tell us. If you can’t answer that question, don’t do anything…
October 16, 2014
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http://blog.chabris.com/2013/10/why-malcolm-gladwell-matters-and-why.html
Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer and perennial bestselling author, has a new book out. It’s called David and Goliath: Misfits, Underdogs, and the Art of Battling Giants. I reviewed it ( PDF ) in last weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. (Other reviews have appeared in The Atlantic,…
October 13, 2014
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Untold Riches: An Analysis Of Portal’s Level Design
Words by Hamish Todd. Portal has the best-designed first-person puzzles I’ve ever seen. They’re surprising, focused, and concise. They are also designed very perceptively, and we can learn a lot from looking at this perceptiveness. Read on for an analysis of Portal’s level design, and some lessons…
October 10, 2014
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10 Awesomely Tasteful Animated GIFs | Wired Design | Wired.com
Artists like Guillaume Kurkdjian are using animated GIFs to a somewhat unique end: creating tasteful (and sometimes commissioned) illustrations. Image: Guillaume Kurkdjian Rebecca Mock , a Brooklyn-based illustrator, is one of a handful of artists who have done GIF work for the New York Times.…
October 7, 2014
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The Rookie Product Manager — Trial and error — Medium
I’ve been a product manager for two months and I still feel like I’m walking out of the dugout everyday and on to the field wondering how the heck I got here.
Back in August, after six years of doing marketing and communications for OpenSRS and 15 years in film and television before that, I took on…
October 4, 2014
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Aligning your team through design principles
Charlton heston in the ten commandments Aligning your team through design principles How to spend less time discussing design and more time doing it. It’s easy for design discussions to devolve into three hour tangents of everyone needing their opinion to be heard. But as designers, we know that…