New Now Know How
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“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.” —The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
Something to keep in mind with all the teeth-gnashing over the Flickr re-design (which I quite like) and the Tumblr acquisition.
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A/B, A Manifesto (on critical design) –– by Dunne & Raby
Yes to all of this except for “design as medium” because I distrust _X as Y_ constructions.
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Chevy Vega GT
Look, I know the Vega is a joke. But from here in the antipodes all I see is a Torana-that-never-was that needs a honking great V8 and a ducktail spoiler.
/via The ‘Pedia.
The Brown Car Blog is back. With a vengeance.
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“They want everything; their ambition is boundless.” -
Viral James Mattis Email About Reading In the first 4th year industrial design class of the year, my colleague always asks the students if they read any books over the year break. Any books at all. Maybe 30-50% have. Then she asks if they’ve read fiction over the break. Very few.
Hmmm…
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“It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” -
Early career research: the power of 'no' | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional Some 20 years before I visited Brazil, paleontologist Jack Homer looked at his own work patterns, building a model based on differential equations to explain how working long and erratic hours led to an overall decrease in productivity. The story I heard was that Homer was supposed to be on a summer break and suffering from burnout when he did the work. So not only did Homer show us that putting too many things on your to-do list is bad for productivity, he is also anecdotal evidence that researchers were workaholics long before the growth of the publish-or-perish mentality.
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Apprentice air traffic controllers train with model aircraft at Andrews Air Base in Maryland, March 1957.
Photograph by Robert F. Sisson and Donald McBain, National Geographic -
That Big Data Debate In Full
“Big Data doesn’t work!” (post by somebody who has never worked with Big Data.)
“No, Big Data is awesome, buy it!” (post by CEO of Big Data company)
They both make excellent points.
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BMJ Group blogs: Richard Smith: The irrationality of the REF What this means is that universities have effectively outsourced to journals and publishers the function of assessing academic quality, an activity that many would consider core to academia.
Waiting around for the bureaucratic machine of universities to work that out is going to take a while…
