Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• 5 Habits Of People Who Never Stop Learning [huffingtonpost.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Many people claim to be a “lifetime learners,” and with good reason. Scientists have warned that you need to keep your brain active if you want to avoid mental decay. But some people seem to learn easier and faster than others. These smart people …

• Who Gets to Graduate? [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a cha…

• What a Modi government might mean for freedom of speech | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on Quartz:

  To a lover of democracy, the fervor surrounding the Indian election results is seductive. A record number of voters—the most in history, anywhere—have collectively pushed the frontier of Indian democracy forward but, …

• Working at the intersection of tech & art: An interview with concept designer Scott Robertson | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on VentureBeat:

  It is very common for products and technologies presented in science fiction and films to come into real life years later, like the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and touch screens in Minority…

• How online courses boost college completion but lower actual learning ( in 3 charts) | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on VentureBeat:

  The availability of online learning is doing some really strange things to California’s community college students: It’s dramatically increasing their persistence to a degree, but it’s lowering how often they fin…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Page not found | Things I grab, motley collection

  The purpose of education is in large part linked to its standing as a social science. Philosophers dating back to Socrates have linked education to a purpose beyond the individual, one where accrual of facts and training in skills is not the outco…

• U.S. military wants to teach robots how to make moral and ethical decisions [impactlab.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning, knowing right from wrong? Not yet. But the U.S. government is spending millions on developing machines that understand moral consequence.

  The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in gr…

• Germany generates 74% of power needs from renewable energy [impactlab.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Germany’s impressive streak of renewable energy milestones continues, with renewable energy generation surging to a record portion — nearly 75 percent — of the country’s overall electricity demand by midday last Sunday. With wind and solar in part…

• The homepage is dead, and the social web has won—even at the New York Times | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on Quartz:

  Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy . Here’s the very stark chart:

  That’s not necessarily a reflection of an…

• Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York…

• Ants Swarm Like Brains Think [nautil.us] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo, N.M. Long before the first rays of sun hit the desert floor, a group of patroller ants was already on the move. Th…

• Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left [jacobinmag.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes hi…

• The Sharing Economy Needs to Start Sharing Its Data Too [wired.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Every reservation is analyzed by Airbnb’s algorithm, which combs it for red flags — new listings that are signing up reservations at a suspicious clip; messages that include the term Western Union — and assigns it a trust score. If the trust score…

• Your wearable is selfish. But some are being used for social good | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that healthcare has emerged as a good space to meld wearable tech with social good. Some of the most popular wearables out there are wristbands that monitor heart rates and physical activity. Devices that …

• Meet Uruguay’s Pot-Legalizing, VW-Driving, Sandal-Wearing President [npr.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  As Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica likes to say, his personal story seems like the stuff of fiction.

  He was a leftist guerrilla who was imprisoned for more than a decade. He’s known for driving a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, wearing sandals to meeting…

• Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians [wired.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  This is the decade of the protest. The Arab Spring. The Occupy Movement. And now the student demonstrations in Taiwan.

  Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped…

• Robots Are Starting to Make Offshoring Less Attractive | Things I grab, motley collection

  Harvard Business Review:

  ” … Despite the doom and gloom, advances in robotics and associated technology are having a positive impact on local manufacturing and services and both sustaining and creating jobs. In developed economies, they have even…

• Would you work better if your boss didn’t care how you did it? | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  definition : “Results-Only Work Environment isn’t flex-time, it’s absolute freedom to work when and where you please. All you have to do is produce.”

  Originally posted on Financial Post | Business:

  In 2003, Cali Ressler and Jody Th…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• How we exchange is as important as what we exchange | Comment nous échangeons est aussi important que ce que nous échangeons | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  All departments in a company produce … something : technical documents, drawings, various kinds of notes, forms, you name it. What I’ve witnessed over a reasonable period of time is, once we’ve passed that just-a-couple-of-Excel-spre…

• We All Shamed Monica and Now It’s Time to Apologize | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on TIME:

  Ask any child of the 1990s, and she remembers – vividly – when she first heard about the Monica Lewinsky scandal (as well as the particular sex acts involved).

  I was 16, perched with a group of friends in the hallway o…

• In China, Personality Could Come Down to Rice Versus Wheat | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  pretty much like in this corner of the world difference is made on account of butter with or without salt ^_^

  Originally posted on TIME:

  In the mind of many Americans, China is a monolith of 1.3 billion people, all equally similar …

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Groups have a larger cognitive capacity than individuals | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  It has long been recognized that collective choice can improve accuracy by averaging out the random errors of inaccurate individual
  decisions [3]. The advantage we find here is different: rather than combining many essentially identi…

• Happy Birthday, BASIC | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on TechCrunch:

  Fifty years ago this month, in 1964, a computer programming language winked to life that changed the course of a generation. While many would point to the rise of Unix and other ubiquitous programming languages in…

• 4 Robots That Teach Children Science and Math in Engaging Ways [scientificamerican.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Robots can capture a child’s imagination like no other tool by creating a fun, physical learning process. With robots, kids learn programming via interactive play by moving a robot in various sequences and using intuitive, visual programming on a …

• How Helsinki Became the Most Successful Open-Data City in the World [theatlanticcities.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  HELSINKI, Finland — If there’s something you’d like to know about Helsinki, someone in the city administration most likely has the answer. For more than a century, this city has funded its own statistics bureaus to keep data on the population, bus…

• Changing The Economic Paradigm Through Developing Community Enterprises In Rural Areas [eurasiareview.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  There is an incidence of neglect and poverty throughout rural societies around the world. While urbanization is quickly taking place across the Earth, rural societies are very quickly slipping behind. This is not just a ‘developing country’ afflic…

• Beyond the Big and New: Innovating on Quality | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on Censemaking: The newest, biggest, shiny thing Innovation is a term commonly associated with ‘new’ and sparkly products and things, but that quest for the bigger and more shiny in what we do often obscures the true innovati…

• Couple design and build a mortgage free home for $33k [interestingengineering.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The house that you see here comes complete with two sitting rooms, a kitchen with a dining table, wood stove, plenty of storage and a bathroom. However what’s different about this small mortgage free home is that it is in fact very small, at jus…

• Fewer high school graduates enroll in college after graduation [impactlab.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The proportion of high school students in the U.S. who go on to college rose regularly for decades but now appears to be declining. Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in…

• Move over selfies … here come the dronies [theguardian.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Take an airborne robot minion and a hi-tech camera and what do you have? A “dronie”: a new form of self-shot aerial mini-video for online exhibitionists looking to create more drama than the average selfie can supply. The term was coined by Ale…

• Meet the Life Hackers [nytimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The Working Mind: Greg Smith, a Microsoft software designer, has his brain activity measured while he concentrates on a problem. Researchers are trying to discover the best moments to interrupt the modern office worker. (a paper published in … …

• Shifting the Meaning of Hierarchy to Community | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier: Still a long way to go until we really see hierarchies truly change from being authority-based to competence-based. Originally posted on On Web Strategy | Dion Hinchcliffe: Over the last year or so, a fascinating bow wave of inte…

• I miss the old blogosphere — we’ve gained a lot, but we’ve also lost something | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier: I guess my blog belongs to the ‘old blogosphere’ type. Originally posted on Gigaom: I should probably mention up front that this is going to sound like one of those “things were better in my day, young fella!” kind of discussions…

• New York Goes to War Against Airbnb for Disrupting Hotel Business [mashable.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  As far as the state of New York is concerned, most of Airbnb’s business is illegal. What had been a relatively civil legal proceeding spilled into the press this week when the rental startup and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman met i…

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