Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Invisibles at Work, Take a Bow! [nextavenue.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Who Are the Invisibles?

  “They’re highly skilled professionals. I’m not talking about the factory worker toiling away anonymously or the person who’s cleaning the hotel room. They’re important too,” says Zweig. “But what I wanted to focus on were …

• A Century Ago In Sarajevo: A Plot, A Farce And A Fateful Shot [NPR.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was fired a hundred years ago this weekend.

  The assassination in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, triggered World War I and changed the course of the 20th century. The consequences of th…

• Free exchange: Wealth by degrees [Economist.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  IS A university degree a good investment? Many potential students are asking the question, especially in countries where the price of a degree is rising, as a result of falling government subsidies. Recent research suggests that the conventional w…

• David Ball’s Translation of ‘Diary of the Dark Years’ – [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  If Jean Guéhenno had never existed, France would surely have had to invent him. A model writer and intellectual who neither collaborated nor accommodated the enemy, he refused to publish a single word as long as his country was under Nazi control….

• Trading the yuan: Yuawn [economist.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  IF HEADLINES translated into trading volumes, the yuan would be well on its way to dominating the world’s currency markets. It once again graced front pages this week after moves to lift its status in London, the world’s biggest foreign-exchange m…

• How Inherited Wealth Helps the Economy – [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Is inherited wealth making a comeback?

  Yes, says Thomas Piketty, author of the best seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Inherited wealth has always been with us, of course, but Mr. Piketty believes that its importance is increasing. He …

• The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool [theguardian.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  This lack of visual disparity has probably led to societys fondness for hipster-bashing. As Alex Miller, UK editor-in-chief of Vice, explains: “I couldnt define a hipster. I guess its The Other. But as a general term its blown up because people fi…

• DIY labs are an exciting alternative to university science research [theguardian.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Laden with institutional bureaucracy and hampered by protracted funding and publishing systems, the juggernaut of university research is slow to change direction. In an era of rapid global change, are universities really the best places for progre…

• Comfy – a new app that solves the No. 1 complaint about offices [impactlab.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  An app called Comfy is trying to put temperature control back in the hands of employees. Tell the app that you’re too warm or cold, and it automatically sends a blast of air directly to your part of the office. Over time, the system learns what te…

• Why Audiences Hate Hard News—and Love Pretending Otherwise [theatlantic.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Ask audiences what they want, and theyll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and theyll mostly eat candy.

  Audiences are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes. At the Aspen Ideas Festival last …

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Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Figure 1 Is The Instagram For Doctors – [businessinsider.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Dr. Josh Landy noticed a trend among doctors. They seemed to be texting each other photos in order to communicate quickly.

  It could be sending a photo to a doctor who isnt in the hospital at the moment or to a physicians assistant to give them ba…

• More Than 50 Million People Are Displaced, the Highest Number Ever Recorded | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on TIME:

  The global population of people who were forced to flee their homes has exceeded 50 million­­, according to the United Nations — levels not seen since comprehensive record-keeping began in 1989.

  The United Nations High…

• Does Culture Matter for Economic Growth? | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on The Growth Economics Blog:

  There’s been an increasing number of papers concerned with culture and its relationship to economic growth. I happened to just see this working paper by Di Tella and MacCulloch (2014), but the idea …

• Where over half of the world’s exports are going in one elegant chart | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on Quartz:

  Lines on the edge of the circle (directly underneath the country’s name) indicates total imports and exports for that country (in US$ billion) in 2013. The graphic represents 60% of total global exports.

  Quartz has a…

• La science face au défi de la transparence [lesechos.fr] | Things I grab, motley collection

  En mars, des astrophysiciens de Harvard annonçaient avoir détecté des traces dondes gravitationnelles formées immédiatement après le big bang. La mise en ligne des résultats et de lensemble des données permit à des dizaines déquipes à travers le m…

• Starbucks to Provide Free College Education to Thousands of Workers – [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on …

• 40 Years On, Woodward And Bernstein Recall Reporting On Watergate [npr.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Many people know All the Presidents Men as a film: a hit movie about the two young reporters who cracked the Watergate conspiracy. Its the only blockbuster that centers on two guys making phone calls, organizing paper notes and meeting a source ca…

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Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• 95% of all the additional national income in the U.S. goes to the top 1%, that’s not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that’s a fact. [alternet.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that “we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment” in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when “95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery bega…

• Twitter’s executive turmoil masks a deeper problem: Confusion over what Twitter wants to be | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  “… the road to short-term market acceptance can also be the road to long-term irrelevance …”

  Originally posted on Gigaom:

  Fans of Silicon Valley’s version of “Game of Thrones” got a front-row seat to a shake-up in Twitter’s executi…

• How Yammer is killing enterprise social networking [techrepublic.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  When approaching this retail franchise scenario from a technology implementation standpoint, the enterprise social networking tools may need to be modified or customized to ensure managers use the systems effectively. In concept, all social busine…

• Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years [npr.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Parents, teachers and cheesy after-school specials have long tried to convince kids that being cool and popular isnt all that its cracked up to be. Now scientists are chiming in as well.

  Dating, flouting authority and surrounding yourself with go…

• Here are the 31 countries Google Maps won’t draw borders around | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  In an email to Quartz a Google spokesperson said the company is “committed to providing our users with the richest, most up-to-date maps possible,” and that it uses multiple resources to decide how to depict political areas.

  Origina…

• Moving Beyond MOOCs: Experiments in Non-traditional Product Education by Julia Wilkowski [learningsolutionsmag.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The engineering education team’s staff meeting on May 2, 2012 began like any other: reports of new engineer orientation, computer science outreach efforts, and an updated mission statement: “To provide Google engineers and the world with relevant …

• A wiki as alternative to current Quality document structure | Things I grab, motley collection

  Quality is one my few trades. I started out in Metrology then progressed into (after I majored in) Quality. Over the last, what, 10 years I specialized increating and maintaining databases while remaining in Quality. I’ve had the chance to follow …

• Downton Abbey Craze Serves Up A Demand For Butlers [npr.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Butlers in American pop culture tend to provide comic relief — think The Fresh Prince of Bel-Airor The Birdcage. Or, like Batman’s Alfred, the butler is more of a friend than an employee.

  But one show has brought back the classic butler, with a v…

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Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Productivity And The Education Delusion | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on TechCrunch:

  There is a constant tension about education in labor economics these days. On one hand, education is strongly correlated with income and employability. Workers with college degrees, or even just some university-le…

• Antisocial networks: how to avoid Facebook friends and irritate people [theguardian.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Think that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk are out of control, and you would like to regain some of the privacy you once enjoyed? Help may be at hand in the form of “antisocial networking” – a clutch of new apps and websites designed to…

• The real threat to Europe isn’t a fascist revival, it’s the end of politics | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  If there is a single overarching tendency to emerge from the European polls it is therefore not the widely taunted “revival of fascism,” but rather a withering of the traditional “left versus right” distinction amongst political part…

• How to Conquer the Tipping Point in Employee Engagement (INFOGRAPHIC) [theundercoverrecruiter.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

   

  How to Conquer the Tipping Point in Employee Engagement [INFOGRAPHIC].

  Filed under: Employee, engagement, people, work Tagged: employee, Engagement, work

• Economie du partage et amitié ne font pas bon ménage – leJDD.fr

  Airbnb ou KissKissBankBank peuvent-ils nuire à nos amitiés?http://t.co/h8UleNmCsH

• Is Internal Crowdfunding in the Enterprise Set to Take Off? [resultsfromcrowds.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  A number of companies are experimenting with internal crowdfunding.  This has the potential to be a successful way to spark innovation and evaluate employee-generated ideas.

  Given the attention that crowdfunding and Kickstarter have had in the me…

• Tech Titans on Income Inequality and Their “Stingy, Stingy” Industry [recode.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Marc Benioff, the philanthropist and billionaire founder of Salesforce, may have been the angriest man at last week’s Code Conference, held at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

  Onstage, Benioff launched into a fervent monologue, …

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Weekly blog posts (weekly)

• Who Made That French Press? [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  “From the beginning, the French devoted more attention than any other people to coffee brewing,” William Harrison Ukers wrote in “All About Coffee,” published in 1922. The first French coffee maker appeared around 1800, Ukers claimed, and the firs…

• Why is wave power so far behind wind and solar? [treehugger.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  its possible to imagine a future where wave power is cost-effective and widely deployed as one more leg to the renewable stool, but its an uphill battle. I hope that engineers can figure it out, because we need all the options we can get to clean …

• Begrudgingly, Google Offers a Form for People Who Want to Be Forgotten [recode.net] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Removing a link in Google’s search results, it should be noted, does not actually remove the page from the Internet. The search giant is worried that the ability to do so could be abused, for instance, by people who did not like the way they were …

• Going Beyond ‘Bolt-On’ Digital Transformation | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  “Bolt-On Digital Transformation” is not enough, here’s why.

  Originally posted on On Web Strategy | Dion Hinchcliffe:

  Much has been made recently of the imperative to fully transition our businesses into the modern digital world. It…

• Ill Tell You A Secret: Anonymous Apps Matter [readwrite.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Until recently, I kept all my secrets to myself.Sometimes I want to share my thoughts online, but find them too personal for Twitter, and not necessarily appropriate for Facebook. I want to share these thoughts anonymously, either because they’re …

• How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm [spectrum.ieee.org] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Imagine looking out over Tokyo Bay from high above and seeing a man-made island in the harbor, 3 kilometers long. A massive net is stretched over the island and studded with 5 billion tiny rectifying antennas, which convert microwave energy into D…

• Why Germany Dominates the U.S. in Innovation | Things I grab, motley collection

  Originally posted on HBR Blog Network – Harvard Business Review:

  Reading the headlines, you might think that the most urgent question about national success in innovation and growth is whether the U.S. or China should get the gold medal. The trut…

• Why Programming is a Part-Time Job: Breaks Make You More Productive [bufferapp.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  I work from home. Which is to say ,I don’t have an office to go to. What I do have are a lot of pubs, most of which are pretty quiet during the day. And I have evolved a routine that gets me out of the house, gets me fresh air, keeps me productive…

• Habits of highly effective digital enterprises [mckinsey.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The skills required for digital transformation probably can’t be groomed entirely from within. Leadership teams must be realistic about the collective ability of their existing workforce. Leading companies frequently look to other industries to at…

• Transportation platform RideScout isn’t scared of Google. Maybe it should be | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  “Google could beat us. But we’re just hoping to go faster than they are,” Kopser admits.

  Is systematically killing other people’s innovations good for business ?

  Originally posted on PandoDaily:

  It’s never a fun moment for a start…

• TL;DR = Too Long; Didn’t Read. Otherwise said : Faking Cultural Literacy [NYTimes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  It’s not lying, exactly, when we nod knowingly at a cocktail party or over drinks when a colleague mentions a movie or book that we have not actually seen or read, nor even read a review of. There is a very good chance that our conversational part…

• How big data is transforming public services – expert views [theguardian.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  What is big data?

  It’s a bit of a misnomer: “Ex-Guardian writer Simon Rogers once said, ‘Big data is data that is one bit too much for you to be comfortable’, and this is probably the best definition I’ve read.

  “The volume of data is not irrelev…

• MT Francis prays at the Western Wall in ‘s Old

  tags: Pope Jerusalem

  MT @AFP #Pope Francis prays at the Western Wall in #Jerusalem ‘s Old City, on the final day of his Middle East tour http://t.co/d4ESJBvyMN

• Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding Part 1: What is Crowdfunding and Why Do It? [intelligenthq.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Crowdfunding is a relatively new approach to raising money for a project, new business or cause online via specific websites that have been set up for this process. Specifically it involves you finding a crowd to help you fund your project. This m…

• Free Speech [xkcd.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally il…

• Algorithms That Dominate Our World ? [io9.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others — and these ten are the most si…

• Giants behaving badly: Google, Facebook and Amazon show us the downside of monopolies and black-box algorithms | Things I grab, motley collection

  plerudulier:

  Who said “don’t do evil” again ?

  Originally posted on Gigaom:

  The internet is a wondrous thing — a limitless universe of content and products and information, all of which can be summoned up from the comfort of a chair or the palm …

• Sorry, Mom and Dad: The Kids Aren’t Moving Out Yet [forbes.com] | Things I grab, motley collection

  Chief Economist at Trulia TRLA +3.56% takes a close look at the most important measure of the housing recovery: household formation. The latest population data show that young adults are still living with their parents — even if they have jobs.

  D…

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