Hello All
Great links from the week. Programming Stacks, Design, Privacy, Leadership, Mars, Fuchsia, Uber, and the Echo Show. As always, the most important trends through all center around information discovery, design, and collaboration. Buzz Aldrin’s interview provides some great commentary on shifting goals for the sake of prioritization and success. For those of you in and around NYC, the ITP Spring Show runs on the 16th and 17th. A great exhibition of the recently possible.
https://itp.nyu.edu/shows/spring2017/show/
Have a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend.
M
1. New Technology Is Built on a ‘Stack.’ Is That the Best Way to Understand Everything Else, Too?
“In 1990, when computers were still merely in the process of taking over the world, John Daugman, a computer scientist and researcher at Harvard University, published an article titled “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory,” noting a habit he had observed among his peers. “Invariably,” he wrote, “the explanatory metaphors of a given era incorporate the devices and the spectacles of the day.” In other words: We describe everything as if it were technology.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/new-technology-is-built-on-a-stack-is-that-the-best-way-to-understand-everything-else-too.html
2. How Privacy Became a Commodity for the Rich and Powerful
“Recently I handed over the keys to my email account to a service that promised to turn my spam-bloated inbox into a sparkling model of efficiency in just a few clicks. Unroll.me’s method of instant unsubscribing from newsletters and junk mail was “trusted by millions of happy users,” the site said, among them the “Scandal” actor Joshua Malina, who tweeted in 2014: “Your inbox will sing!” Plus, it was free. When a privacy policy popped up, I swatted away the legalese and tapped “continue.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-privacy-became-a-commodity-for-the-rich-and-powerful.html
3. The New Design Leader Emphasizes Leadership
“Yet as we learn more about the current cohort of design leaders — the ones who are making their organizations more competitive through design — we find they are nothing like this mythical ideal super-designer. Their superpowers aren’t turning everything they touch into beautiful works to be idolized. Instead, they focus more on leadership than on design. That isn’t to say they ignore design, rather that great design is the touchstone by which they bring everyone together.”
https://medium.com/ux-advantage/the-new-design-leader-emphasizes-leadership-e23fdb482b96
4. Ten Things I Learned Working at the World’s Largest Company
“The vendor rooms were busy; there was energy, people scurrying up and down the hallway carrying laptops and notebooks. This scene began my journey of working at the world’s largest company, Walmart.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ten-things-i-learned-working-worlds-largest-company-kaye-cullum
5. Buzz Aldrin To NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP To Reach Mars (space.com)
“If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said. “We must retire the ISS as soon as possible,” the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C.”
http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html
6. ITP Spring Show 2017!
“A two day exhibition of creative interactive projects by the graduate students of ITP.”
Tuesday, May 16, 5-9pm
Wednesday, May 17, 4-8pm
721 Broadway New York, NY 10003
https://itp.nyu.edu/shows/spring2017/show/
7. Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI
“Taking a look at Google’s mysterious third operating system.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/
8. Masters of Scale (from Dan)
“In the new podcast Masters of Scale, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman explores his philosophy on how to scale a business – and at Entrepreneur.com, entrepreneurs are responding with their own ideas and experiences on our hub.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/masters-of-scale
9. In Silicon Valley, a Voice of Caution Guides a High-Flying Uber
“Travis Kalanick, the famously combative chief executive of Uber, took the stage at a Vanity Fair conference in San Francisco last October and quickly faced a prickly question. Why all the blunders at the company, Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, asked. And had Mr. Kalanick learned anything?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/technology/bill-gurley-uber-travis-kalanick-silicon-valley.html
10. Amazon Reveals $230 Touchscreen ‘Echo Show’ Launching in June
“The Echo Show is a smart home speaker system that has all of the features of the basic Echo system with an additional 7-inch touchscreen. With the addition of a touchscreen, Amazon said that users will be able to watch video flash briefings and YouTube, see music lyrics, check on security cameras, swipe through photos, view weather forecasts, make to-do and shopping lists, and more. Far-field voice recognition, eight microphones, beam-forming technology, and noise cancellation allow users to be heard from anywhere in the room, as well as over loud music coming from the Echo Show itself.”
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/05/09/amazon-echo-show-june/
11. Introducing Echo Show
“Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Watch video flash briefings and YouTube, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and more. All hands-free—just ask.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J24C0TI
