Mike Alexander takes inspiration from Chandoo to add shapes to his Excel dashboards. Not for the faint-of-heart.
Month: July 2013
My Life in Circles: Why Metadata is Incredibly Intimate [Article]
In light of NSA’s spying revelations, Matthew Harwood shows how incredibly intimate metadata really is:
Metadata, no matter what the detractors say, collected over time is an intimate repository of our lives–whom we love, whom we’re friends with, where we work, where we worship (or don’t), and whom we associate with politically. The right to privacy means our metadata shouldn’t be collected and analyzed without reasonable suspicion that we’ve done something wrong.
Riding the booster with enhanced sound [Video]
Ever wondered what does a rocket going up sound like? This video, created by NASA and sound designed by the amazing folks at Skywalker Sound, lets you rise 150,000 feet on a solid rocket booster, and then, after helping the space shuttle shoot into orbit, you (and the booster) tumble straight back to Earth. Keep those headphones on.
Principles of Creative Management [Article]
A peek into the creative life of advertising legend David Ogilvy:
If you ever find a man who is better than you are — hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself
His principles on morale are worth reading again.
The life of a royal born in the Internet Era [Article]
Charlie Stross writes science fiction – and explains the future that awaits the most recent addition to the UK’s royal family.
What is it going to be like to be the heir to the throne, aged ten and starting at a public school (that is, a very high-end private school) in 2023?
How do good ideas spread? [Article]
Atul Gawande finds out , in the New Yorker, using the different trajectories of anaesthesia & anti-septics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century:
In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.
Take the time to read through this thoughtful essay, with real-world examples that will make you pause & ponder.
Everything is rigged, & it ain’t no conspiracy [Article]
Matt Tabibi’s journalistic investigation discovers that the “too-big-to-jail” banks are up to more collusion.
..it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system…
How to value personal data [Article]
Ctrl-Shift has a very good article that explains why data is the currency that is poised to overshadow money, not for the sellers but for consumers.
A huge amount of data today – the data collected by companies’ web sites, Google search terms, Facebook postings etc – are provided by individuals for free. If something is ‘free’ does that mean it has no economic value?
What goes on when you’re not there [Video]
Exactly what happens when you’re not there can only be found out with a camera rolling
Words on Food by a master of both [Article]
Alexander Dumas on the three kinds of hunger, three kinds of gluttony & the perfect number of dinner guests. You won’t be disappointed! [via Brainpickings]