McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 30th Edition

• On Taxis and Rainbows. How not to anonymize data sets, in this case NYC taxi journeys.
• A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit. Really tempted to write a bot to track the number of jobs lost/created according to estate agent/regeneration press releases. Think it'll have to wait until I've more time.
• The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy. I wonder if this provides at least one vision of an alternate future in a serendipitous response to last week's Maximum Happy Imagination?
• Of Moonshots and Slingshots: Bringing Policy and Technology into Planetary Alignment "It's been a long time since any nation staked its national pride on exploring space, or, frankly, doing much of anything useful at all"
• In Deep. A wonderfully written account of a deep cave exploration expedition.
• The Disruption Machine. Another long read (like the caving link), this time an interesting critique of innovation and disruption.
• The coolest culture hack of all is not hacking your culture. Culture is too important to hack.
• Corrupt Personalization. A great article, with good concrete examples (from Facebook in this case) of how personalization can be a bad thing.

And a video to watch this week. Vinay Gupta setting out some plausible utopias:

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 23rd Edition

• UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance of residents’ Facebook and Google use. So, AIUI, the Government would need a warrant to read an email I send someone, but not to read a private message sent via Facebook or Twitter...
• Anne, Sue, Bob and Nigel too, a short story about privacy, politics and the press. Part of the reason the previous link is an important, and disgraceful revelation.
• Be Nice Or Leave.
• Maptime: Changing culture in geospatial tech learning, one meetup at a time. I've been wrangling OpenStreetMap data to produce laser-cutter files of late, so rather envious of beginners mapping groups in other cities.
• Six steps to better business digital of things. I do wonder if the field that "Pretend Office is one of the best companies in the field that it’s in" is writing strategy documents for the council. Or maybe some other local companies...
• The sun does not rise: How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science
• Maximum Happy Imagination. Matt Jones pointing out how all these visionaries who look to disrupt everything always seem to stop shy of disrupting the consumer-capitalism environment itself...

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 16th Edition

• We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow. This piece on surveillance technology could have been written today. However, it was actually written back in 2005!
• The art of asking: or, how to ask and get what you want.. This is something I still struggle with, especially when it's for important things like work. Go on, hire me to build you an interesting IoT device. (Always be practising ;-)
• And via that last link, also Creative People Say No. I always find that tricky to balance, particularly while trying to grow a culture, which puts me more in the manager role where you have to be available to help people...
• Industry clusters: The modern-day snake oil. It's all about the people. As ever. Which makes it trickier to engage with. (But I don't think it's impossible. Anyone want to pay me to work up my ideas into an alternate strategy?)
• Leila Johnston is interviewed by Cory Doctorow. Lots of good thinking about tech, art and capitalism (but much more readable than I've just made it sound!)
• Consumers, users, people, mammals. Russell doing his usual sterling job of clarifying things that you hadn't spotted needing clarification until he showed you.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 9th Edition

• Nobody Goes to Art School to Make Money, so Fuck Off. "In other words, we went to this art school because we too are interested in programming and making, but disagree with the rest of what we see in the tech industry now."
• The Good, the Normal and the Everyday. Thought-provoking ruminations on craft, democratized design and making.
• Reality Distortion Field. There are no short cuts, just enjoy the work and get on with it.
• Designing the Good Life: The Ethics of User Experience Design. Lots to chew on here, about what work you undertake. Not just applicable to designers.
• Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World. And once you've read the slides in the previous link, go watch this.
• Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7. "The need not to know yourself. Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think, I’m agoraphobic, I’m a shy person, whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge." (there are more bits I could quote, but that was the one that drew me in initially)

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 2nd Edition

• The Internet With A Human Face - Beyond Tellerand 2014 Conference Talk. If you only read one link on the Internet this week, make it this one from Maciej Ceglowski.
• Michael Bierut on Massimo Vignelli, 1931-2014.
• Gradual Engagement between Digital Devices as a Function of Proximity: From Awareness to Progressive Reveal to Information Transfer. An interesting look at how to transfer content between devices.
• Diary of a Corporate Sellout. Although we didn't have the wider community, given that STNC wrote web browsers for OEMs to ship on their mobile phones, lots of this rings true for my experience when we became part of Microsoft. And that's a big part of why MCQN Ltd hasn't ever looked for funding.
• I will not comment on the attendant irony. Language used to conceal rather than communicate.
• and a robot pony. Nick Sweeney doing an excellent job of bringing some clarity to the OMG-Google-self-driving-car debate.