The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
May 23, 2016
Interesting Things on the Internet: May 23rd 2016
- Recipe for disaster. Some background to the creation of the BBC's online recipe database and thoughts about how/why the BBC is failing to help society debate/frame such non-commercial endeavours.
- Redefining capitalism. Some interesting thoughts on how better to define growth and new directions for something better than capitalism.
- ANA. Lovely, if rather dystopic, short film about the robot future.
- Jane Jacobs: City Limits. (Link to) An interesting film of urbanist Jane Jacobs and accompanying thoughts on how it translates to modern day. (Jane Jacobs previously on this blog)
- Jane Jacobs: Godmother of the American City. And another, great interview with Jane Jacobs. "There is a sameness—this is one of the things that is boring people, this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don’t get new products and services out of sameness. Now, the Americans haven’t gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn’t opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore."
- How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist. Beware the dark patterns of design.
- Guide to Computing. Computers used to be so colourful! Did the designers stop offering us anything adventurous or did we all start only buying what-are-perceive-as-inoffensive options and bring this upon ourselves?
- Thoughts about decoupling PGP and email clients. Good to see someone fixing existing systems rather than deciding the only way is to build yet-another-competing-silo because it's easier. Looking forward to being a user of the system Paul builds.
- Eye Spy, a Year of Tracking. Great to see the BBC work on privacy, etc. "No-one in the UK should be speculatively accumulating raw data, particularly without notifying people they are doing it."
May 02, 2016
Interesting Things on the Internet: May 2nd 2016
- Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At "You do not need a smartwatch to tell you exactly how many messages you are never going to reply to."
- How the Hillsborough inquest jury ruled on the 14 key questions. I don't have any stories to relate, but as a Liverpool FC fan - and particularly since being back living in the city - this has been part of the background of how life is for my entire adult life. I was 14 when the disaster happened. The extent of the cover-up and smear campaign is disgraceful.