December 2011
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Liquidspace: Finding A Space To Work Wherever And...
I attended the GigaOM Net:Work conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and met some of the founders of Liquidspace, a new start-up building something like AirBNB for coworking spaces:
LiquidSpace is an application that connects people seeking workspace with venues that have space to share. High-end business centers, hip startup co-working spaces, hotels, and private spaces are listed on...
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Futurity.org – Aging musicians have sharp brains →
via Emory
Older musicians perform better on cognitive tests than individuals who did not play an instrument, according to a new study published in the April issue of Neuropsychology.
While much research has been done to determine the cognitive benefits of musical activity by children, this is the first study to examine whether those benefits can extend across a lifetime.
“Musical activity...
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Five Best Wednesday Columns - Eric Randall via The... →
Dana Milbank does the unimaginable: goes back and checks all prognostications.
Eric Randall, Five Best Wednesday Columns via The Atlantic Wire
Dana Milbank in The Washington Post on political punditry In 2011, while speaking on television, Dana Milbank predicted Rick Perry would perform well in debates, Newt Gingrich’s campaign was finished, and Michele Bachmann was a...
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“@stoweboyd: We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new...”
– December 30, 2011 at 05:08AM via http://bit.ly/t7ltsR
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The End Of An Age, Or The End Of The Beginning?
Jeremiah Owyang wants to declare the end of the golden age of tech blogging, or, even more portentously, he says
The tech blogosphere, as we know it, is over.
This could be interpreted in a number of ways, but at face value — and leaving aside for the moment the specifics of his argument — I agree. The ‘blogosphere’ — that mid ’00s concept of a community of...
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“I’m no more intelligent than the next guy. I’m just more curious.”
– Albert Einstein
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Infinite Stupidity - Mark Pagel via Edge →
Mark Pagel is Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind.
I want this book.
Mark Pagel via Edge
One of the first things to be...
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“Someday all of our technology will learn to emotionally manipulate us. Your...”
– - Scott Adams
(via alysonsmediadiet:notational)
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A Prediction: IBM and Microsoft
Roughly equal companies in terms of market cap — $220B — but with IBM’s enterprise value about $50B, I am predicting a merger of IBM and Microsoft with IBM leading the merged company, Ballmer retiring, and Microsoft being run — at least for a while — as a branded line of business in the twice as large, new IBM.
The fit of Microsoft’s enterprise solutions...
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The Windows Phone Problem In Three Words: Way Too... →
I can reduce a way-overlong post by Paris Lemon about what’s wrong with the Microsoft Phone:
Too late, not an order of magnitude better.
The iPhone was easily an order-of-magnitude better that the shit phones we all tolerated when it launched. Microsoft had years to come up with something awesome, and it’s ok. Which means death, today.
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Now We Are Six - The Hormone Surge of Middle... →
Middle childhood is where the social is put into the social animal:
Natalie Angier via NYTimes.com
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practicing their fine motor skills. And because...
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City Parks, Like Madrid Río, Stand Where Highways... →
Cities are undoing the ugliness, noise, and inhumanity of freeways:
Michael Kimmelman via NYTimes.com
All around the world, highways are being torn down and waterfronts reclaimed; decades of thinking about cars and cities reversed; new public spaces created.
Most famously, in beauty-mad San Francisco, the 1989 earthquake overcame years of entrenched thinking: the Embarcadero Freeway was...
Anonymous asked: are you aware of any initiative using Social Network and smartphones to promote physical activity ? Jean-Sebastien, Quebec Canada
jeannefrancoise asked: Why do you choose a blur picture for your profile?
palmersmedic-deactivated2012082 asked: Hello. I'm the original poster of the Ghost Subculture concept. Just been keeping an eye on where it spreads and I saw your website and wanted to saw I'm flattered that you in particular liked the idea enough to put it up.
sboyar asked: just wondering .. are you a resident of Stowe VT?
bookhling asked: I can't figure out your blog interface! How can I follow you? (or is it difficult to find/not there on purpose?)
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Destroying Detroit (in Order to Save It) - Howie... →
What can we learn from destroying Detroit?
Howie Khan via CQ
These days everyone in Detroit is talking like an urban planner. You can’t spend even a day driving through the city and not think in terms of land use, redevelopment, and urban identity. Entire neighborhoods, people gone and houses razed, are on their way to becoming prairies. The neo-Gothic shell of Cass Tech High School,...
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“According to the Center for an Urban Future, “freelance businesses has...”
– Anthony Townsend, Art as Personal Business in the City: Brooklyn’s Creative Freelance Economy via IFTF’s Future Now
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The City Solution - Robert Kunzig via National... →
Can we turn the corner, and end sprawl?
Robert Kunzig via National Geographic Magazine
Sprawl is not just a Western phenomenon. By consulting satellite images, old maps, and census data, Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton, has tracked how 120 cities changed in shape and population density between 1990 and 2000. Even in developing countries most...
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“There’s no such thing as a poor urbanized country; there’s no such...”
– Edward Glaeser, cited by Robert Kunzig in The City Solution via National Geographic Magazine
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The Best CityReads of 2011 - Neighborhoods - The... →
A selection of 10 non-Atlantic long pieces on cities, all great reads.
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Tests Cast Doubt on F.A.A. Restrictions on Kindle... →
Nick Bilton does some real science, and proves that the FAA’s restrictions on electronics during take-off and landing is not based on actual emissions from the devices. It’s all security theater.
The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don’t add up.
Since I wrote a column...
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“Flipboard has a core quality that makes it special: it turns noise into signal....”
– Alex Wilhelm, Why Flipboard Matters - The Next Web (via underpaidgenius)
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Graph Rank: Just Another Proof That Facebook...
A former CTO was briefed on ‘Facebook’s advertising strategy’ (although it’s not clear by who) and suggest that they are up to no good:
Anonymous via Betabeat
If you logged onto Facebook yesterday, perhaps you caught a link at the top of the News Feed that read: “About Ads: Ever wonder how Facebook makes money? Get the details.” The answers provided some context on the...
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Harvard researchers underwhelmed by peer influence... →
Harvard researchers Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman published a paper called Social selection and peer influence in an online social network, and it seems to suggest that peers have a smaller influence on what we like than people may think:
Bob Brown via NetworkWorld
Using the Facebook data from a group of more than a thousand college students at one college, the researchers found...
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“@steverubel: Meta-Twitter Analysis Shows Happiness Trending Down (Janice Wood /...”
– December 20, 2011 at 10:54AM via http://bit.ly/utA6ik
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How LinkedIn Takes the Stress out of Friendships -... →
Di Fiore suppors the premise that LinkedIn helps us make use of weak ties, but suggests that the mediation of LinkedIn can also decrease the friction that can arise when asking a strong tie for a favor:
Alessandro Di Fiore via Harvard Business Review
On-line professional networks are successful around the world. In cultures like the US where people are comfortable transacting with strangers you...
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“The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse via The New Yorker
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“Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost...”
– Virginia Wolf, To The Lighthouse
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“Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude...”
– - Jonah Lehrer, Classroom Creativity via The Frontal Cortex
(via Alex Tabarrok)
(via joegle)
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“In my view, futurism (“strategic foresight,” “scenario planning”) is a...”
– Jamais Cascio, The Future is a Virus
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New Disqus
I noticed that Disqus has revamped the look and functionality of their commenting system.
Note the prominent capability to share a comment on Twitter, as well as the ability to subscribe to a comment thread by email or RSS, and a trackback URL. The last is interesting since Tumblr doesn’t support the trackback protocol.
The tweet that Disques generates is fairly standard, and it did pull...
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“@jowyang: @armano agreed, it’s a layer we’ll see across many...”
– December 19, 2011 at 07:27AM via http://bit.ly/sNqc7v
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“@armano: @stoweboyd @jowyang the gamification layer is somewhat of a blueprint....”
– December 19, 2011 at 07:24AM via http://bit.ly/t5tijZ
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“@stoweboyd: Remember Empire Avenue? http://t.co/l3A9hKQk still advocating it...”
– December 19, 2011 at 07:13AM via http://bit.ly/w4aZSj
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Remember Empire Avenue?
Back in the first half of the year I wrote some fairly disparaging comments about Empire Avenue, which is a social network modeled like a stock market so that all users’ reputaiton or popularity is indicated by a stock price.
I thought this was sort of dumb:
Jeremiah Owyang does a serious writeup, implicitly advocating that brands should get involved, but I think he’s way too premature...
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Don't Forget Brooklyn: NYU's plan for the old MTA... →
I find Charlie’s arguments in favor of the NYU Brooklyn proposal persuasive, but it looks like the Mayor and everyone else likes the imagery of an outpost of Roosevelt island, even if it turns out to be a pain in the ass geographically for everyone that winds up working or studying there:
Charlie O’Donnell via This Is Going To Be BIG…
NYU-Poly made a pitch to transform the former...
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More Vague Hints Of Clues About That Rumored Apple... →
parislemon:
The smoke around the Apple Television continues to billow, ever-thicker. But this latest report by Jessica Vascellaro and Sam Schechner for The Wall Street Journal sure makes it seem as if things are still in the fairly early stages. It sounds like Apple is putting a lot of options out there in their talks with the media companies to see what sticks.
If that’s correct, I say there’s...
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Are Creative People More Dishonest? - Carmen Nobel... →
Steve Jobs was theoretically channeling Picasso when he said ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal,’ but he may have been onto something. It turns out that creatives are more likely to cheat, according to new research by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely:
Francesca Gino
Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge
Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?
There certainly is,...
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Rising Use of Consumer Technology in the Workplace... →
Accenture looked into the ‘consumerization’ of business IT, and has hard evidence that it is happening, and fast:
Rising Use of Consumer Technology in the Workplace Forcing IT Departments to Respond, Accenture Research Finds
Rising Employee Technology Expectations
Over a quarter (27 percent) of employees routinely use non-corporate applications downloaded from the Internet in the...
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If You Like Links, You’ll Hate What Facebook Is... →
chartier:
Case in point, this weekend I tried to share a link to a story in The Guardian I found interesting. You’ll note (as I highlighted in a red box) even my browser recognized this was a link to the publication’s website, not Facebook.
However, due to how The Guardian has configured their site’s Facebook integration, anyone clicking the link is not taken to the expected URL. Instead a...
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Why Apps Are The Future
Dave Winer wants us to ignore the rapid adoption of apps — primarily driven by the genius generation of smart phones now on the market — because he says they ‘are not the future’. This reminds me of the Chico Marx line, ‘Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?’
Leaving aside the astonishing proliferation of apps, what is it that Winer is trying to...
