Collected Friday Feed, 2020

The Collected Friday Feed, 2020 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 3, 2020 Using AI to improve breast
cancer screening Over the last two years, we’ve been working with leading clinical research partners in the U.K. and U.S. to see if artificial intelligence could improve the detection of breast cancer. Today, we’re sharing our initial findings, which have been published in Nature. These findings show that our AI model spotted breast cancer in de-identified screening mammograms (where identifiable information has been removed) with greater accuracy, fewer false positives, and fewer false negatives than experts. 'Man on the Moon' moment - the year's big breakthroughs It has been a remarkable year of promise in medical science - from inventing ways of treating the untreatable to reversing paralysis and keeping the brain alive after death. What Happened In The 2010s Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is ending today, in no particular order of importance. What Will Happen In The 2020s It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us. The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2020 From smart homes to ultrafast wireless speeds, here’s what to watch. 2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream From our president to our clothes to our books, this year showed that Dataviz has become an integral part of modern culture

Friday Feed January 10, 2020 U.S. cancer death rate drops
by largest annual margin ever, report says The overall cancer death rate has been falling about 1.5% a year since 1991. It fell 2.2% from 2016 to 2017, according to the new American Cancer Society report. That’s the largest drop ever seen in national cancer statistics going back to 1930, A Glimpse of Our Connected Tech Future, Courtesy of CES 2020 Paying for gas with Amazon’s Alexa or playing table tennis with a robot: Whether the latest tech trends will become fixtures in our lives is an open question. Mastodon Makes The Internet Feel Like Home Again Having been on the service for nine months myself, I can confirm Mastodon is not a replacement for Twitter. It’s much better. It is the first place on the internet where I have felt comfortable in a long time. How Library Science Helped Me Understand Databases I finally understood relational database design in a class that had nothing to do with databases and everything to do with library science. The class was called “Knowledge Organization Structures”. AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 CPUs are here to take on Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake laptop chips Ryzen 7 4800U benchmarks 4 percent better in single-thread performance, 90 percent better in multithread cases, and 28 percent better for graphics compared to Intel’s closest competitor, the comparably specced Core i7-1065G7 from the company’s latest 10nm Ice Lake lineup. A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now Those systems that used the quick fix have now reached the end of that window, and have rolled back to 1920. Utility company bills have reportedly been produced with the erroneous date 1920, while tens of thousands of parking meters in New York City have declined credit card transactions because of the date glitch.

Friday Feed January 17, 2020 The Mechanical Muse Machines are
learning to write poetry. How should artificial intelligence alter our appreciation of art? Temperature Change by Country Temperature change 1880–2019. Based on NASA GISTEMP data. Adding a Semantic Touch to Your Data Visualization I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Semantic Typography concept. It sounds abstract, and for a certain degree it is, but when we look at it, well, things become clearer. It happens when we overlap the visual and verbal communication, creating a sort of recursive image in which words behave in the same way as the meaning they drive (see above). Words that visualize meanings. Why we’re writing machine learning infrastructure in Go, not Python Production machine learning is about more than just algorithms

Friday Feed January 24, 2020 Augmented Reality in a Contact
Lens: It’s the Real Deal Augmented reality in a contact lens? Science fiction writers envisioned the technology decades ago, and startups have been working on developing an actual product for at least 10 years. Today, Mojo Vision announced that it has done just that—put 14K pixels-per-inch microdisplays, wireless radios, image sensors, and motion sensors into contact lenses that fit comfortably in the eyes. Advent of Computing Welcome to Advent of Computing, the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has lead to our modern world. There's a new obstacle to landing a job after college: Getting approved by AI College career centers used to prepare students for job interviews by helping them learn how to dress appropriately or write a standout cover letter. These days, they're also trying to brace students for a stark new reality: They may be vetted for jobs in part by artificial intelligence. Wikipedia now has more than 6 million articles in English Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone today: The English version of the world’s largest online encyclopedia now has more than six million articles. The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of “what humans can do together,” said Ryan Merkley, chief of staff at Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates the omnipresent online encyclopedia. Kids are swapping AirPods and using text-to-speech to "talk" in class without being caught https://www.imore.com/kids-are-swapping-airpods-and-using-text-speech-talk-class-without-being-caught

Friday Feed January 31, 2020 Why Cancer-Spotting AI Needs To
Be Handled With Care But for many in health care, what studies like these demonstrate is not just the promise of AI, but also its potential threat. They say that for all of the obvious abilities of algorithms to crunch data, the subtle, judgment-based skills of nurses and doctors are not so easily digitized. And in some areas where tech companies are pushing medical AI, this technology could exacerbate existing problems. Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy — An Interview with the New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson His recent series with journalist Charlie Warzel, “One Nation, Tracked,” has gained significant attention in the data and privacy communities as the series breaks down 50 billion location ‘pings’ and 12 million unique IDs into being able to track the President of the United States’ every movement. Remembering the LAN You can set up your environment so you can focus on being creative. Writing a web service for use by your friends should not be a form of combat The tools and tricks that let Ars Technica function without a physical office Looking at the “future of work” with a team that’s been living it for two decades. The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on stage at the Yerba Buena theater in San Francisco. It surprised everyone, in several ways.

Friday Feed February 7, 2020 Google Maps Hacks 99 second
hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic. Landmark study to transform cancer treatment More than a thousand scientists have built the most detailed picture of cancer ever in a landmark study. Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. Six Hats of Data Visualization User, Researcher, Analyst, Storyteller, Data Geek, and Techie The Missing Semester of Your CS Education Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Friday Feed February 14, 2020 What Does Diversity Look Like
for the Academy — Now That We Have Parasite? An Oscars ‘Best Picture’ Visualisation What does diversity look like in film, and other content that we consume? There isn’t any one full, clear answer, but this visualisation has helped me put things into perspective somewhat, a bird’s-eye view if you will. Tech in 2020: Standing on the shoulders of giants Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems. Tech is becoming a regulated industry, but we don’t really know what that will mean. Flip phones deserve a shot because phones all look the same now Phones don’t have to just be featureless glass slabs The US says the Chinese military hacked Equifax. Here’s how. The hackers “ran approximately 9,000 [SQL] queries on Equifax’s system,” says the indictment, and “created an archive containing 49 directories. Once created ... split it into 600MB segments which were then downloaded from the Equifax network to a Dutch server via HTTP.”

Friday Feed February 21, 2020 Explorable Explanations Lion cubs play-fight
to learn social skills. Rats play to learn emotional skills. Monkeys play to learn cognitive skills. And yet, in the last century, we humans have convinced ourselves that play is useless, and learning is supposed to be boring. Hacker Laws: Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful. There are lots of laws which people discuss when talking about development. This repository is a reference and overview of some of the most common ones. Exploring Isotype Charts: “Only An Ocean Between” What better way to learn more about Isotype and gain inspiration from their designs than to view and discuss the work itself? This article — one of a series on Isotype — seeks to explain and celebrate the work by the Isotype Institute while revealing the process and design concepts used to create them. Working In Science Was A Brutal Education. That’s Why I Left. Science was being the only black person in the program for four years. Science was saying nothing because I was tired of being corrected about the particulars of my own experience. Science was being told that I should consider moving to the other side of town where more black people live. Iconic Icons: Designing the World of Windows This design choreography becomes more critical as technology advances. That’s why we’ve embarked on a multi-year effort across Microsoft’s design teams to redesign our icons: a system within a system.

Friday Feed February 28, 2020 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2020 Unhackable
internet, Hyper-personalized medicine, Digital money, Anti-aging drugs, AI-discovered molecules, Satellite mega-constellations, Quantum supremacy, Tiny AI, Differential privacy, Climate change attribution Big Tech Is Testing You Large-scale social experiments are now ubiquitous, and conducted without public scrutiny. Has this new era of experimentation remembered the lessons of the old? Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued. Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates One thing that’s different now is that the Web is much more encrypted than it was. In June of 2017 approximately 58% of page loads used HTTPS globally, 64% in the United States. Today 81% of page loads use HTTPS globally, and we’re at 91% in the United States! This is an incredible achievement. That’s a lot more privacy and security for everybody. Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose

Friday Feed March 6, 2020 Films that dissolve rapidly when
placed under the tongue or high in the cheek will make vaccines cheaper and more reliable My research group has developed a novel method to stabilize live viruses and other biological medicines in a rapidly dissolving film that does not require refrigeration and can be given by mouth. The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision. Demonstration of the QCCD trapped-ion quantum computer architecture Industrial giant Honeywell says it’s built the world’s best quantum computer Alibaba’s new AI system can detect coronavirus in seconds with 96% accuracy Chinese technology giant Alibaba recently developed an AI system for diagnosing the COVID-19 (coronavirus). Alibaba’s like Amazon, Microsoft, a video game company, and a nation-wide healthcare network all rolled into one with every branch being fed solutions from the company’s world-class AI department. p5.js 1.0 is Here! Today we are excited to announce the 1.0 Release of p5.js! p5.js is a JavaScript library that aims to make creative expression and coding on the web accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, and beginners.

Scrap the Bar Chart to Show Changes Over Time Introducing
the slope chart, a handy alternative that does away with extra “noise”

Friday Feed March 13, 2020 5 Principles for Making Digital
Healthcare More Human-Centered Digital interfaces can empower people to take control of their own health, but these systems can also amplify the sterile interactions for which the industry is all too well known. The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus Our comprehensive guide for understanding and navigating this global public health threat is below. This is a rapidly developing epidemic, and we will update this guide every day at 3pm EDT to keep you as prepared and informed as possible. How to "encourage" your children to use the internet more for learning using Pi-hole 5.0 beta I keep hearing about school closings and wonder how I can "encourage" my son and daughter to spend a little less time on social media and more time learning during school hours if their middle school closes. With the awesome per client features of Pi-hole 5.0 beta it will now be possible to add the ability to periodically block sites and unlock them after points are earned on khan academy, typing club or any site that has a web scrapable point system. Zero Trust Information A far more interesting story, to my mind, is about the other side of that distribution. Sure, the implication of the Internet making everyone a publisher is that there is far more misinformation on an absolute basis, but that also suggests there is far more valuable information that was not previously available: Is the Word ‘Dashboard’ Losing Its Value? Does the term that once represented the hip and new elements of data viz carry the same significance today?

Friday Feed March 20, 2020 Ready for changes with Hexagonal
Architecture The idea of Hexagonal Architecture is to put inputs and outputs at the edges of our design. Business logic should not depend on whether we expose a REST or a GraphQL API, and it should not depend on where we get data from — a database, a microservice API exposed via gRPC or REST, or just a simple CSV file. Thirteen Things to Visualize About COVID-19 Besides Case Loads Whether it’s showing us the importance of flattening the curve or keeping us informed about our communities, data visualization has played a crucial role in messaging about COVID-19. The Data Visualization Society’s 13,000 members have been discussing how to best communicate information related to the coronavirus, as well as how to improve the use of these data to inform our collective response. Catch up on all of Nightingale’s coverage of COVID-19 here. AI for 3D Generative Design Making the design process faster and more efficient by generating 3D objects from natural language descriptions. See the live demo here: datanexus.xyz 20 Seconds... During the Vergecast, did I challenge @reckless to try to describe how the new iPad Magic Keyboard works in 20 seconds so that you could use it as a handwashing guide? You bet I did. NanoHack, an open-source 3D printed mask against COVID-19 The manufacturer of 3D printing materials Copper3D has just put online an open-source STL file of a N95 mask, which can be 3D printed and used against the COVID-19 virus. Its Hack The Pandemic initiative is global and aims to mobilize all manufacturers of machines, fablabs, printing services, etc. to create these masks quickly – the lack of which is a burden for hospitals and healthcare professionals.

Friday Feed March 27, 2020 Apple releases new COVID-19 app
and website based on CDC guidance Apple today released a new screening tool and set of resources to help people stay informed and take the proper steps to protect their health during the spread of COVID-19, based on the latest CDC guidance. The new COVID-19 website, and COVID-19 app available on the App Store, were created in partnership with the CDC,1 the White House Coronavirus Task Force and FEMA to make it easy for people across the country to get trusted information and guidance We’re Sharing Coronavirus Case Data for Every U.S. County With no detailed government database on where the thousands of coronavirus cases have been reported, a team of New York Times journalists is attempting to track every case. Using Zoom to host a community call It’s great but unfortunately it can be abused by bad actors - so here’s how to make sure you keep control over it well! Compaq and Coronavirus To put it another way, the West feels like Compaq in the 1990s, relying on its brand name and partnerships with other entities to do the actual work, forgetting that it was hard work and determination that made it great in the first place. Software Engineering at Google How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software.

Friday Feed April 3, 2020 The National Emergency Library is
a Gift to Readers Everywhere This week the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, announced—and, in the blink of an eye, opened—the National Emergency Library, a digital collection of 1.4 million books. Until June 30th, or the end of the national emergency in the United States (“whichever is later”), anyone, anywhere in the world, can check books out of this library—for free. The best alternatives to Zoom for videoconferencing We recently ran a roundup of some of the free videoconferencing apps available, including Zoom. Since so many questions have come up about Zoom’s security, we’ve decided to run the roundup again, this time excluding Zoom and adding other apps that you can use instead. How Tailscale Works People often ask us for an overview of how Tailscale works. We’ve been putting off answering that, because we kept changing it! But now things have started to settle down. We Tested the Five Best TikTok Algorithm Theories to See Which Ones Work The TikTok algorithm is mysterious, powerful, and frustrating. It finds and promotes quality content with superhuman accuracy. TikTok philosophers have long tried to decode its brain and share “hacks” to guarantee views, making it seem like everyone has a different theory about how the algorithm chooses who to make famous. Cambridge Core Textbooks We are pleased to announce that free access to HTML textbooks is now available again and is being offered direct to Higher Education institutions. Access will be automatically arranged if you already have access to the current free reference collection, which includes Cambridge Histories, Cambridge Companions, and Cambridge Elements.

ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer ACM, the
Association for Computing Machinery, today announced that David Silver is the recipient of the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing. Silver is a Professor at University College London and a Principal Research Scientist at DeepMind, a Google-owned artificial intelligence company based in the United Kingdom. Silver is recognized as a central figure in the growing and impactful area of deep reinforcement learning.

Friday Feed April 10, 2020 Hospitals Deploy AI Tools to
Detect COVID-19 on Chest Scans Over the past week, companies around the world announced a flurry of AI-based systems to detect COVID-19 on chest CT or X-ray scans. Already, these deep learning tools are being used in hospitals to screen mild cases, triage new infections, and monitor advancing disease. Stanford to offer free online CS class during pandemic “This is a really tough time for a lot of people,” Piech said. “And we thought that for some people stuck at home, learning to code is not just reasonable, but might be a great thing to do; that could be students with intellectual curiosity or adults who want a new skill for the workforce.” This Agency Guy Built an A.I. Clone to Attend Zoom Meetings for Him "The idea of a digital twin of yourself came up," he says. "We also knew we wanted to do something to bring a smile to people, and the digital twin that awkwardly handled your Zoom meetings using overused meeting jargon could do just that. At the worst, it could stall for you while you take a bio-break, and ideally it would handle your entire meeting from 'Hello' to 'Bye' without anyone noticing. Oh, but they noticed." Typography in Album Artwork: From Groovy Typefaces to Handwritten Calligraphy They say you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover and it’s also true that you can’t judge a song based on its album art. COBOL Programmers Needed The governor of New Jersey just put out the call on live TV that he is desperate for Cobol programmers right now.

Friday Feed April 17, 2020 A one-take journey through Russia’s
iconic Hermitage museum Experience a 5 hr 19 min 28 sec cinematic journey through one of the world’s biggest museums in St. Petersburg, Russia. Take in 45 galleries, 588 masterpieces, and live performances, shot in 4K on iPhone 11 Pro in one continuous take. 50 years after Apollo 13, Commander James Lovell sees the mission's failure as a triumph When a Saturn rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center half a century ago, it carried three astronauts and a lunar lander to take two of them to the moon's surface. On board with them was a bomb. Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda. How John Burn-Murdoch’s Influential Dataviz Helped The World Understand Coronavirus Many have noted the importance of data visualization in helping people attempt to make sense of it all with a few data journalists contributing significant impact. One of them is John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times (FT), whose breakout moment came on March 11 when his first log scale chart comparing the trajectory of infection rates between countries helped millions of people around the world understand that the pandemic was a trend just beginning in England and the USA. Radar trends to watch: April 2020 Coronavirus, real time transcription, quantum computing, and regulating cryptography. Principles for Technology-Assisted Contact-Tracing The current COVID-19 pandemic is a deadly crisis, but also an opportunity to pull together as a society. Regrettably, it’s also an opportunity for would-be authoritarians and powerful corporations to expand their power. One way they may try to do so is through the use of technology and data to address the pandemic.

Friday Feed April 24, 2020 It’s Time To Build The
problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things. It’s Time To Learn Yesterday my feed had many references to a new Marc Andressen essay titled It’s Time to Build. I understand it’s popularity as it has an enthusiasm that’s in short supply in the tech world today. But what he has to say floats about the fray in a disturbing way Apple Aims to Sell Macs With Its Own Chips Starting in 2021 Apple Inc. is planning to start selling Mac computers with its own main processors by next year, relying on designs that helped popularize the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the matter. Making macOS run well on ARM processors isn’t the hard part The hard part is clearly communicating to users and developers what the change will mean to them — and providing them with tools to deal with it. What software will work, won’t work, and will work slowly via emulation? What will developers need to do in order to port their apps over? Will porting an app to ARM even be worth the effort and cost? Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases In this series, I’m sharing a few insights I specifically found useful for developers who are not specialized in this domain.

3D photos on images from instagram profile pages A chrome
extension that adds depth parallax (an effect similar to Facebook 3D photos) on images from instagram profile pages.

Friday Feed May 1, 2020 The Suddenly Remote Playbook This
has been an extraordinary moment for remote work. Entire populations have been forced to work from home, proving remote infrastructure viable on a massive scale. Now, companies of all sizes ask: “How do you do distributed work the right way? How do you run a remote operation with the most efficiency?” The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations What felt impossible has become thinkable. The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization. Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. THe Design Squiggle The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. The Anti-Amazon Alliance The problem is that the gravitational pull of an integrated offering like Amazon.com is nearly impossible to resist; witness how Windows once spoiled Microsoft services, and Android Google services. Perhaps it was too much to expect Amazon to be any different — or, to put it another way, maybe Amazon always was an integrator, just at a far grander scale.

Friday Feed May 8, 2020 Death of the office The
coronavirus pandemic has sped up a revolution in home working, leaving offices around the world empty. But what was the point of them anyway? Take on hard projects Let's talk about one last wizard skill: confidence Bye, Amazon May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. On responses to “Bye, Amazon” Boy, when your I’m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. SIGGRAPH 2020 Technical Paper: N-Dimensional Rigid Body Dynamics See also:https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q I present a formulation for Rigid Body Dynamics that is independent of the dimension of the space. I describe the state and equations of motion of rigid bodies using geometric algebra. Using collision detection algorithms extended to nD I resolve collisions and contact between bodies. My implementation is 4D, but the techniques described here apply to any number of dimensions. I display these four-dimensional rigid bodies by taking a three-dimensional slice through them. I allow the user to manipulate these bodies in real-time.

Radar trends to watch: May 2020 Trends in technology and
Coronavirus, robotics, AI, programming, and the New Workplace.

Friday Feed May 15, 2020 The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins,
the Hacker Who Saved the Internet At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story. Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models Machine-learning models trained on normal behavior are showing cracks —forcing humans to step in to set them straight. Ethical Recommendations for COVID-19 Visualizations The stakes are high, and the data is complex. A practical guide to doing no harm for data designers working on COVID-19 visualizations WebAssembly COBOL Pong Pong written in COBOL, compiled to WebAssembly. Nvidia launches Clara Guardian to power smart hospitals with surveillance, sensors, and edge AI Nvidia insists smart hospitals can ensure cleaner environments and reduce the risk of spreading infectious diseases, including COVID-19. “If we can employ technologies like video and voice and use artificial intelligence to have a real-time active engagement to create actions and efficiencies for nurses, that’s a huge gain for health care professionals,

Friday Feed May 22, 2020 Rethinking conference talks for video
calls I find the idea of Zoom talks fascinating. What does it means to do something: which is live, where everyone in the audience is potentially multitasking, that includes a text chat backchannel which is visible to everyone? The Dawn of a Philosophy of Visualization I often joke — although I’m inclined to believe — that a field X reaches maturity when a parallel field of “philosophy of X” springs into existence. Apple and Google's COVID-19 contact tracing tech is ready Today, Apple and Google are releasing their COVID-19 contact tracing technology to public health agencies (PHAs) around the world. So far, 22 countries on five continents have requested the API, which will allow PHAs to develop their own contact tracing apps. 2020 CX Report The CX Report gathers trends related to how business now happens in the computational era. This is a departure from my annual SXSW presentation on Design in Tech in two dimensions: 1/ SXSW didn't happen so I'm going to broadcast live on YT for a change, and 2/ I'm retiring #DesignInTech to broaden my sphere of curiosity to touch all business levers of the digital transformation industry. If you've read my book How To Speak Machine then the CX Report will make more sense to you; and if you haven't read it, no worries as I'll review the basics of how to speak machine throughout the CX Report. Microsoft Solitaire turns 30 years old today and still has 35 million monthly players Microsoft’s Solitaire game is turning 30 years old today. Microsoft is celebrating the occasion with a world record attempt of the most games of Microsoft Solitaire completed in one day. 35 million people still play Solitaire monthly, according to Microsoft, with more than 100 million hands played daily around the world.

Microsoft Build 2020: Everything announced at the company's all-digital event
Microsoft's event, being held during the coronavirus pandemic, includes announcements of new health care apps, changes to the company's Edge browser and updates to Windows.

Friday Feed May 29, 2020 Why is Artificial Intelligence So
Useless for Business? AI research has structural problems that limit how much it can impact business. But understanding why gives a way to determine what will work and what won't, as well as reveal new business opportunities. Glamorous Toolkit Glamorous Toolkit is the moldable development environment. It is a live notebook. It is a flexible search interface. It is a fancy code editor. It is a software analysis platform. It is a data visualization engine. All in one. The largest collection of startup pitch decks 600+ decks from the world's best startups. Wish You Were Here: Context-Aware Human Generation We present a novel method for inserting objects, specifically humans, into existing images, such that they blend in a photorealistic manner, while respecting the semantic context of the scene. How I would put voice control in everything Why can’t I point at a lamp and say “on”“ and the light come on? Or point at my stove and say “5 minutes”? Or just look at it and talk, if my hands are full.

Friday Feed June 5, 2020 Data for Black Lives We
are a movement of scientists and activists. Data as protest. Data as accountability. Data as collective action. Watch NASA astronauts fly SpaceX’s Crew Dragon using touchscreens SpaceX’s Crew Dragon eschews the famous maze of manual controls and switches found on retired spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or the Apollo command modules. Instead, Crew Dragon pilots have just three large touchscreen panels in front of them and a few spare buttons below. So during the few times that they have to manually control the spacecraft, they do so using a video game-style interface on those screens. Disinformation Strategies and Tactics Across the world more and more communities are being manipulated by fake news and misinformation. However, most people don't really understand how this is implemented. Join Gabrielle Lim, Researcher at Harvard's Shorenstein Center who will share with us common tactics and strategies used. Four User-Centered Strategies for Designing Useful Data Visualizations Without appropriate user involvement throughout the entire design cycle, the data viz tool might answer irrelevant questions, be too complex or too simple, and misalign with workflows or decision-making processes. These issues can all put the usability, utility, and experience of using the tool at risk. Your work may go unused or misused, and an opportunity for system awareness and improvement is lost. COVID-19 Data Literacy is for Everyone We created this webcomic to share some of their work and help empower audiences to better understand the COVID-19 data visualisations that now fill our everyday lives.

Friday Feed June 12, 2020 Where Is the Rush to
Visualize the Public Health Crisis of Racism? Data visualization designers can be anti-racist by raising awareness of inequities and finding ways to #VizResponsibly Amazon to ban police use of facial recognition software for a year Amazon is implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of its artificial intelligence software Rekognition amid a growing backlash over the tech company’s ties to law enforcement. healthOS Apple is building an operating system for health Solving online events But every time we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit the old way of working, and then one day we realise that it lets us do the work differently, and indeed change what the work is. I do expect to get on planes to conferences again in the future, but I also hope to have completely different ways to communicate ideas, and completely different ways to make connections, that don’t rely on us all being in the same city at the same time - or pretending that we are. How Utah’s Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing A pandemic, one doctor said, is not the place for amateurs to learn

Friday Feed June 19, 2020 MakeSpace A whole new way
to be together, apart. A browser for you, your friends, and your community. A place to co-create, co-work, or just hang out. MakeSpace for all of the above. Apple, ARM, and Intel The most obvious implication of Apple’s shift — again, assuming the reporting is accurate — is that ARM Macs will have superior performance to Intel Macs on both a per-watt basis and a per-dollar basis. That means that the next version of the MacBook Air, for example, could be cheaper even as it has better battery life and far better performance ( EarBuddy: Enabling On-Face Interaction via Wireless Earbuds We propose EarBuddy, a real-time system that leverages the microphone in commercial wireless earbuds to detect tapping and sliding gestures near the face and ears. We develop a design space to generate 27 valid gestures and conducted a user study (N=16) to select the eight gestures that were optimal for both human preference and microphone detectability Sketching the World: An Icebreaker to Working With Data Map the world from memory and learn data visualisation fundamentals in five simple steps How the Coronavirus Will Reshape Architecture In recent months, we have arrived at a new juncture of disease and architecture, where fear of contamination again controls what kinds of spaces we want to be in. As tuberculosis shaped modernism, so covid-19 and our collective experience of staying inside for months on end will influence architecture’s near future.

Friday Feed June 26, 2020 What a machine learning tool
that turns Obama white can (and can’t) tell us about AI bias It’s a startling image that illustrates the deep-rooted biases of AI research. Input a low-resolution picture of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, into an algorithm designed to generate depixelated faces, and the output is a white man. 'The Computer Got It Wrong': How Facial Recognition Led To False Arrest Of Black Man In January, police pulled up to Williams' home and arrested him while he stood on his front lawn in front of his wife and two daughters, ages 2 and 5, who cried as they watched their father being placed in the patrol car. His wife, Melissa Williams, wanted to know where police were taking her husband. 'Google it,'she recalls an officer telling her. WWDC 2020 Special Event Keynote — Apple Apple WWDC 2020 kicked off with big announcements, exciting reveals, inspiration, and new opportunities to create the most innovative apps in the world. Introducing Amazon Honeycode – Build Web and Mobile Apps Without Writing Code Today we are launching Amazon Honeycode in beta form. This new fully-managed AWS service gives you the power to build powerful mobile and web applications without writing any code. It uses the familiar spreadsheet model and lets you get started in minutes. If you or your teammates are already familiar with spreadsheets and formulas, you’ll be happy to hear that just about everything you know about sheets, tables, values, and formulas still applies. Filtered for hallway tracks and spreadsheet parties When I’ve been posting about rethinking conferences in the Age of Zoom it’s all been about the talks. But conferences aren’t just talks…

Friday Feed July 3, 2020 What Does It Mean to
Decolonize Design? In everyday design work, to “shatter the familiar” might start by rethinking the needs of the audience you’re designing for. For example, have you considered how people of different ethnicities may identify with what you’re creating? An aspect of decoloniality is questioning how solutions might be experienced in someone else’s shoes. Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers While aimed at helping employers, bossware puts workers’ privacy and security at risk by logging every click and keystroke, covertly gathering information for lawsuits, and using other spying features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce. MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms. Unlocking value with durable teams Over the past six months, my group at the Financial Times has moved from project-based teams to durable teams. In this post I’ll explain why we made that move and how this is helping us deliver bigger and better things for our customers. Socializing in a World of Social Distance: A COVID-19 Data Journey Using data visualization to tell the story of one author’s daily communication habits in quarantine Apple Silicon At WWDC his week, we’ll look at the most important announcement: Apple’s move from Intel, the historic Santa Clara giant that’s only interested in cookie-cutter chips, to a homegrown System On a Chip (or SOC) known as Apple Silicon.

Friday Feed July 10, 2020 “It’s Data, Not Reality”: On
Situated Data with Jill Walker Rettberg A professor of digital culture discusses the myth of objectivity in data visualization and much more Scientists make precise gene edits to mitochondrial DNA for first time A peculiar bacterial enzyme has allowed researchers to achieve what even the popular CRISPR–Cas9 genome-editing system couldn’t manage: targeted changes to the genomes of mitochondria, cells’ crucial energy-producing structures. When data is messy A huge reason for ImageNet’s messiness is that it was automatically scraped from images on the internet. The images were supposed to have been filtered by the crowdsourced workers who labeled them, but plenty of weirdness slipped through. And horribleness - many images and labels that definitely shouldn’t have appeared in a general-purpose research dataset, and images that looked like they had gotten there without the consent of the people pictured. La Télévision, œil de demain (1947) Inspired by an essay by Barjavel, this documentary proposes the evolution of television in transportable pocket format, and the way in which humans will interact with the object -- compare with smartphone use today. These Scientists Raced to Find a Covid-19 Drug. Then the Virus Found Them. This spring, researchers at Regeneron’s Westchester headquarters found themselves in one of the country’s first coronavirus hot spots.

Friday Feed July 17, 2020 Predictive policing algorithms are racist.
They need to be dismantled. “There’s a long history of data being weaponized against Black communities” “Outright Lies”: Voting Misinformation Flourishes on Facebook While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading. Who’s Behind Wednesday’s Epic Twitter Hack? Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter administrative tools. What Am I Reading? Following a legacy of turning everyday activities into data art Coronavirus Drug and Treatment Tracker Below is an updated list of 19 of the most-talked-about treatments for the coronavirus. While some are accumulating evidence that they’re effective, most are still at early stages of research. We also included a warning about a few that are just bunk.

Friday Feed July 24, 2020 How Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor
Built a Distance-Learning Empire David Malan, who films CS50’s lectures in 4K high resolution, has written that the course’s high production value is “part of its pedagogy,” allowing students who tune in remotely to “feel no less a part of the classroom than students on campus.” OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless The AI is the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand but won't bring us closer to true intelligence. How Is COVID-19 Case Data Collected? The journey from a test swab to a record in a database At Magazzino, Social Distancing Devices Vibrate. So Does the Art. A Hudson Valley oasis of Italian art debuts eight up-and-coming artists — and new wearable safety tech — upon its reopening. Design Docs at Google One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of defining software designs through design docs. These are relatively informal documents that the primary author or authors of a software system or application create before they embark on the coding project.

Friday Feed July 31, 2020 The Cold War Bunker That
Became Home to a Dark-Web Empire An eccentric Dutchman began living in a giant underground facility built by the German military—and ran a server farm beloved by cybercriminals. For Black entrepreneurs, the racial wealth gap makes finding funding nearly impossible They need to understand that it’s about missed opportunity as well. Minorities as a consumer group represent nearly $4 trillion in buying power and significantly influence the mainstream. The fact of the matter is that investing in underrepresented communities is just smart and lucrative business. We’re in a golden age of UX. Why is video chat still stuck in the ’90s? In my line of work, we frequently host calls with a diverse set of participants, from large foundations, to governments, to community leaders. It’s about time we had a virtual environment that is conducive to these conversations. Google’s Top Search Result?, Surprise! It's Google We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. Tech CEO Congressional Hearing: Recap of the biggest moments you missed The hours-long hearing was marked by piercing questions about anti-competitive practices … as well as bizarre diversions into tech support and internet drama A Boy With Muscular Dystrophy Was Headed For A Wheelchair. Then Gene Therapy Arrived This is the story of a fatal genetic disease, a tenacious scientist and a family that never lost hope.

The End of Open-Plan Everything Personal space is finally back
in style, but re-creating it after two decades of its destruction is hardly a straightforward task.

Friday Feed August 7, 2020 Microsoft Analyzed Data On Its
Newly Remote Workforce When driven by employees, entrenched norms can change quickly. Measuring collaboration patterns across our 350-person team, we looked at how meetings had changed beyond remote-only attendance. One data point stunned us: the rise of the 30-minute meeting The Gilded Age Map That Shines a Light on America’s Past and Present What makes “Historical Geography” so unusual is that it conflates biblical virtues with the history of Slavery in the United States. The map shows the “two trees” of slavery vs. liberty with Jamestown representing money, slavery (and everything bad) while Plymouth is the source of the Bible, intelligence, sobriety, and light itself. As We May Code What if, instead of lowering source code down for the purpose of execution, we raised source code for the purpose of understanding? How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic Taiwan and Audrey Tang occupy a unique spot in a world, where the ascendance of the internet and digital technology is marked by the twin dystopias of “post-truth” information chaos in the United States and China’s totalitarian, technologically mediated surveillance-and-censorship regime. With Audrey Tang as the symbolic figurehead, the island nation is making the radical argument that digital tools can be effectively used to build stronger, more open, more accountable democracies. Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when a user inputs a gene’s alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 — short for “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1” — Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar.

Friday Feed August 14, 2020 How a Popular Medical Device
Encodes Racial Bias Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin. The consequences could be serious. Developers, Choose Wisely: a Guide for Responsible Use of Machine Learning APIs I wondered whether the positive sentiment of the phrase “Fair & Lovely” might trick the emotion analysis tool and lead to the misclassification of a sentence’s sentiment, even if the overall sentiment of the sentence may not be positive. Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics As the CTO of one late-stage data startup put it, AI development often feels “closer to molecule discovery in pharma” than software engineering. This is because AI development is a process of experimenting, much like chemistry or physics. The job of an AI developer is to fit a statistical model to a dataset, test how well the model performs on new data, and repeat. This is essentially an attempt to reign in the complexity of the real world. When Data Renders Invisible Illnesses Visible How ‘small’ data visualization helps complex patients be heard, seen, and believed What a Doctor Learns From Watching You on Video Chat Patients and doctors are rediscovering the unexpected virtues and hidden pitfalls of homebound care.

Friday Feed August 21, 2020 Remote Work Is Reshaping San
Francisco, as Tech Workers Flee and Rents Fall Tech corporations are giving their staff extra freedom to work from anyplace. Staff are taking them up on the choice to relocate, forming the beginnings of a shift that might reshape not solely the Bay Space, but in addition the cities the place these tech employees are making new properties. Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable Workplace chat can amplify corporate infighting, help divide companies like social media divides countries, and facilitate employee organizing. Top executives, not employees, sign the checks for these services. And though they’re unlikely to get rid of them, many will inevitably crack down on their freewheeling nature. A college kid’s fake, AI-generated blog fooled tens of thousands. This is how he made it. It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts reached the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated. Some even hit “Subscribe.” Apple, Epic, and the App Store Indeed, this is the most frustrating aspect of this debate: Apple consistently acts like a company peeved it is not getting its fair share, somehow ignoring the fact it is worth nearly $2 trillion precisely because the iPhone matters more than anything.

Friday Feed August 28, 2020 The reMarkable 2: the next
generation paper tablet Replace your notebooks and printed documents with the only tablet that feels like paper. From books to presentations in 10s with AR + ML(AR Cut & Paste) Copy and Paste IRL What Virtual Reality for Flies Teaches Us About Human Vision Unlike most scientists who study illusions, Clark didn’t examine this illusion in humans and other primates. Instead, his team studied it in flies—specifically, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster Rethinking the App Store Here is what I believe the App Store has fundamentally wrong: its current organizing principle is digital versus analog; anything that is digital has to have in-app purchase, while anything that is analog — i.e. connected to the real world — can monetize however it pleases. How Public Speaking Can Help You Design Better Data Visualisations Nine foundational principles from speechmaking that will help you see data visualisation in a new light

Friday Feed September 4, 2020 Unpopular Opinion - Data Scientists
Should Be More End-to-End I believe data scientists can be more effective by being end-to-end. Here, I’ll discuss the benefits and counter-arguments, how to become end-to-end, and the experiences of Stitch Fix and Netflix. The birth of the IBM PC One analyst was quoted as saying that "IBM bringing out a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance." During a meeting with top executives in New York, Lowe claimed his group could develop a small, new computer within a year. The response: "You're on. Come back in two weeks with a proposal." Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC Each test, which costs less than $5, includes a processor, RAM, a button cell battery, and a tiny LCD screen to display the result. The processor is an 8-bit Holtek microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM, capable of running at either 4Mhz or 8Mhz depending on the battery configuration. Gentle medicine could radically transform medical practice In short, as a response to the many problems in medicine today, gentle medicine suggests changes to clinical practice, the medical research agenda, and policies pertaining to regulation and intellectual property. Three things digital ethics can learn from medical ethics Ethical codes, ethics committees, and respect for autonomy have been key to the development of medical ethics — elements that digital ethics would be advised to emulate.

Friday Feed September 11, 2020 An AI-Run World Needs to
Better Reflect People of Color uch of the data being used to train machine learning algorithms, which power the AI movement, doesn’t take ethnicity or race into consideration. Give everybody the internet We need to get the internet to everyone in America. Here’s what it would take to do it. Inside TikTok's killer algorithm The algorithm identifies similar videos to those that have engaged a user based on video information, which could include details like captions, hashtags or sounds. Recommendations also take into account user device and account settings, which include data like language preference, country setting, and device type. Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization In the process of revising and expanding the style guide, we are taking a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) perspective to our research, data, and visualizations.

Friday Feed September 18, 2020 I Have Blood on My
Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed. IBM has built a new drug-making lab entirely in the cloud On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to make, and the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients required and the order in which they should be mixed. It then sends the instructions to a robot in a remote lab to execute. Major pharma companies, including Novartis and Merck, build federated learning platform for drug discovery Today, contributors to the three-year MELLODDY project announced they have reached their first-year objective: successfully deploying the platform. Marking a larger milestone, they say they have also completed the platform’s first federated learning runs. Zoom Fatigue and the New Ways to Party Virtual-reality coffee shops and party-simulation apps are aiming to help you gossip and mingle more realistically online. Viz What You Love Data visualization is a great way to celebrate our favorite pieces of art as well as reveal connections and ideas that were previously invisible. More importantly, it’s a fun way to connect things we love

Friday Feed September 25, 2020 The Elusive Peril of Space
Junk Millions of human artifacts circle the Earth. Can we clean them up before they cause a disaster? CS349 - Contemporary Issues in Computer Science Topics we will explore include policy vaccuums created by new technology, copyright and patent, software bugs and liability, freedom of speech, privacy, security, employment and job markets, warfare and state-building, wealth discrepency and consumerism, environmental impact, and changing cultural norms and social contracts. How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole I go on a walk. I get interrupted once, twice, 15 times by one of my group texts. I get home and go to the bathroom, where I have just enough time to look at my phone again. I drive to the grocery store and get stuck at a long stoplight. I pick up my phone, which says, “It looks like you are driving.” I lie to my phone. Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house Ring latest home security camera is taking flight — literally. The new Always Home Cam is an autonomous drone that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you’re not home. Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took-a-page-from-big-tobaccos-playbook/

Friday Feed October 2, 2020 How to Hack a Painting
This is my recent work, but when I got started, I created the kind of work that you might expect somebody with a programming and computer science background to create. It was very geometric, very obviously mathematically inspired. I felt like it needed something else. I felt like I could take it a little bit further by introducing more organic and natural elements to the artwork. Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination he sections in this exhibition examine information graphics that show space, time, nature, and society. Many are beautiful. Each is a unique way of seeing still worth our attention. New Project: ‘the Seinfeld Chronicles’ This project is a compilation of visual analysis I’ve been working on for a couple of years to pursue a curiosity I had about the rhythm and texture of Seinfeld, looking into how it was written and how it was produced. Data art posters about music (streaming) data for Sony Music When a single or album sells more than a certain amount of units they become a gold or platinum record. The artist generally receives a framed vinyl or CD. But in these days of data being tracked everywhere and listening to music online, could I develop a more data art inspired version of a gold record using data from the actual streams, charts and the song itself. Well, that sounded like an amazingly fun project to sink my teeth into so I enthusiastically agreed! How Civil Society Can Combat Misinformation and Hate Speech Without Making It Worse In this document, I explore a set of potential strategies to be used specifically by civil society organizations (CSOs) to mitigate misinformation.

Friday Feed October 9, 2020 I Want to show you
something Prowling around the empty nighttime suburbs with headphones on, trying to figure out if this tree in someone’s yard is a chestnut (no, chinquapin), I hear a man’s voice across the street behind me: M’AM. M’AM. M’AM!!! Good Intentions, Bad Inventions:The Four Myths of Healthy Tech The tech companies that design and build so many of the devices, platforms, and software we use for hours each day have embraced myths that push a flawed understanding of digital well-being. How The URL Was Built The Web was invented as a solution to the problem of passing around information between computers. Although this was possible before the Web, the absence of a uniform format and protocol made the whole process cumbersome. When Data visualization and Art Collide With the Humble Org Chart There’s a widespread belief that companies which are successful in digital achieve their goals because they have the right internal structures in place. I am intrigued by how you can visualize these structures beyond simple org charts, and whether or not a tangible representation of them reveals insights into the way a company is managed.

Friday Feed October 16, 2020 How Speech-Recognition Software Discriminates against
Minority Voices On average, the authors found, all five programs from leading technology companies, including Apple and Microsoft, showed significant race disparities; they were roughly twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers compared with white speakers. Stations: Visualizing the Mechanics of Music Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music. Data Organization in Spreadsheets The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files. A Quarter Century of Hype - 25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle A presentation of several novel ways to visualize 25 years of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The goal is to demonstrate how one's understanding of complex information can benefit greatly from viewing the data from a fresh perspective. The way we run meetings now is hell for working moms Already time-strapped and stretched to their limits, working parents minding kids at home simply cannot afford to put up with meandering check-ins, inconvenient call times, and back-to-back Zoom tête-à-têtes, they say.

Friday Feed October 23, 2020 United States v. Google I
believe the particulars of the Justice Department’s complaint have been foreshadowed for a long time, and make for a case stronger than most of Europe’s; if the lawsuit fails in court — as it very well may — it also points to where Congress should act to restrain the largest companies in the world. Powers of Ten and the Power of Wonder in Data Visualisation We’ve never had more tools at our disposal to help people understand the scale of things. So why not try to blow a few minds and see what happens? IBM and Pfizer claim AI can predict Alzheimer’s onset with 71% accuracy Pfizer and IBM researchers claim to have developed a machine learning technique that can predict Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms develop. By analyzing small samples of language data obtained from clinical verbal tests, the team says their approach achieved 71% accuracy when tested against a group of cognitively healthy people. ‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly. This is straining the towns’ resources and putting pressure on them to adapt. Cryo–electron microscopy breaks the atomic resolution barrier at last Now, for the first time, scientists have sharpened cryo-EM’s resolution to the atomic level, allowing them to pinpoint the positions of individual atoms in a variety of proteins at a resolution that rivals x-ray crystallography’s.

Friday Feed October 29, 2020 A room, a bar and
a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air The risk of contagion is highest in indoor spaces but can be reduced by applying all available measures to combat infection via aerosols. Here is an overview of the likelihood of infection in three everyday scenarios, based on the safety measures used and the length of exposure The (Not Failing) New York Times A decade ago, the NYT was a dying buisness like every other newspaper, ten years, later they've completely turned things around. They accomplished this by cleaning up their balance sheet so they could invest in their core product; which enabled them to flip their business model from ad-first to subscription-first A clean start for the web e idea is that we could choose a new lightweight markdown format to replace HTML & CSS, split the web into documents and applications, and find performance, accessibility, and fun again. Designing with Data | Giorgia Lupi Learn about Giorgia’s stunning data visualizations and why you should create your own personal data diary. Dennis Ritchie Day When Steve Jobs died there was a wide lament — and well-deserved it was — but it’s worth noting that the resurgence of Apple depended a great deal on Dennis’ work with C and Unix.

Friday Feed November 6, 2020 How the Coronavirus Hacks the
Immune System At a laboratory in Manhattan, researchers have discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses our defenses against us. Masks Work. Really. We'll Show How In this animation, you will see just how effective a swath of fabric can be at fighting the pandemic Ten simple rules to colorize biological data visualization Visual representation of biological data should not overwhelm, obscure, or bias the findings, but rather make them more understandable. This is often due to the challenge of how to use color effectively in creating visualizations. The recent global adoption of data vis has helped address this challenge in some fields, but it remains open in the biological domain. Muddy America : Color Balancing The Election Map - Infographic The Trouble with the County Winner Map, and why this Muddy Map is better for determining vote populations and vote margins in the US election. The AI Who Mistook a Bald Head for a Soccer Ball the club uses an AI-controlled camera that’s programmed to follow the ball for their broadcasts. But in a recent match against Ayr United, the AI controller kept moving the camera off the ball to focus on the bald head of the linesman, making the match all but unwatchable. No fans allowed in the stadium either, so the broadcast was the only way to watch.

Friday Feed November 13, 2020 Pfizer’s Early Data Shows Vaccine
Is More Than 90% Effective Pfizer announced positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial, cementing the lead in a frenzied global race that has unfolded at record-breaking speed. Election Data Storytelling on US News Networks: Could They Do Better? A critique of the 2020 election night data storytelling Apple M1 Chip: Let's Talk! MKBHD: Apple M1 chip is here, and there's 3 new Macs to launch it CS294: Building User-Centered Programming Tools This hands-on course explores a selection of techniques from Programming Languages and Human-Computer Interaction that can help us create useful, usable programming languages and programming tools. We will cover strategies for designing programming systems—e.g., need finding, formative studies, user-centered design broadly. We will also cover tools and techniques that help us build user-friendly programming systems DOSY Logos A 1000 auto-generated hexagonal SVG logos

Friday Feed November 20, 2020 The Rise and Fall of
Getting Things Done How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. The M1 Macs Better necessarily implies different. M1 MacBook Air vs Intel MacBook Air We compare the Intel MacBook Air to Apple's new M1 MacBook Air to see if it’s worth upgrading by testing everything from Benchmarks & Thermals to x86 Gaming, Logic Pro & Battery Life! ARM1 vs. Apple M1 With Apple's recent announcement of the ARM-based M1 processor, I figured it would be interesting to compare it to the first ARM processor, created by Acorn Computers in 1985 for the BBC Micro computer. M1 MacBook Air & Pro - EXCLUSIVE Apple Interview Nerding out with 2 Vice Presidents at Apple about the new M1 chip in MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini - what it means, how do apps work, and what about Intel?

Friday Feed November 27, 2020 I should have loved biology
Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology Information Design Round-Up: COVID-19 Edition A curation of information design and dataviz that aids in the public understanding of COVID-19 How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck. Physicist creates N95-type respirators using cotton candy machine The technique involves heating ordinary plastics such as bottles or shopping bags and then putting them into an ordinary cotton candy machine (also known as a candy floss machine). The machine spins the plastic into a material that is similar to cotton candy (a mesh), which is also electrocharged by the spinning. Reasoning about colors This article will be a whirlwind tour of things you can do to individual colors, and at the end how I put these blocks together.

Friday Feed December 4, 2020 We read the paper that
forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says The company's star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google's business. Five Lessons From Dave Chappelle one best not compete with Chappelle when it comes to story-telling; the way in which the comedian weaves together multiple stories from his childhood on up to the present to make his argument about why he should be paid for the rights to stream Chappelle’s Show is truly extraordinary. Paving the Way for Electronic Organs-on-a-Chip It may sound like science fiction, but “organ on a chip” systems — devices capable of imitating the interaction of cells in a specific organ such as the lungs or liver — have begun to be used to test the effectiveness of drugs in the past few years. The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services. M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness We knew this to be true because that was the way things were. But now, with the M1 Macs, it’s not. M1 Macs run very fast and do so while remaining very cool and lasting mind-bogglingly long on battery. It was a fundamental trade-off inherent to PC computing, and now we don’t have to make it.

Friday Feed December 11, 2020 How our data encodes systematic
racism Technologists must take responsibility for the toxic ideologies that our data sets and algorithms reflect. How the Vaccine Will Get From the Lab to You For months, the country has faced down the massive logistical challenge of getting the vaccine to the right places at the right time. AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology We have been stuck on this one problem – how do proteins fold up – for nearly 50 years. To see DeepMind produce a solution for this, having worked personally on this problem for so long and after so many stops and starts, wondering if we’d ever get there, is a very special moment. Does AI Transform Data Visualization? It might be tempting to say that when AI can find patterns and outliers in a dataset faster and more accurately than people can, data visualization will become irrelevant and dashboards will become obsolete. If users can reliably ask a computer for whatever information they need, when they need it, would they still need to analyze charts to extract information and insights? We set out to find an answer. Delivery companies are bringing holiday gifts — and vaccines This year, delivery companies are facing two heavy lifts at once: meeting unprecedented demand for holiday shipping while orchestrating complex logistics for coronavirus vaccine distribution.

Friday Feed December 18, 2020 Original Dartmouth College BASIC manual
(1964) Typing is no substitute for thinking, Six Chart Design Lessons from Visualizations of COVID-19 Important reminders for social scientists when creating visualizations Experiments On A $50 Diy Air Purifier You Can Make In 30s If you’re in a hurry, this post says that if you strap two HEPA filters to a box fan, it will clear the air of basically all the particles we can measure, and it will do it faster than a commercial filter that costs twice as much. In 2021, We Need To Fix America’s Internet We pay twice as much as Europe for high speeds, assuming we can even get them Cloudflare and Apple design a new privacy-friendly internet protocol Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.

Friday Feed December 25, 2020 Reverse Engineering the source code
of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine The BNT162b mRNA vaccine has this digital code at its heart. It is 4284 characters long, so it would fit in a bunch of tweets. At the very beginning of the vaccine production process, someone uploaded this code to a DNA printer (yes), which then converted the bytes on disk to actual DNA molecules. How the US government hack happened, and what it means, explained by an expert It’s one of the largest and most brazen hacks in American history — and it may just be the beginning of a much larger global espionage effort. Why @Google fired me I'm finna tell yall why @Google fired me- their MOST successful diversity recruiter in the history of their company- with the receipts to support that statement. New Yorker Photography in a Year of Crisis Among the many extraordinary challenges posed by 2020 were a few that were peculiar to photographers. When the pandemic hit, journalists who write for a living could conduct much of their reporting remotely, by phone or over Zoom, but photographers documenting the ravages of covid-19 had to go to the action—or at least within six feet of it.

Collected Friday Feed, 2020

Collected Friday Feed, 2020

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