"culture" entries

Four short links: 27 April 2015

Four short links: 27 April 2015

Living Figures, Design vs Architecture, Faceted Browsing, and Byzantine Comedy

  1. ‘Living Figures’ Make Their Debut (Nature) — In July last year, neurobiologist Björn Brembs published a paper about how fruit flies walk. Nine months on, his paper looks different: another group has fed its data into the article, altering one of the figures. The update — to figure 4 — marks the debut of what the paper’s London-based publisher, Faculty of 1000 (F1000), is calling a living figure, a concept that it hopes will catch on in other articles. Brembs, at the University of Regensburg in Germany, says that three other groups have so far agreed to add their data, using software he wrote that automatically redraws the figure as new data come in.
  2. Strategies Against Architecture (Seb Chan and Aaron Straup Cope) — the story of the design of the Cooper Hewitt’s clever “pen,” which visitors to the design museum use to collect the info from their favourite exhibits. (Visit the Cooper Hewitt when you’re next in NYC; it’s magnificent.)
  3. Two Way Streetan independent explorer for The British Museum collection, letting you browse by year acquired, year created, type of object, etc. I note there are more things from a place called “Brak” than there are from USA. Facets are awesome. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. The Saddest Moment (PDF) — “How can you make a reliable computer service?” the presenter will ask in an innocent voice before continuing, “It may be difficult if you can’t trust anything and the entire concept of happiness is a lie designed by unseen overlords of endless deceptive power.” The presenter never explicitly says that last part, but everybody understands what’s happening. Making distributed systems reliable is inherently impossible; we cling to Byzantine fault tolerance like Charlton Heston clings to his guns, hoping that a series of complex software protocols will somehow protect us from the oncoming storm of furious apes who have somehow learned how to wear pants and maliciously tamper with our network packets. Hilarious. (via Tracy Chou)
Four short links: 20 April 2015

Four short links: 20 April 2015

Edtech Advice, MEMS Sensors, Security in Go, and Building Teams

  1. Ed Tech Developer’s Guide (PDF) — U.S. government’s largely reasonable advice for educational technology startups. Nonetheless, take with a healthy dose of The Audrey Test.
  2. The Crazy-Tiny Next Generation of Computers — 1 cubic millimeter-sized sensors are coming. The only sound you might hear is a prolonged groan. That’s because these computers are just one cubic millimeter in size, and once they hit the floor, they’re gone. “We just lose them,” Dutta says. “It’s worse than jewelry.”
  3. Looking for Security Trouble Spots in Go — brief summary of the known security issues in and around Go code.
  4. The New Science of Building Great Teams (Sandy Pentland) — fascinating discussion of MIT’s Human Dynamics lab’s research into how great teams function. The data also reveal, at a higher level, that successful teams share several defining characteristics: 1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet. 2. Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.
Four short links: 13 April 2015

Four short links: 13 April 2015

Occupation Changes, Country Data, Cultural Analytics, and Dysfunctional Software Engineering Organisations

  1. The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks (PDF) — The only difference with more conventional models of skill-biased technological change is our modelling of the fruits of cognitive employment as creating a stock instead of a pure flow. This slight change causes technological change to generate a boom and bust cycle, as is common in most investment models. We also incorporated into this model a standard selection process whereby individuals sort into occupations based on their comparative advantage. The selection process is the key mechanism that explains why a reduction in the demand for cognitive tasks, which are predominantly filled by higher educated workers, can result in a loss of employment concentrated among lower educated workers. While we do not claim that our model is the only structure that can explain the observations we present, we believe it gives a very simple and intuitive explanation to the changes pre- and post-2000.
  2. provinces — state and province lists for (some) countries.
  3. Cultural Analyticsthe use of computational and visualization methods for the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows. Interesting visualisations as well as automated understandings.
  4. The Code is Just the SymptomThe engineering culture was a three-layer cake of dysfunction, where everyone down the chain had to execute what they knew to be an impossible task, at impossible speeds, perfectly. It was like the games of Simon Says and Telephone combined to bad effect. Most engineers will have flashbacks at these descriptions. Trigger warning: candid descriptions of real immature software organisations.
Four short links: 3 April 2015

Four short links: 3 April 2015

Augmenting Humans, Body-Powered CPUs, Predicting the Future, and Hermit Life

  1. Unpowered Ankle Exoskeleton“As we understand human biomechanics better, we’ve begun to see wearable robotic devices that can restore or enhance human motor performance,” says Collins. “This bodes well for a future with devices that are lightweight, energy-efficient, and relatively inexpensive, yet enhance human mobility.”
  2. Body-Powered Processing (Ars Technica) — The new SAM L21 32-bit ARM family of microcontroller (MCUs) consume less than 35 microamps of power per megahertz of processing speed while active, and less than 200 nanoamps of power overall when in deep sleep mode—with varying states in between. The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Temporal Effects in Trend Prediction: Identifying the Most Popular Nodes in the Future (PLOSone) — We find that TBP have high general accuracy in predicting the future most popular nodes. More importantly, it can identify many potential objects with low popularity in the past but high popularity in the future.
  4. The Shut-In EconomyIn 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the Internet could make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The Web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew more isolated and depressed. “We were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such anti-social consequences,” said one of the researchers at the time. “And these are the same people who, when asked, describe the Internet as a positive thing.”
Four short links: 26 January 2015

Four short links: 26 January 2015

Coding in VR, Git Workflows, Programming as Bookkeeping, and Valuing People

  1. How Might We Code in VR? — caught my eye because I’m looking for ideas on how to think about interaction design in the holoculus world.
  2. Git Workflows for Pros — non-developers don’t understand how important this is to productivity.
  3. All Programming is Bookkeeping — approach programming as a bookkeeping problem: checks and balances.
  4. Why I Am Not a Maker (Deb Chachra) — The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing — it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.

DevOps keeps it cool with ICE

How inclusivity, complexity, and empathy are shaping DevOps.

ice

Over the next five years, three ideas will be central to DevOps: the need for the DevOps community to become more Inclusive; the realization that increasing Complexity of systems is the underlying reason for DevOps; and the critical role of Empathy in the growth and adoption of DevOps. Channeling John Willis, I’ll coin my own DevOps acronym, ICE, which is shorthand for Inclusivity, Complexity, Empathy.

Inclusivity

There is a major expansion of the DevOps community underway, and it’s taking DevOps far beyond its roots in agile systems administration at “unicorn” companies (e.g., Etsy or Netflix). For instance, a significant majority (80-90%) of participants at the Ghent conference were first-time attendees, and this was also the case for many of the devopsdays in 2014 (NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and others). Moreover, although areas outside development and operations were still underrepresented, there was a more even split between developers and operations folks than at previous events. It’s also not an accident that the DevOps Enterprise conference took place the week prior to the fifth anniversary devopsdays and included talks about the DevOps journeys at large “traditional” organizations like Blackboard, Disney, GE, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Raytheon, Target, UK.gov, US DHS, and many others.

The DevOps community has always been open and inclusive, and that’s one of the reasons why in the five years since the word “DevOps” was coined, no single, widely accepted definition or practice has emerged. The lack of definition is more of a blessing than a curse, as DevOps continues to be an open conversation about ways of making our organizations better. Within the DevOps community, old-time practitioners and “newbies” have much to learn from each other.

Read more…

Four short links: 13 January 2015

Four short links: 13 January 2015

Slack Culture, Visualizations of Text Analysis, Wearables and Big Data, and Snooping on Keyboards

  1. Building the Workplace We Want (Slack) — culture is the manifestation of what your company values. What you reward, who you hire, how work is done, how decisions are made — all of these things are representations of the things you value and the culture you’ve wittingly or unwittingly created. Nice (in the sense of small, elegant) explanation of what they value at Slack.
  2. Interpretation and Trust: Designing Model-Driven Visualizations for Text Analysis (PDF) — Based on our experiences and a literature review, we distill a set of design recommendations and describe how they promote interpretable and trustworthy visual analysis tools.
  3. The Internet of Things Has Four Big Data Problems (Alistair Croll) — What the IoT needs is data. Big data and the IoT are two sides of the same coin. The IoT collects data from myriad sensors; that data is classified, organized, and used to make automated decisions; and the IoT, in turn, acts on it. It’s precisely this ever-accelerating feedback loop that makes the coin as a whole so compelling. Nowhere are the IoT’s data problems more obvious than with that darling of the connected tomorrow known as the wearable. Yet, few people seem to want to discuss these problems.
  4. Keysweepera stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs, and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity. Designs and demo videos included.
Four short links: 7 January 2015

Four short links: 7 January 2015

Program Synthesis, Data Culture, Metrics, and Information Biology

  1. Program Synthesis ExplainedThe promise of program synthesis is that programmers can stop telling computers how to do things, and focus instead on telling them what they want to do. Inductive program synthesis tackles this problem with fairly vague specifications and, although many of the algorithms seem intractable, in practice they work remarkably well.
  2. Creating a Data-Driven Culture — new (free!) ebook from Hilary Mason and DJ Patil. The editor of that team is the luckiest human being alive.
  3. Ev Williams on Metrics — a master-class in how to think about and measure what matters. If what you care about — or are trying to report on — is impact on the world, it all gets very slippery. You’re not measuring a rectangle, you’re measuring a multi-dimensional space. You have to accept that things are very imperfectly measured and just try to learn as much as you can from multiple metrics and anecdotes.
  4. Nature, the IT Wizard (Nautilus) — a fun walk through the connections between information theory, computation, and biology.
Four short links: 31 December 2014

Four short links: 31 December 2014

Feudal Employment, Untrusted Computing, Nerd Entitlement, and Paxos Explained

  1. Governance for the New Class of Worker (Matt Webb) — there is a new class of worker. They’re not inside the company – not benefiting from job security or healthcare – but their livelihoods in large part dependent on it, the transaction cost of moving to a competitor deliberately kept high. Or the worker is, without seeing any of the upside of success, taking on the risk or bearing the cost of the company’s expansion and operation.
  2. Hidden Code in Your Chipset (Slideshare) — there’s a processor that supervises your processor, and it’s astonishingly fully-featured (to the point of having privileged access to the network and being able to run Java code).
  3. On Nerd EntitlementPrivilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer. The best part of 2014 was the tech/net feminist consciousness-raising/uprising. That’s probably the wrong label for it, but bullshit is being called that was ignored years ago. I think we’ve collectively found the next thing we fix that future generations will look back on us and wonder why it went unremarked-upon for so long.
  4. Understanding Paxos — a simple introduction, with animations, to one of the key algorithms in distributed systems.
Four short links: 11 December 2014

Four short links: 11 December 2014

Crowdsourcing Framework, Data Team Culture, Everybody Scrolls, and Honeypot Data

  1. Hive — open source crowdsourcing framework from NYT Labs.
  2. Prezi Data Team Culture — good docs on logging, metrics, etc. The vision is a great place to start.
  3. Scroll Behaviour Across the Web (Chartbeat) — nobody reads above the fold, they immediately scroll.
  4. threat_research (github) — shared raw data and stats from honeypots.