- The Poisoned NUL Byte, 2014 Edition (Project Zero) — from Google’s public security efforts, this detailed public description of how an exploit was constructed from a found vulnerability. They’re helping. Kudos!
- Myths About the Coming Robot Economy (Eric Sofge) — the entire discussion of the so-called robot economy, with its predictions of vast, permanent employment rates and glacial productivity gains, is nothing more than a wild guess. A strong pushback on the Pew Report (PDF): Frey and Osborne’s analysis is full of logical leaps, and far-reaching conclusions drawn from cursory observations about robots that have yet to replace humans.
- Content for Sensitive Situations (Luke Wroblewski) — People have all kinds of feelings when interacting with your content. When someone’s needs are being met they may feel very different then when their needs are not being met. How can you meet people’s needs?
- Urban Villages (Senseable City at MIT) — People who live in a larger town make more calls and call a larger number of different people. The scaling of this relation is ‘superlinear,’ meaning that on average, if the size of a town doubles, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way. Surprisingly, however, group clustering (the odds that your friends mutually know one another) does not change with city size. It seems that even in large cities we tend to build tightly knit communities, or ‘villages,’ around ourselves. There is an important difference, though: if in a real village our connections might simply be defined by proximity, in a large city we can elect a community based on any number of factors, from affinity to interest to sexual preference. (via Flowing Data)
"empathy" entries
Empathy is at the heart of every great product or service
You need to understand users to create engaging experiences that add value.
In his keynote from Velocity NY 2014, Tim O’Reilly speaks about the link between DevOps and user experience design — empathy is the common thread. Tim notes:
“[Jeff Sussna says in his blog post Empathy: The Essence of DevOps]: ‘It’s not about making developers and sysadmins report to the same VP. It’s not about automating all your configuration procedures. It’s not about tipping up a Jenkins server, or running your applications in the cloud, or releasing your code on GitHub. It’s not even about letting your developers deploy their code to a PaaS. The true essence of DevOps is empathy.’
“Understanding the other people that you work with and how you’re going to work together more effectively — that word ‘empathy’ struck me and it made me connect the world of DevOps with the world of user experience design.”
In the design community, empathy is at the heart of delivering excellent user experiences. Read more…
A foundation of empathy: The O’Reilly Radar Podcast
Putting ourselves in the shoes of the user is key to building better systems and services.
Editor’s note: you can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunes, SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.
In this podcast episode, Tim O’Reilly talks about building systems and services for people, keeping a close eye on the end user’s experience to build better, more efficient systems that actually work for the people using them. Highlighting a quote from Jeff Sussna, O’Reilly makes a deeper connection between development and the ultimate purpose for building systems and services — user experience:
“[Jeff Sussna says in his blog post Empathy: The Essence of DevOps]: ‘It’s not about making developers and sysadmins report to the same VP. It’s not about automating all your configuration procedures. It’s not about tipping up a Jenkins server, or running your applications in the cloud, or releasing your code on Github. It’s not even about letting your developers deploy their code to a PaaS. The true essence of DevOps is empathy.’
“Understanding the other people that you work with and how you’re going to work together more effectively. That word ’empathy’ struck me and it made me connect the world of DevOps with the world of user experience design.”
Four short links: 26 August 2014
Public Exploit Construction, Robot Myths, Empathy, and Social Scaling
Signals from OSCON 2014
From tiny satellites to young programmers to reasoned paranoia, here are key talks from OSCON 2014.
Experts and advocates from across the open source world assembled in Portland, Ore. this week for OSCON 2014. Below you’ll find a handful of keynotes and interviews from the event that we found particularly notable.
How tiny satellites and fresh imagery can help humanity
Will Marshall of Planet Labs outlines a vision for using small satellites to provide daily images of the Earth.