'I guess it depends on how much one values human life, as against the inconvenience of having to look in the rearview mirror more often.' (via the economist)
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ey day: just one thing. (push, pull) today, from yesterday, into tomorrow. ey day: the daily. |
'I guess it depends on how much one values human life, as against the inconvenience of having to look in the rearview mirror more often.' (via the economist)
Obama loved the new tech during his campaign, but now, in trying to reconcile two radically different operating structures (gvmt & tech) while being shielded from the harsh realities of the dev schedule and product status, he sure got burned.
They broke the page into its component parts and prepared a handful of alternatives for each. For the button, an A/B test of three new word choices—”Learn More,” “Join Us Now,” and “Sign Up Now”—revealed that “Learn More” garnered 18.6 percent more signups per visitor than the default of “Sign Up.” Similarly, a black-and-white photo of the Obama family outperformed the default turquoise image by 13.1 percent. Using both the family image and “Learn More,” signups increased by a thundering 40 percent.
(via wired)
vs
O: OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.
(via the wp)
In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures — they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.
[...]
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
Clay Shirky on Healthcare.gov
how to clearly indicate to the world that you've raised more money than you know what to do with (and that your product markup is too high).
design is increasingly an exercise in consensus building (with a few super-votes).
or does it secretly involve doing all the research, running user interviews, thinking hard about it independently, pre-conceiving an optimal proposal and recognizing a few false starts and dead-ends to avoid, and then slowly steering a client to that same conclusion such that it seems like a foregone conclusion, using cycles of user testing, feedback, and refinement to optimize the product? good designers can make you feel smart; great designers can make you forget them entirely?
sans & serif, old & new.
les frère frere-j.
the cost of convenience.
got €650K? now you too can become an EU citizen.
a serious plan.
built!
President Barrack Obama is one of 1.4 million Americans who take their dogs to work.
nick veasey.
(⌘-I)
conde nast is sued, closes intern program.
any architectural interns with good lawyers?
jan gehl quits and denounces sydney barangaroo waterfront development.
sounds like politicians and developers colluding to fill their coffers while flaunting 'people first design'.
kudos to him for shining a light on it before final permits are issued - hopefully the attention causes positive change.
with 90M users, flipbook raised 50M on an 800M valuation.
there is value in personalized news aggregators.
wish the whole album was this good.
ps: not produced by joaquin phoenix.
julie mehretu earned $5M for the goldman sachs mural.
production costs were, apparently, $4M.
this feels like a very sad story in the unravelling. woman has car accident at the wrong place, or is confused and angry and makes compounding bad decisions as she gets scared and runs away, police kill her with her daughter in the back seat. the whole congratulatory tone to all the quotes about the 'security apparatus working perfectly' and threaded through the reporting is a little disturbing.
anna and the blind tobit.
via.
academia.edu raises 11M.
blackberry is also looking for investors, as long as you're making bad decisions.
closet drake fans, ta-ku.
leak.
the alchemist's vinyl set on the anthony valadez show, kcrw.
28 minutes of soul sample heaven.
Long-form articles like this still feel important.
The New Yorker shines a light on civil forfeiture.
A few gems:
Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence. One result is the rise of improbable case names such as United States v. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.
...
“It was an area of the law that was under the radar and very prone to abuse,” Rulli told me when we met at his clinic, in a wing of the law school with a separate entrance and an air of potted-plant competence reminiscent of a doctor’s office.
The Wall Street Journal sold six years ago for $5 billion; the WaPo is selling for 1/20th of that. That's the direction the newspaper business is headed. It is becoming a boutique business for extremely rich people— a way for them to luxuriate in the prestige, and cultural respect, and political influence that newspapers still command, to some extent. How this shit will turn out is anyone's guess.
Update: As WaPo reporters begin considering the conflicts of interest that will come along with having Bezos as their boss, here is a special one for the paper's vaunted national security desk: Amazon recently landed a $600 million contract to build an entire cloud computing system for the CIA. The company is reportedly staffing up on engineers with top secret clearance. Does Jeff Bezos have top secret clearance? That would be something that the Washington Post might want to think about, considering how much reporting their journalists have done on the topic. A huge CIA contractor is now Dana Priest's boss. Think about that.
via.
tintypes in afghanistan.
2,500 year-old, $12M inlaid bronze tapir.
