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Curated News - Saving information on a computer boosts human memory resources for new information | KurzweilAI
“a personal memory is not a blueprint but rather a dynamic reconstruction of what happened when and where. Memories change with time.”
via Saving information on a computer boosts human memory resources for new information | KurzweilAI
Curated News - Saving information on a computer boosts human memory resources for new information | KurzweilAI
“As technology develops, computers and smart phones are making it easier and easier to save information, which seems to have important consequences for the ways in which our memory functions,” says Storm. “By treating computers and other digital devices as extensions of memory, people may be protecting themselves from the costs of forgetting while taking advantage of the benefits.”
via Saving information on a computer boosts human memory resources for new information | KurzweilAI
September 2014
Curated News - Can a Computer Replace Your Doctor?
“And some studies show that half the people who buy portable fitness trackers stop using them in a matter of months. That is probably because most people who wear them are already health-conscious and there may be little long-term value once they take note of their activity patterns, Mr. Van Kuiken suggested.”
Curated News - Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence
“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.”
via Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence
Curated News - Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence
“Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.”
via Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence
Curated News - i think, therefore i (instagr)am. cyberpunk novelist j.g. ballard, predicted social media in i-D 27 years ago
“social media remains in its infancy and the long-term effects of documenting our lives are yet to be seen”
Curated News - Famous Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
“This, perhaps, is the greatest gift of the diary — its capacity to stand as a living monument to our own fluidity, a reminder that our present selves are chronically unreliable predictors of our future values and that we change unrecognizably over the course of our lives.”
via Famous Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
Curated News - The Internet’s Original Sin - The Atlantic
“But 20 years in to the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive. It’s time to start paying for privacy, to support services we love, and to abandon those that are free, but sell us—the users and our attention—as the product.”
August 2014
Curated News - Where Tech Is Taking Us: A Conversation With Intel’s Genevieve Bell
“What else is changing is how stories are told, and who gets to tell them. We tell stories differently too — there have been all kinds of experiments with listservs, blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter, Instagram. The professional storytellers are changing too — television is something that comes out six or eight episodes at a time and gets binge watched over a weekend. That changes how you tell the story.”
via Where Tech Is Taking Us: A Conversation With Intel’s Genevieve Bell
Curated News - Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living
“prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
via Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living
Curated News - You Are Not Late — The Message — Medium
“Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?”
March 2014
Curated News - Intel reportedly buying Basis for at least $100M | mobihealthnews
“The Basis Band includes an optical blood flow monitor, a 3-axis accelerometer, a perspiration sensor, plus skin and ambient temperature sensors.”
via Intel reportedly buying Basis for at least $100M | mobihealthnews
February 2014
Curated News - The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters
“our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, our character becomes our destiny”
via The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters
2013
December 2013
Curated News - Curation: How the Global Brain Evolves | Underwire | Wired.com
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, review. Those who can’t review, tweet. Those who can’t tweet retweet.”
via Curation: How the Global Brain Evolves | Underwire | Wired.com
November 2013
Curated News - The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented
“Most of the data entry — 200 million keystrokes — was done by Digital Divide Data, a social enterprise that provides jobs and technology training to young people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya.”
via The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented
Curated News - In 20 Years, We’re All Going To Realize This Apple Ad Is Nuts | Co.Design | business + innovation + design
“Design is at its heart a service for humanity, it’s crafting solutions for people to live with more security, efficiency, or happiness.”
Curated News - Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City - NYTimes.com
“The process is known as chengzhenhua, moving into towns, and has become one of the most-debated topics in China. The idea is to limit the number of megacities by keeping farmers closer to the land they farmed instead of moving them to giant cities. The problem is jobs, or the lack of them, in these areas.”
via Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Software Is Reorganizing the World | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
“So when it comes to the constraints on mobility imposed by the physical world, the rule is simple: when goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.”
via Software Is Reorganizing the World | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
Curated News - Let Bidding Begin for the Bay Psalm Book From 1640
“It’s what that book symbolizes,” Mr. Inman said. “These 11 copies symbolize the introduction of printing into the British colonies, which was reflective of the importance placed on reading and education by the Puritans and the concept of freely available information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. All that fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise to the United States.”
October 2013
Curated News - Consolidate this: Quantified self edition
“I am of the strong opinion that a newer brand will emerge victorious — a brand whose business is core to the vision of the quantified self, and not a bolted-on business pursued out of evolutionary necessity.”
Curated News - Dealing With Default
“So are there any other choices? Many legal experts think there is another option: One way or another, the president could simply choose to defy Congress and ignore the debt ceiling.
Wouldn’t this be breaking the law? Maybe, maybe not — opinions differ. But not making good on federal obligations is also breaking the law. And if House Republicans are pushing the president into a situation where he must break the law no matter what he does, why not choose the version that hurts America least?”
Curated News - A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall
“Failure by the world’s largest borrower to pay its debt — unprecedented in modern history — will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.”
via A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall
Curated News - Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
“Today things are very different. Almost everyone carries a tracking device (their mobile phone) at all times, which reports their location to a handful of telecoms, which are required by law to provide that information to the government. Tracking everyone is no longer inconceivable, and is in fact happening all the time. We know that Sprint alone responded to eight million pings for real time customer location just in 2008. They got so many requests that they built an automated system to handle them.”
Curated News - Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence
“Over the past decade, the N.S.A. has invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, according to documents provided by Mr. Snowden.”
Curated News - N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
“The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.”
via N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
September 2013
Curated News - Uncommon Genius: Stephen Jay Gould On Why Connections Are The Key to Creativity | Brain Pickings
“The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time.”
via Uncommon Genius: Stephen Jay Gould On Why Connections Are The Key to Creativity | Brain Pickings
Curated News - How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings
“What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
Curated News - How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
Curated News - How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings
“Aristotle, who is attributed with saying, ‘Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.’”
Curated News - The ‘Busy’ Trap
“Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.”
via The ‘Busy’ Trap
August 2013
Curated News - Hamptons McMansions Herald a Return of Excess
“But most of all, he credits the Federal Reserve for the economic stimulus, which he said has helped the wealthy most of all. “The stock market’s flying through the roof and who’s that helping, the middle class? No, I mean that’s the reality,” he said. “Out here, life goes on.”
Curated News - Two Providers of Secure E-Mail Shut Down
“I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States”
Curated News - Mobile Is Helping To Spur The Next Revolution In Health Care — The Transfer Of Power To Consumers And Patients
“Vinod Khosla has said: “The fundamental change in health care is the transfer of power to the consumers, and helping them become the CEO of their own health.”
Curated News - DaveNet : Transcendental Money
“Probe your dreams at a deeper level and see if you can’t find a way to do the things you want to do with your life, even if you have no money. You can save yourself a lot of years, learning the old adage, money doesn’t buy happiness.”
July 2013
Curated News - What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows - NYTimes.com
“Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward.”
via What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows - NYTimes.com
Curated News - MIT project lets you mine your email to map out your digital life — Tech News and Analysis
“If nothing else, Immersion does a great job at showing users how much personal data is hiding in plain sight.”
via MIT project lets you mine your email to map out your digital life — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - MIT project lets you mine your email to map out your digital life — Tech News and Analysis
“little things on the internet can make big statements about your life when it’s combined into a single pile”
via MIT project lets you mine your email to map out your digital life — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online - NYTimes.com
“This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”
via Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online - NYTimes.com
June 2013
Curated News - This is what the world will look like In 2045 - Here comes tomorrow - FORTUNE
“The number of neuron clusters and neural networks in the neocortex is finite, Kurzweil says — there’s quite literally a limit to what we can store and retrieve in the human brain. But with a direct line to the cloud, our brains could theoretically access infinite information and infinite processing power.”
via This is what the world will look like In 2045 - Here comes tomorrow - FORTUNE
February 2013
Curated News - Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data - NYTimes.com
“EXECUTIVES in technology, retail, marketing and other industries like to say that data is “the new oil” or, at least, the fuel that powers the Internet economy. It is a metaphor that casts consumers as natural resources with no say over the valuable commodities that companies extract from them.”
via Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data - NYTimes.com
Curated News - No Data Scientists Required: Big Data is All About Business Users - GoodData
“Spreadsheets are functional, but they don’t encourage deep interaction. To derive the greatest value from big data, users need to view and engage with their data on an ongoing basis. A spreadsheet doesn’t offer any motivation to do that. An intuitive UI, on the other hand, promotes regular useage, enabling companies to befriend their big data.”
via No Data Scientists Required: Big Data is All About Business Users - GoodData
Curated News - Happier Launches To Help You Share Your Daily Happy Moments | TechCrunch
“The app is inspired by research that shows that focusing on the positive and sharing good things that happen to you with the people you care about makes you happier.”
via Happier Launches To Help You Share Your Daily Happy Moments | TechCrunch
Curated News - The Global Farmland Rush - NYTimes.com
“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” is a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain. These days, that advice is being heeded all too well.”
Curated News - Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever - NYTimes.com
“What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.”
via Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens - NYTimes.com
“In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.”
via Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens - NYTimes.com
January 2013
Curated News - adam brault: I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly everything.
“I’ve realized—Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain.”
Curated News - Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com
To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com
Curated News - Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com
Amazing to think how far we haven’t come … Yikes.
Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com
2012
November 2012
Curated News - Scientists and Philosophers Answer Kids’ Most Pressing Questions About How the World Works | Brain Pickings
“Evolutionary psychologist and sociologist Robin Dunbar balances out the poetics with a scientific look at what goes on inside the brain when we love:
What happens when we fall in love is probably one of the most difficult things in the whole universe to explain. It’s something we do without thinking. In fact, if we think about it too much, we usually end up doing it all wrong and get in a terrible muddle. That’s because when you fall in love, the right side of your brain gets very busy. The right side is the bit that seems to be especially important for our emotions. Language, on the other hand, gets done almost completely in the left side of the brain. And this is one reason why we find it so difficult to talk about our feelings and emotions: the language areas on the left side can’t send messages to the emotional areas on the right side very well. So we get stuck for words, unable to describe our feelings.
But science does allow us to say a little bit about what happens when we fall in love. First of all, we know that love sets off really big changes in how we feel. We feel all light-headed and emotional. We can be happy and cry with happiness at the same time. Suddenly, some things don’t matter any more and the only thing we are interested in is being close to the person we have fallen in love with.
These days we have scanner machines that let us watch a person’s brain at work. Different parts of the brain light up on the screen, depending on what the brain is doing. When people are in love, the emotional bits of their brains are very active, lighting up. But other bits of the brain that are in charge of more sensible thinking are much less active than normal. So the bits that normally say ‘Don’t do that because it would be crazy!’ are switched off, and the bits that say ‘Oh, that would be lovely!’ are switched on.
Why does this happen? One reason is that love releases certain chemicals in our brains. One is called dopamine, and this gives us a feeling of excitement. Another is called oxytocin and seems to be responsible for the light-headedness and cosiness we feel when we are with the person we love. When these are released in large quantities, they go to parts of the brain that are especially responsive to them.
But all this doesn’t explain why you fall in love with a particular person. And that is a bit of a mystery, since there seems to be no good reason for our choices. In fact, it seems to be just as easy to fall in love with someone after you’ve married them as before, which seems the wrong way round. And here’s another odd thing. When we are in love, we can trick ourselves into thinking the other person is perfect. Of course, no one is really perfect. But the more perfect we find each other, the longer our love will last.”
Curated News - Google Aims to Move Ever More Seamlessly Into Daily Life - NYTimes.com
“Mr. Singhal is talking about what computer scientists call ubiquitous computing or intelligence augmentation — the idea that computers will no longer be devices we turn on, but will be so integrated into our everyday environment that we can ask them to do things without ever lifting a finger.”
via Google Aims to Move Ever More Seamlessly Into Daily Life - NYTimes.com
October 2012
Curated News - The sleeping brain behaves as if it’s remembering something | KurzweilAI
“It had been shown previously that the neocortex and the hippocampus “talk” to each other during sleep, and it is believed that this conversation plays a critical role in establishing memories, or memory consolidation. However, no one was able to interpret the conversation. “When you go to sleep, you can make the room dark and quiet and although there is no sensory input, the brain is still very active,” Mehta said. “We wanted to know why this was happening and what different parts of the brain were saying to each other.”
via The sleeping brain behaves as if it’s remembering something | KurzweilAI
Curated News - What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan | KurzweilAI
“And for at least a billion years, the plan needs to be (as beautifully stated by Lee Valentine of Space Studies Institute): “Mine the sky, defend the Earth, settle the Universe.”
via What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan | KurzweilAI
Curated News - What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan | KurzweilAI
“The great strategist John Boyd told us that it is the nature of all organisms to seek to “Survive, survive on their own terms, and improve their capacity for independent action.”
via What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan | KurzweilAI
Curated News - These 10 Companies Didn’t Need VC Money - Business Insider
“Look at what the top stories are, and they’re all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don’t matter,” 37Signals founder Jason Fried says. ”What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well?”
via These 10 Companies Didn’t Need VC Money - Business Insider
Curated News - William James on Habit | Brain Pickings
“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.”
September 2012
Curated News - Rethinking Sleep - NYTimes.com
“No one argues that sleep is not essential. But freeing ourselves from needlessly rigid and quite possibly outdated ideas about what constitutes a good night’s sleep might help put many of us to rest, in a healthy and productive, if not eight-hour long, block.”
Curated News - Rethinking Sleep - NYTimes.com
“Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, proposes that sleep — including short naps that include deep sleep — offers our brains the chance to decide what new information to keep and what to toss. That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and characters, a result of the brain’s trying to find connections between what it’s recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory.”
Curated News - Lessons of 107 Birthdays: Don’t Exercise, Avoid Medicine and Never Look Back - NYTimes.com
“Somebody asked her the secret of long life,” said Ying-Ying Yuan, a step-granddaughter of Mrs. Koo. “She said, ‘No exercise, eat as much butter as you like and never look backwards.’”
via Lessons of 107 Birthdays: Don’t Exercise, Avoid Medicine and Never Look Back - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Why Do You Share Photos? - NYTimes.com
“The act of snapping a picture is no longer enough to confirm reality and enhance experience; only sharing can give us that validation.”
Curated News - Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com
“EMC and the International Data Corporation together estimated that more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information were created globally last year. “It is absolutely a race between our ability to create data and our ability to store and manage data,” Mr. Burton said.”
via Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Charles Bukowski, Arthur C. Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Cage, and Others on the Meaning of Life | Brain Pickings
“A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus?”
August 2012
Curated News - The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020 | World Future Society
“Science and technology have progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our own imaginations.”
via The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020 | World Future Society
Curated News - The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020 | World Future Society
“Data doesn’t spring full formed from nowhere. Data is created, generated, and recorded. And the unifying principle behind all of this data is that it was all created by humans. We create the data, so essentially our data is an extension of ourselves, an extension of our humanity.”
via The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020 | World Future Society
Curated News - Why Facebook’s face-plant is a good thing
“We’re seeing a new focus on people thinking about how they’re going to make money and build these big sustainable businesses,” Elman said in an interview at the event, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “It’s not just about how quickly you can attract a ton of users.”
Curated News - How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music - NYTimes.com
“The song’s trajectory also demonstrates the continuing power of radio, which record executives say is still essential to turn any song — no matter how much online buzz it has — into a genuine smash.”
via How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
“The best counterculture now is in biology. As far as I can tell, biohackers are all adventurous young people, incredibly athletic, and they’re all traveling the world. I don’t know if biohackers are as much fun as the computer hackers were, but they’re way more responsible. They monitor their own potential misbehavior in a way that computer hackers never have.”
via Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Curated News - Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
“Your Facebook identity is the identity that’s confirmed by all the people who friend you—and therefore it’s the real you. It’s not somebody pretending to be you. Facebook created a largely self-policing model for online identity, and that has proven to be a cashable feature for it.”
via Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Curated News - The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions | Brain Pickings
“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original….it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.”
Curated News - Entrepreneurs need just one thing to succeed
“If you are willing to innovate and work hard, the American Dream is very much alive and available to you. If you believe and you can execute and turn this belief into a reality, you can change the world.”
Curated News - Memory and the Cybermind - NYTimes.com
“We have all become a great cybermind. As long as we are connected to our machines through talk and keystrokes, we can all be part of the biggest, smartest mind ever. It is only when we are trapped for a moment without our Internet link that we return to our own humble little personal minds, tumbling back to earth from our flotation devices in the cloud.”
Curated News - Global mobile health market now worth $11.8B by 2018 | mobihealthnews
“70 percent of available health apps are intended for use by consumers, while the remaining 30 percent are apps built for professional healthcare providers.”
via Global mobile health market now worth $11.8B by 2018 | mobihealthnews
Curated News - How Big Data Became So Big - Unboxed - NYTimes.com
“Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.”
Curated News - Marketing Is Dead - Bill Lee - Harvard Business Review
“In a devastating 2011 study of 600 CEOs and decision makers by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group, 73% of them said that CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.”
Curated News - Steve Jobs
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.”
via Steve Jobs
Curated News - This is what Wall Street’s terrifying robot invasion looks like | KurzweilAI
“This is what high frequency trading looks like, when specially programmed computers make massive bets at lightning speed”
via This is what Wall Street’s terrifying robot invasion looks like | KurzweilAI
July 2012
Curated News - App Design Company Director: All Of Our Clients Choose iOS Over Android - Business Insider
“In short, Matzner says that companies end up paying more money to develop an Android app that likely reaches fewer people who are willing to try it and buy it than would if the app were on the iPhone.”
via App Design Company Director: All Of Our Clients Choose iOS Over Android - Business Insider
Curated News - Memories serve as tools for learning and decision-making | KurzweilAI
“Memories are not just for reflecting on the past; they help us make the best decisions for the future”
via Memories serve as tools for learning and decision-making | KurzweilAI
Curated News - That’s Not My Phone, It’s My Tracker - NYTimes.com
“There is an even more fascinating and diabolical element to what can be done with location information. New research suggests that by cross-referencing your geographical data with that of your friends, it’s possible to predict your future whereabouts with a much higher degree of accuracy.”
Curated News - Imagining tomorrow’s computers today | KurzweilAI
“I do not predict. Anyone who does predictions is underestimating the complexity of developments.”
Curated News - Imagining tomorrow’s computers today | KurzweilAI
“An interesting study by the University of British Columbia published in Science magazine last July showed that we are off-loading our memory to our devices. We have lower rates of recall to information but higher recall rates for access to the information. This is not new. We have been off-loading our oral history to books. That is not bad — it’s progression.”
Curated News - Why health startups should care about ‘alpha geek’ caregivers — Tech News and Analysis
“They are very much in need of help and in need of up-to-the-minute, good quality health information. They are using all the tools at their disposal in new ways to gather and share health information on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the people they love and care for,” she said. “[Caregivers] are creating the tools that they need, just as hackers create the tools that they need.”
via Why health startups should care about ‘alpha geek’ caregivers — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - The ‘Busy’ Trap - NYTimes.com
“My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.”
Curated News - The ‘Busy’ Trap - NYTimes.com
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.”
Curated News - Larry Page, Google Co-Founder
“I now have a very simple metric I use: are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world. Obviously, technologies are the way to do that. That’s what we’ve seen in the past; that’s what drives all the change.”
June 2012
Curated News - Make Yourself Healthy: Daughter Knows Best about Kidney Disease and Gluten Intolerance - Boing Boing
“You’ve heard knowledge = power countless times. This case is more complicated. Here, self-knowledge + scientific knowledge + trying new things = power.”
via Make Yourself Healthy: Daughter Knows Best about Kidney Disease and Gluten Intolerance - Boing Boing
Curated News - Make Yourself Healthy: Daughter Knows Best about Kidney Disease and Gluten Intolerance - Boing Boing
“It had taken ten years for Gail’s GFR score to go from 90 to 31. A few months after she quit gluten she had another kidney test. Your score is slightly better, said her doctor. He implied that such a recovery wasn’t unusual. Six months after that her score was 62 (Ginna made her ask for a number). That was a huge recovery, no longer close to needing dialysis. (The National Kidney Disease Education Program says a score above 60 is “in normal range.”) Gail told her doctor she thought the improvement was because she’d given up gluten. “That’s very trendy right now,” said her doctor. They did not discuss it further.”
via Make Yourself Healthy: Daughter Knows Best about Kidney Disease and Gluten Intolerance - Boing Boing
Curated News - Wearing a Computer Is Good for You - Technology Review
“Devices that monitor weight, activity level, heart rate, or other vital signs could, in principle, lower health-care costs by aiding efforts to prevent chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. They could make it possible to provide medical services such as remote monitoring of patients or automatic detection of falls. “Wearable sensor data is going to be the most complete you can get,” Vu says. It could make a yearly blood pressure measurement at the doctor’s office seem archaic.”
Curated News - Wearing a Computer Is Good for You - Technology Review
“Mobile health devices and software could change medicine profoundly, allowing people to continuously monitor vital signs and better track and modify behavior. That’s important because chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes are on the rise.”
Curated News - Wearing a Computer Is Good for You - Technology Review
“The best products are the ones that you really rely on but you don’t have to remember to use”
Curated News - Is modern technology creating a culture of distraction? — Tech News and Analysis
“One of the devices that has historically drawn the most criticism from scholars and theologians for its corrupting effect on humanity seems to have worked out pretty well — it’s called the book. If we can figure that out, I’m sure we can figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates.”
via Is modern technology creating a culture of distraction? — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Is modern technology creating a culture of distraction? — Tech News and Analysis
“The democratization of connections, collisions and therefore thinking is historically unprecedented. We are the first generation to have the information equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for ideas. And if that doesn’t change the way you think, nothing will.”
via Is modern technology creating a culture of distraction? — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History - Forbes
“In this and the next decade, we will begin to make energy and food abundant, inexpensively purify and sanitize water from any source, cure disease, and educate the world’s masses. The best part: it isn’t governments that will lead this charge; it will be the world’s entrepreneurs.”
via Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History - Forbes
Curated News - Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History - Forbes
“I don’t believe that the future holds shortages and stagnation; it is more likely to be one in which we debate how we can distribute the abundance and prosperity that we’ve created.”
via Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History - Forbes
Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
“Individuals will understand their own bodies and take care of themselves; doctors will merely assist with the maintenance and fine-tuning.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
“A different way to organize society is to say it is human-focused, human-centered, patient-centered, and that there are no legal or financial repercussions from sharing data,” he says. “There is a huge societal benefit from sharing the data, getting it out from the firewalls, letting software look across millions of these things.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
“Getting there will mean essentially dismantling the health-care industry as we know it. (Thus the creative destruction of Topol’s title.) Or, as Larry puts it: “A lot of enormously wealthy, established, powerful institutions in our society are going to be destroyed.” And why not? Over the past 20 years, computers have been toppling and rebuilding industries one by one, from retail sales (Walmart and Amazon), to banking (ATMs and online services), to finance (high-speed online investing), to entertainment (Web streaming, downloads, YouTube, etc.), to publishing (e-books and news aggregators). We’re just babes in this new digital era, and it will eventually upend almost every field of human endeavor.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
“we are beginning an era characterized by the right drug, the right dose, and the right screen for the right patients, with the right doctor, at the right cost.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
“Larry was beginning to have serious doubts about the way medicine is practiced in this country. “Here’s the way I look at it; the average American has something like two 20-minute visits a year with a doctor,” he explains. “So you have 40 minutes a year that that doctor is going to help you make good decisions. You have 500,000 minutes a year on your own, and every one of those, you are making decisions. So we’re already in a situation where you are in charge of your ship—your body—and you are making a lot of pretty horrible decisions, or else two-thirds of the United States’ citizens wouldn’t be overweight or obese. You wouldn’t have the CDC saying that 42 percent of Americans may be obese by 2030, and a third of all Americans may develop diabetes by 2050. That’s the result of a lot of bad decisions that people are individually making on their own.”
Curated News - Why you need your own company | Derek Sivers
####
“We all need some time off. A change of scene and pace. Silence and solace if we’re stressed. Reckless adrenaline if we’re in a rut.
But for those of us who think that an eternal escape from work would be paradise, don’t forget that we all need a playground, and your own company is one of the best playgrounds of all.
“If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.” - Australian psychiatrist W. Béran Wolfe
“Find a happy person, and you will find a project.” - Sonja Lyubomirsky”
Curated News - Why you need your own company | Derek Sivers
“Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas.”
Curated News - Domino Theory: Small steps can lead to big results | University of Colorado Boulder
“Domino theory is a framework that helps people understand that no matter how big or small their hopes and dreams, they can accomplish them by seeing the world as a set of dominos,” he says. “All it takes is one small strategic action to set big things in motion and align with the actions of others.”
via Domino Theory: Small steps can lead to big results | University of Colorado Boulder
Curated News - How To Make Your Company A Talent Magnet, Even In Tough Markets | Fast Company
“the best talent doesn’t worry about losing their jobs, nor are they concerned about being ready for the day they’ll need to look for new ones. That’s because they never job search online. Instead, they look for ideas, beliefs, and vision that they can relate to. Then, they start conversations with the people presenting those concepts and that leads to their next opportunities.”
via How To Make Your Company A Talent Magnet, Even In Tough Markets | Fast Company
Curated News - QS
“The quantified self movement should be closely monitored by all interested in the future of the American health care delivery system. The potential to improve the life of patients with chronic diseases is clearly apparent; whether most people will use the increasingly sophisticated tools being developed is open to debate.”
via QS
Curated News - QS
“For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown … they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.”
via QS
Curated News - The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything
“To put the matter concretely, if a modern-day MacBook Air operated at the energy efficiency of computers from 1991, its fully charged battery would last all of 2.5 seconds.”
Curated News - The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything
“Harvesting background energy flows, including ambient light, motion, or heat, opens up the possibility of mobile sensors operating indefinitely with no external power source, and that means an explosion of available data.”
Curated News - The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything
“As one of many examples of what is becoming possible using ultra-low-power computing, consider the wireless no-battery sensors created by Joshua R. Smith of the University of Washington. These sensors harvest energy from stray television and radio signals and transmit data from a weather station to an indoor display every five seconds. They use so little power (50 microwatts, on average) that they don’t need any other power source.”
Curated News - The 5 traits of radically successful people | VentureBeat
“Success—while defined by everyone on their own terms—is something that truly manifests itself once you make that mind-set shift and tell yourself it’s go time. Are you ready to make that shift?”
via The 5 traits of radically successful people | VentureBeat
Curated News - Big Data, healthcare, devices, and quantified self | Molecularist
“One thing that hit me is that whatever arises from the fusion of Big Data and personal health measurement, it will come from outside the healthcare industry. Part of that is because in the healthcare industry, they are thinking of hospitals, chronic conditions, FDA, reimbursements, privacy, and so forth. Too much baggage, I think.”
via Big Data, healthcare, devices, and quantified self | Molecularist
Curated News - Is the ‘quantified self’ movement just a fad? - Computerworld
“People “quantify” their “selves” in many ways. They take pictures of everything they eat and drink, measure the distance they walk or run, monitor sleep patterns, record their “mood” at regular intervals, detect their blood pressure and heart rate, track their work priorities hourly, and more.”
via Is the ‘quantified self’ movement just a fad? - Computerworld
Curated News - Can Nike Fuel a Mobile Health Revolution? | Futurelab – We are marketing and customer strategy consultants with a passion for profit and innovation.
“Nike, as one of the most beloved consumer brands in the world, has the ability to turn the Nike+ FuelBand into part of a frontal attack on the modern healthcare establishment. Nike Fuel may just end up becoming a new mobile health platform that transforms “lifestyle tracking” into “lifestyle changing.”
Curated News - Can Nike Fuel a Mobile Health Revolution? | Futurelab – We are marketing and customer strategy consultants with a passion for profit and innovation.
“revolutions start with the ability to take complex concepts and make them palatable and attractive for the masses”
Curated News - Can Nike Fuel a Mobile Health Revolution? | Futurelab – We are marketing and customer strategy consultants with a passion for profit and innovation.
“The application to health and wellness is significant and important! Direct monitoring of these activities can provide essential information to guide your individual wellness, but also can be a tool to track activity and sleep as a measure of drug or device efficacy—by a physician or a pharmaceutical company. The clinical and lifestyle utility is endless. And as technology advances, the use of small and unobtrusive devices to record blood pressure and blood chemistries (like serum glucose), ECGs and EEGs, respiration and a host of other yet discovered uses will make devices like the UP a breakthrough in health and fitness that will help redefine how well we take care of ourselves”
Curated News - How Big Data Gets Real - NYTimes.com
“The business of Big Data, which involves collecting large amounts of data and then searching it for patterns and new revelations, is the result of cheap storage, abundant sensors and new software.”
Curated News - Nike Is Rebranding The Calorie, In A Deal With Xbox | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“With Nike+ Kinect, Nike will begin counting what you do in a video game toward our Nike+ Fuel pool in the cloud, syncing all Nike+ services, including the new Fuelband, into a single measurable value of activity. It’s a digital health coup—a networked database of everything you do in an era when my doctor’s office still updates patient files with a typewriter.”
via Nike Is Rebranding The Calorie, In A Deal With Xbox | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Curated News - Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
“In 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of breath. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass. It seems reasonable to assume Bill Clinton has the best medical care available. And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%. Surely at some point in the future we’ll know these numbers the way we now know something like our weight. Ditto for cancer. It will seem preposterous to future generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to be diagnosed with cancer. Cancer will show up on some sort of radar screen immediately.”
Curated News - In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
“Beyond everyday personal goals and health concerns, though, the point of lifelogging seems sentimental. With increasingly seamless ways to gather daily reports on food, location, mood and activity, lifelogging risks turning into digital hoarding. Without a story or some kind of context, it says nothing more about us than a look in a detailed mirror. And like a reflection, it captures our attention — because it is about us.”
via In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
Curated News - In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
“The same data, when gathered by and about ourselves and motivated by sincere curiosity and a desire for self-improvement, feel very different than when collected by Facebook, Google and other corporations and tech companies.”
via In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
Curated News - In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
“He called much of the data he tracks a “WORN memory — write once, read never.” Many of us, self-identified as lifeloggers or not, can relate.”
via In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
Curated News - In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
“Lifelogging is the practice of gathering personal data about oneself using computers, which can include everything from taking daily self-portraits, constant heart monitoring, or breaking the details of one’s daily existence into graphs and statistics. Out of health concern or curiosity, much of the practice is focused on the body.”
via In lifelogging, you find your statistical (and egotistical?) self - latimes.com
Curated News - On the Progression of the Quantified Self Movement Going Mainstream | Lifestream Blog
“the problem is that if you use several of these devices the data is being stored in silos for each of the device maker’s services. Step 2 on the way to being able to glean valuable correlations and information from this data will require it to be aggregated in a single location.”
via On the Progression of the Quantified Self Movement Going Mainstream | Lifestream Blog
Curated News - On the Progression of the Quantified Self Movement Going Mainstream | Lifestream Blog
“With the personal activity and health data that is spurring the Quantified Self movement I think it will initially be the discovery of ways to improve our lives based on our own personal data that will initially attract mainstream users and then once people become more comfortable sharing their personal data with others we will see other innovations occur based on the big data sets that are analyzed across many people.”
via On the Progression of the Quantified Self Movement Going Mainstream | Lifestream Blog
Curated News - Software Screening Rejects Job Seekers - WSJ.com
“As anyone who has applied for a job lately knows, the trick is parroting all the words in the job description but not just copying and pasting the text, which leads the software to discard the application. It’s a whole new skill: Clearing the software hurdle is as important as being able to do the job.”
Curated News - Software Screening Rejects Job Seekers - WSJ.com
“With so much talent looking for work, why not get what you really need? Here’s why: Managers pile up so many requirements that they make it nearly impossible to find anyone who fits.”
Curated News - Software Screening Rejects Job Seekers - WSJ.com
“For every story about an employer who can’t find qualified applicants, there’s a counterbalancing tale about an employer with ridiculous hiring requirements,” he says. In many companies, software has replaced recruiters, he writes, so “applicants rarely talk to anyone, even by email, during the hiring process.”
Curated News - Predictions and Fears From the Experts - NYTimes.com
“The other is the “brain map” — a technology that maps out every neural connection in your mind and then, effectively, stores your brain on your hard drive. That information — more than your DNA even — is you.”
Curated News - Apps Aiming for Sharing Within Boundaries - NYTimes.com
“We should encourage Web and mobile services to lead with their privacy practices and let users vote with their feet,” wrote Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York, in a recent blog post.”
Curated News - The Measured Life - Technology Review
“As Gary Wolf, a journalist and cofounder of the Quantified Self, puts it, “It’s a trial that begins with one very important person: yourself.”
Curated News - More bad news for Facebook, as site crashes — Tech News and Analysis
“But for a site with almost one billion users, Facebook has proven to be remarkably resilient. I expect we’ll soon hear from the company on what caused its latest problem, given its openness around engineering efforts. Remember, delivering five nines (99.999 percent) reliability — which means your site is down less than 5.26 minutes a year — on the web is hard, so hard it may indeed be a pipe dream.”
via More bad news for Facebook, as site crashes — Tech News and Analysis
May 2012
Curated News - Reebok taps MC10 for wearable device to launch this year | mobihealthnews
“If you think about how data is collected from the body, it’s by using clunky straps and boxy equipment. MC10 is focused on advancing that so it’s seamless, thin, invisible to the user and scalable for large scale manufacturing,” Icke said.”
via Reebok taps MC10 for wearable device to launch this year | mobihealthnews
Curated News - Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster - NYTimes.com
“virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad.”
Curated News - Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster - NYTimes.com
“What it doesn’t reflect is where Facebook will be 5 or 10 years from now. I could easily make a bullish case for Facebook — with its 900 million users, and its wise-beyond-his-years chief executive. I could just as easily make a bearish case: Maybe Facebook will never figure out mobile. Maybe its moment will pass before it ever becomes the kind of technology juggernaut that Microsoft once was, or Google is. But being either bullish or bearish requires making a judgment that is years away from being revealed.”
Curated News - Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster - NYTimes.com
“Compared to Splunk, the Facebook I.P.O. was, indeed, a disaster. For starters, there was only the tiniest initial bump, so the Wall Street speculators did not make their usual killing. What’s more, because the company decided, late in the game, to issue 25 percent more shares — and because Morgan Stanley aggressively priced the stock, at $38 a share — Facebook maximized its take, at $16 billion. Long-term investors should be happy about this outcome; the company now has plenty of capital as it competes with Google and the other Internet big boys.”
Curated News - Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman | Brain Pickings
“Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid, or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art.”
via Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman | Brain Pickings
Curated News - Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital — Tech News and Analysis
“Between providing early access to capital, testing new ideas in real time and potentially growing the entire pool of startup capital astronomically, the emergence of crowdfunding customer capital is about to change the startup game in a big way.”
via Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital — Tech News and Analysis
“Crowdfunding is just one indicator, but at least it’s feedback from real customers – not theoretical feedback from pundits.”
via Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - The ‘quantified self’ movement grows, but what are we really learning about ourselves? - The Boston Globe
“As for me, after a week of walking around with a FitBit clipped to my pocket, I realized that I had come to believe that the thumb-size piece of hardware actually cared how I did. As if it were my supervisor in a sales job, its compensation package based on my success. When I realized that final day of our vacation would involve a two-hour drive to Los Angeles and then a five-plus-hour flight, I was panicky about all the sitting.”
Curated News - Fred Wilson And The Death Of Venture Capital - Forbes
“Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, asked the audience to consider this scenario: if U.S. families devote just 1% of their assets to investing in startups via crowdfunding, that would unleash a torrent of $300 billion annually. “The problems with venture capital now are dwarfed by the potential problems down the line,” he observes. Even with just $40-$50 billion aimed at financing scalable startups (the sum of the sources listed above), VC’s can’t beat the markets. With nearly ten times that amount of capital let loose, the attractiveness of venture capital as an asset class will only deteriorate further .”
Curated News - Trend: Wearable health devices on the rise | mobihealthnews
“The device communicates to a nearby smartphone via short range wireless, which can then relay the data to care providers. The cuff-less sensors can monitor blood pressure, body temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen consumption, neural activity, ECG, and more, according to the research team.”
via Trend: Wearable health devices on the rise | mobihealthnews
Curated News - Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever
“It could be seen as somewhat ironic that Google is addressing what has been a key criticism leveled at it by its chief search competitor, Microsoft Bing. The software giant ran a series of scathing commercials, which while never mentioning Google by name, depicted the search results most people get as comically lacking context. Most people understood that the criticism and joke was aimed at Google, and now Google is doing something about the quality of its results.”
Curated News - Magazine - How We Got the Crash Wrong - The Atlantic
“The problem on Wall Street has never been about the absolute amount of leverage, but rather about whether financiers have the right incentives to properly manage the risks they are taking. During Wall Street’s heyday, when these firms were private partnerships and each partner’s entire net worth was on the line every day, shared risk ensured a modicum of prudence even though leverage was often higher than 30-to-1. Not surprisingly, that prudence gave way to pure greed when, starting in 1970 and continuing through 2006, one Wall Street partnership after another became a public corporation—and the partnership culture gave way to a bonus culture, in which employees felt free to take huge risks with other people’s money in order to generate revenue and big bonuses.”
Curated News - Technology is Changing the Way We Live, and Stay Well
“As Donald Jones, vice president of business development at QUALCOMM, Inc. writes, the healthcare industry is moving from a “sick care system” to a “health improvement system,” and mobile health (mHealth) services are a big part of it.”
Curated News - Technology is Changing the Way We Live, and Stay Well
“From devices that can monitor your vital signs and blood glucose from a distance, to watches that can tell your heart rate after running a marathon, to doctors who can stay in touch over smartphones and tablets with kidney patients after dialysis to even just staying out of the hospital, technology is changing the way we live.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“What distinguishes our intellect from animals’ is not that we can go against our environment—most of us can’t, not in the long run—but rather that we can purposefully alter our environment to shape our behavior in ways we choose.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“Mobile health’s potential savings to the health-care system are enormous. A 2010 study by one research firm reckoned that the savings in the United States and Canada from mobile monitoring of patient health could climb to as much as $6 billion a year by 2014. If mobile apps could reduce obesity and its associated costs by just 5 percent, the savings would amount to about $15 billion a year in the U.S. alone. The effect on eldercare would be even larger; a Boston Consulting Group report from earlier this year projects a possible cost reduction of 25 percent, which by one study’s figures would amount to about $30 billion.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“You put sensors in phones and throughout the home, you develop algorithms that can infer what people are doing, and then you provide tailored automatic feedback that reinforces the right behaviors.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“Skinner was right-on, in terms of any sentient being from pigeons to humans responding to setting goals, tracking progress, and getting feedback. These tools can provide all that, and can reach into any population to do it.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“Kumar, who is now ShapeUp’s chief medical officer, says that the 14,000 employees at one large client have logged nearly 5 billion steps and lost some 41,000 pounds—a shrewd investment for the employer and insurer paying their health-care costs.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“Skinner’s theory was at its core so simple that it sounds purely commonsensical today: all organisms tend to do what the world around them rewards them for doing.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“And the basic formula underlying Dan’s weight loss reaches well beyond health. Behavioral technology allows users to gradually and permanently alter all kinds of behavior, from reducing their energy use to controlling their spending. Now, with the help of our iPhones and a few Facebook friends, we can train ourselves to lead healthier, safer, eco-friendlier, more financially secure, and more productive lives.”
Curated News - Magazine - The Perfected Self - The Atlantic
“Early studies of a fast-expanding pool of electronic weight-loss aids suggest that, by allowing people like Dan to construct their own regimen on their phone and computer, these tools could be a key to reversing the obesity epidemic. Applied across the health-care spectrum—to improve senior care, fix sleep problems, and cure addiction, for example—these affordable, accessible tools could radically change the way we conceive of and administer health care, potentially saving the system billions of dollars in the process.”
Curated News - How exercise affects the brain | KurzweilAI
“The implication is that exercising during development, as your brain is growing, is changing the brain in concert with normal developmental changes, resulting in your having more permanent wiring of the brain in support of things like learning and memory,” says Bucci. “It seems important to [exercise] early in life.”
Curated News - To Get To The Root Of A Hard Problem, Just Ask “Why” Five Times | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution. Startup teams should go through the Five Whys whenever they encounter any kind of failure, including technical faults, failures to achieve business results, or unexpected changes in customer behavior.”
Curated News - To Get To The Root Of A Hard Problem, Just Ask “Why” Five Times | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem.”
Curated News - The Right Way to Try to Buy Happiness - NYTimes.com
“But according to another article about money and happiness that ran in The New York Times in 2010, there is plenty of research suggesting that experiences, time spent with people we love, and memories of special events contribute significantly to happiness.”
Curated News - Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The hierarchy of innovation
“We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The hierarchy of innovation
Curated News - The Force of the Quantified Self « The Heart Beat
“But collecting data under the radar (with consent of course) and communicating it to the right people could potentially offer even more than a health course correction — it could save your life. I think that this is the future of the Quantified Self.”
Curated News - The Facebook IPO – US Business News — ‘Apple Being Used as ATM for Facebook IPO’ - CNBC
“It looks like Apple is being used as an ATM for the Facebook IPO,” writes Chris Verrone at Strategas.”
via The Facebook IPO – US Business News — ‘Apple Being Used as ATM for Facebook IPO’ - CNBC
Curated News - Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology
“A good chunk of computer and human-computing interaction research these days is focused on giving computers better senses so they can either implicitly or explicitly augment our intellect and assist with our tasks,” says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research. “This work is a wonderful first step toward understanding our changing mental state and designing interfaces that dynamically tailor themselves so that the human-computer system can be as effective as possible.”
via Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology
Curated News - Wearing a Computer Is Good for You - Technology Review
“Devices that monitor weight, activity level, heart rate, or other vital signs could, in principle, lower health-care costs by aiding efforts to prevent chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease.”
Curated News - Wearing a Computer Is Good for You - Technology Review
“Mobile health devices and software could change medicine profoundly, allowing people to continuously monitor vital signs and better track and modify behavior. That’s important because chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes are on the rise.”
Curated News - EveryMove lands $2.6 million to create a ‘mileage rewards program’ for health - GeekWire
“A TechStars Seattle grad, Benaroya said that EveryMove is trying to put “the consumer at the center of their health,” giving them power to control how their activities translate into economic rewards. Participants could earn rewards, for example, for riding a bike to work or eating healthier food at lunchtime.”
via EveryMove lands $2.6 million to create a ‘mileage rewards program’ for health - GeekWire
Curated News - Personal Informatics in Practice: Deep Personalization | Quantified Self
“I have used some applications in my phone that keep track of my activities. Most of them do a good job in their own right; however, they always seem to come out short –no single application tracks my activities in the way I really want it to be tracked, and the feedback is almost always some graphs which are either unappealing or doesn’t give room for self-discovery. I can’t play with my data.”
via Personal Informatics in Practice: Deep Personalization | Quantified Self
Curated News - Pepsi and Competitors Scramble as Soda Sales Drop - NYTimes.com
“The health and wellness trend is huge, permanent and important,” Mr. Douglas said. “My crystal ball says that a smart beverage company will sell a variety of products, and some of them will have bubbles and some of them won’t.”
via Pepsi and Competitors Scramble as Soda Sales Drop - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Facebook Needs to Turn Data Trove Into Investor Gold - NYTimes.com
“I think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way,” Mr. Zuckerberg says in the video. “We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”
via Facebook Needs to Turn Data Trove Into Investor Gold - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Facebook Needs to Turn Data Trove Into Investor Gold - NYTimes.com
“What Facebook already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the site.”
via Facebook Needs to Turn Data Trove Into Investor Gold - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Foursquare’s Cofounder Just Dropped A Big Hint About His Next Startup - Business Insider
“While many people think of Foursquare as a check-in service, Crowley and Selvadurai have consistently pitched it as a data-driven recommendations engine which analyzes and rewards real-world behavior.”
via Foursquare’s Cofounder Just Dropped A Big Hint About His Next Startup - Business Insider
Curated News - Mark Zuckerberg’s Hidden Talent: Firing People - Business Insider
“Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.” Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. “We made some hires that weren’t the right ones. And we were pretty good at correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying and following through with that.”
via Mark Zuckerberg’s Hidden Talent: Firing People - Business Insider
Curated News - Complication is What Happens When You Try to Solve a Problem You Don’t Understand | SIGPWNED
“Ultimately, a programmer’s job is less to actually write code, and more to manage complexity.”
via Complication is What Happens When You Try to Solve a Problem You Don’t Understand | SIGPWNED
Curated News - HealthWatch: Hacking Into Body Metrics May Be Key To Better Health « CBS San Francisco
“The idea behind the movement is that, instead of hacking into computers, you hack into your own body – by using smart phones, mobile apps and any number of wireless devices. The goal is to fine-tune and improve your life.”
via HealthWatch: Hacking Into Body Metrics May Be Key To Better Health « CBS San Francisco
Curated News - From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
“The obvious reason why the company is far from ready is tied to their vision: they want to build the second brain of humanity, a place that securely stores everything from your life.”
via From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
Curated News - From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
“Another important decision they made very early on was to put a price on the product. Users could purchase the premium product from very early on that also gave confidence there was something the company was aiming to solve.”
via From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
Curated News - HOLY MOLEY: Facebook Interns Make A Crapload Of Money - Business Insider
“If you ignore taxes, that’s a salary of around $60,000 annually for someone with little or no work experience in programming.”
via HOLY MOLEY: Facebook Interns Make A Crapload Of Money - Business Insider
Curated News - Governor’s Innovation Conference reflects new era for TN startups | The Tennessean | tennessean.com
“The real test of a cluster ‘catching fire’ is not when it provides local employment,” author Steve Blank (The Startup Owners Manual) wrote in a blog post last year. “But when people from outside the area start coming to work and invest there.”
via Governor’s Innovation Conference reflects new era for TN startups | The Tennessean | tennessean.com
Curated News - Kickstarter Advice From The Guy Whose E-Paper Watch Raised $7.1M | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“Eric Migicovsky needed money. It was January of 2012, and even though he had a cool idea—a watch that could connect to your iPhone or Android smartphone to display incoming calls, calendar and weather alerts, and email, Twitter, and Facebook messages—no VCs were biting, believing hardware to be too risky of an investment.”
Curated News - Stand Up for Fitness - NYTimes.com
“Equally beguiling, at least for me, since I’m shallow, were results from experiments at the University of Massachusetts showing that when volunteers stood all day — nothing else; no walking or jogging; just standing — they burned hundreds more calories than when they sat for the same period of time.”
Curated News - Stand Up for Fitness - NYTimes.com
“When the volunteers remained stationary for the full seven hours, their blood sugar spiked and insulin levels were out of whack. But when they broke up the hours with movement, even that short two-minute stroll, their blood sugar levels remained stable. Interestingly, the jogging didn’t improve blood sugar regulation any more than standing and walking did. What was important, the scientists concluded, was simply breaking up the long, interminable hours of sitting.”
Curated News - From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
“At 3AM Libin and the Evernote fan, who happened to be from Sweden, opened up Skype and in 20 minutes the basic details of the agreement were done. Next week, the fan wired $500 000 to Evernote and basically saved the company from bankruptcy.”
via From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story
Curated News - Apple squared, (four)squared — Tech News and Analysis
“Checkins should be implicit for every single purchase made, creating an immediate personal history. And if you haven’t checked in yet, then there should be an option to “explicitly” check in (i.e. broadcast to friends) when you make a purchase. More data means better recommendations, and it also makes additional services possible, not to mention better user modeling for marketing purposes.”
Curated News - Johns Hopkins Studying Effectiveness of Mobile Health Applications
“Instead of the occasional interaction with a health provider or system, these apps can serve as a ‘guardian angel’ in your pocket, reminding you often about your goals and ways to reach them”
via Johns Hopkins Studying Effectiveness of Mobile Health Applications - iHealthBeat
Curated News - Our Investment in Singly | Foundry Group
“And the volume of private/people data (and information related to people) is exploding: tweets, photos, videos, click-streams, social interactions, check-ins, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, email, Fitbit-like devices, health records, financial records, transaction histories, location information and much more. This growing, fragmented world is rich with possibilities and nascent in its organization and infrastructure.”
Curated News - Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
“Just as elements of the metrosexual movement eventually found their way into the fashion mainstream, the whole datasexual craze is starting to tip into the mainstream.”
via Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
Curated News - Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
“True datasexuals, however, will not stop at just collecting and recording bits of data from the Web. They are obsessively driven to use a proliferating number of mobile devices and apps to make data-grooming a reality.”
via Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
Curated News - New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
“Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, in La Jolla, says it is just a matter of time before these technologies come into wider use. He believes that in the future patients will know far more about themselves than their doctors do, “which is a good thing,” he adds.”
via New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Curated News - Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
“The datasexual looks a lot like you and me, but what’s different is their preoccupation with personal data. They are relentlessly digital, they obsessively record everything about their personal lives, and they think that data is sexy.”
via Meet the Urban Datasexual | Endless Innovation | Big Think
Curated News - New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
“The human is a very flawed measuring instrument,” says Calit2 researcher Smarr. “Technical sensors are far more objective. They can detect deviations from norms far more easily and reveal early signals of disease development.”
via New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Curated News - New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
“In the future, Wolf suggests, self-tracking will no longer be primarily about treating illnesses, but instead will focus on maintaining health and increasing our enjoyment of life.”
via New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Curated News - New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
“Smarr is a proponent of a new kind of medical science driven by data, known as “self-quantification,” which he sees as the key to a revolution in healthcare and the path to a healthier, more self-determined life. “It is absurd that we collect data about everything but our health,” Smarr argues. “For thousands of years, the question you are asked by your doctor has been, ‘how do you feel?’ It is being replaced by, ‘what are your data trends?’”
via New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Curated News - New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
“At the forefront of this movement is Quantified Self, a website attracting members from around the world. It has branches in about 50 cities and a core group of dedicated self-trackers estimated at around 7,500 people. Quantified Self’s motto is “self-knowledge through numbers” and its members are united in a belief that thorough data analysis and statistics can optimize the way we live.”
via New Trend Towards Self-Monitoring Using High-Tech Equipment - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Curated News - Wearable devices track people via wireless network – USATODAY.com
“Wireless carriers, looking for ways to make money beyond transmitting data along their networks for smartphones and tablets, are fueling the boom. “We think this is the single-biggest growth opportunity — that every device is connected,” says Glenn Lurie, head of AT&T’s emerging devices team.”
via Wearable devices track people via wireless network – USATODAY.com
Curated News - ‘Be the CEO of Everything You Do’ | Inc.com
“be the CEO of everything you do. Approach established processes with a skeptical eye, be the leader of solutions, set ambitious goals for yourself and measure your progress. Take risks, learn from failure, share ideas, and have high expectations of those you work with. Proactively add to your job description if you see a gap that needs to be filled. Lead your domain. No task is too small or unimportant to see it as an opportunity to be the boss.”
Curated News - The Library of Utopia - Technology Review
“Innovation is often being restricted today for legal reasons, not technological ones,” says David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis and coauthor of Against Intellectual Monopoly. In many areas, he says, “people aren’t creating new products because they fear a nightmare of copyright litigation.”
April 2012
Curated News - The Library of Utopia - Technology Review
“In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time—not very distant, he believed—when every person on the planet would have easy access to “all that is thought or known.”
Curated News - A $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company
“So, the total payout from one unassuming asteroid? $20,000,000,000,000.”
via A $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company
Curated News - ExtremeTech » Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
“The true power of IPS, though, would come from linking your real life analytics to other streams of data, such as social graphs and payment systems. IPS could track where and when you are most likely to use Facebook or Twitter, and tell you which locations are conducive to happy (or sad) status updates. IPS could be used to create beautiful heatmaps of where you spend money”
via ExtremeTech » Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
Curated News - ExtremeTech » Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
“Starting out in the shallow end, IPS (Indoor Positioning System) would enable a whole new range of “real life analytics” apps. If you love how that Nike+ GPS app tracks your running speed and distance, an IPS version would blow your mind. IPS could track exactly how many steps you take and how many stairs you climb — and calculate, quite precisely, how many calories you burnt in the process. IPS could keep a perfect record of how many minutes you spend in the gym (and on which machines).”
via ExtremeTech » Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
Curated News - Are You Ready for Smarter “Personal” Analytics? « A Smarter Planet Blog
“this growing demand for devices is driven by “information seekers” — people who will increasingly turn to technology to help manage health-related challenges to reach their wellness goals.”
via Are You Ready for Smarter “Personal” Analytics? « A Smarter Planet Blog
Curated News - All APIs are not created equal. | SmartData Collective
“Not only are APIs certainly not like Lego, they are not equal. Talk to a developer and you’ll find out pretty quickly that they range from the well-formed and functional to the fiendishly complex and arcane. Then ask about the documentation. Then probably buy them a beer to recover from having to relive personal nightmares.”
Curated News - Thinking About Side Effects of Personal Informatics Systems | Quantified Self
“Personal Informatics systems often deal in domains and utilize data that are just that: personal. These systems use data that we create through our daily activities (such as going for a run with Nike+) and help us review it in a way that encourages reflection and self-knowledge.”
via Thinking About Side Effects of Personal Informatics Systems | Quantified Self
Curated News - Death to Freemium | Be a Better E-mailer
“All these problems go away when we realize that it’s ok to pay for stuff we like. We need to apply the normal real world economics to online pricing. Then companies can build products and charge a price commensurate with value.”
Curated News - Death to Freemium | Be a Better E-mailer
“This perception that stuff online should be free makes it harder and harder for new businesses to charge money for value.”
Curated News - Death to Freemium | Be a Better E-mailer
####
“There’s a psychological barrier to paying online, and it needs to stop.
We pay for things in real life every day. We don’t hesitate to drop a fifty for a tank of gas, or $4 for a cup of coffee. But when it comes to paying for $5 for an online service that actually delivers significant value – it’s a no-no.”
Curated News - Apple’s Juggernaut - Seeking Alpha
“All in all, Apple sold 58.6 million devices (iPhones, iPads, Macs, and iPods) at an average operating profit of $263 a unit, an all-time profitability record. That means that each device sold — whether an iPad or the lowly Shuffle — on average earned Apple $263 before taxes. To put that in perspective: Nokia (NOK) made $3 per unit while Research in Motion (RIMM) made $57 per unit last quarter reported.”
Curated News - The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
“Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways?”
Curated News - The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
####
“For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:
There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.”
Curated News - Widget-maker, or world-changer? | FLO {thinkery}
“World changers want greatness. They believe they can create something radically better than everyone else, and they know that if they do, the money will follow.”
Curated News - Track Thyself: Quantify Your Life For Productivity, Fun | Fast Company
“There’s a motivational benefit to having to put your day into words, and there’s a long-term data benefit to having a day-by-day account filled with keywords, project names, and little quips.”
via Track Thyself: Quantify Your Life For Productivity, Fun | Fast Company
Curated News - Track Thyself: Quantify Your Life For Productivity, Fun | Fast Company
“But what makes personal data useful and revealing is finding the sweet spot between curiosity and measurable data.”
via Track Thyself: Quantify Your Life For Productivity, Fun | Fast Company
Curated News - How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love | Brain Pickings
“Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, “and dedicate your life to it.”
via How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love | Brain Pickings
Curated News - Want To Live Longer? Learn To Use Technology
“You’re a patient, you need to empower yourself and take the initiative to find out more about that medication and about the treatment that they’re proposing.”
Curated News - The Quantified Self, You Are Your Data
“For a certain type of person, data is the most important thing you can trust,” Wolf has said.”
via GOOD Mobile
Curated News - The Quantified Self, You Are Your Data
“The Quantified Self is a spectrum, and it’s up to you to find your own place within its potential.”
via GOOD Mobile
Curated News - The Quantified Self, You Are Your Data
“A growing number of individuals are using new sensors, social networks, online data repositories, open-access science journals, and sheer discipline to view their bodies, minds, and spirits through the lens of data.”
via GOOD Mobile
Curated News - Disruptions: Tech Valuations Defy the Restraints of Reality - NYTimes.com
This, I have learned, is the mentality of much of Silicon Valley, where decisions are not always made based on revenue or potential business models, but instead seem to be driven by a herd mentality and a yearning to be a part of a potential next big thing.
via Disruptions: Tech Valuations Defy the Restraints of Reality - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
because of the potential benefits, many people seem eager to be measured, as long as their privacy is protected.
via Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
Curated News - Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
It is understanding ourselves better and measuring ourselves better and, in the case of health, using that data to inform our decisions on how we live our lives.
via Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
Curated News - Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
“Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” Kelly wrote.
via Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
Curated News - Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
In that sense, the Quantified Self really enlists just about every technology company imaginable in the service of recording our daily lives.
via Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
Curated News - Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
As everything analog shifts to digital, we can collect a huge amount of data about ourselves.
via Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 | VentureBeat
Curated News - trendwatching.com’s 12 Consumer Trends for 2012
countless new apps and devices are actively targeting consumers keen on preventing, examining, improving, monitoring and managing their health
Curated News - Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users - NYTimes.com
With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.
Curated News - Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users - NYTimes.com
Online social networks offer free services to users and make money primarily through advertising, which can often be directed more effectively using the information the network has collected on them.
Curated News - Why Path is no Instagram — Tech News and Analysis
Path still needs to define a singular addictive behavior and that is its challenge (and opportunity.)
Curated News - Instagram billion dollar valuation - Business Insider
mobile is the future of computing
Curated News - Instagram billion dollar valuation - Business Insider
photos is the core of the social networking experience
Curated News - Instagram billion dollar valuation - Business Insider
Instagram just may be the most capital-efficient company in the world.
Curated News - Physical media is dead — long live the app — Tech News and Analysis
Admittedly it will be some time before tablets and mobile devices become ubiquitous, but there is no doubt about its inevitability.
via Physical media is dead — long live the app — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Physical media is dead — long live the app — Tech News and Analysis
In the post-broadband world, Internet is the truck, and app stores are the newsstand and book store.
via Physical media is dead — long live the app — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - The Mobile Paradox | TechCrunch
The number of users engaged in this app-centric and message-centric Internet is both huge and their use is growing. People used Instagram for images, not Flickr or Picasa. They use Foursquare for checkins not Facebook. And they do so in large numbers and they do it a lot.
Curated News - Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
There’s so much information you can track,” Dr. Smarr says. “And the cost of measuring and analyzing the data about ourselves just keeps on decreasing.
via Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Dr. Wolfram has also scanned 230,000 pages of paper documents and, when possible, fed them through an optical character reader. He has at the ready his medical test data, complete genome, GPS location tracks, room-by-room motion sensor data and much more — all possible fodder for future analysis.
via Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Although he has long been accumulating this data, he never got around to analyzing it until a few months ago. To see the possibilities, he decided to try a new company product, Wolfram Alpha Pro. He used his own data collection for his initial foray into an area he calls “personal analytics.”
via Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Storing things is cheap,” he says of this monumental stockpile. “I’ve tended to take the attitude, ‘Don’t throw electronic things away.’
via Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com
Curated News - The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes | Fast Company
mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward
via The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes | Fast Company
Curated News - Instapaper’s Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs: Tech News and Analysis
But it ends up that good will is powerful,” Arment said. “It shows that people will pay for something they like because they want to ensure its future.
via Instapaper’s Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs: Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Obama Budget Includes $126 Million for Exascale Computing
The ability to compute in exabytes seems increasingly necessary as the amount of data available increases cataclysmically.
via Obama Budget Includes $126 Million for Exascale Computing
Curated News - The Year in Web - Technology Review
Instead of developing devices for users to load with files and software, Google has been designing an operating system that stores nearly everything online and relies on Web applications rather than software that resides on the machine.
Curated News - The Year in Web - Technology Review
Social networking sites have continued to grow in popularity, and users are trusting them with more information than ever before. At the same time, those sites are looking to make money, and that often means selling data about users.
Curated News - Wall St. Computers Read the News, and Trade on It - NYTimes.com
Working with academics at Columbia University and the University of Notre Dame, Dow Jones compiled a dictionary of about 3,700 words that can signal changes in sentiment. Feel-good words include obvious ones like “ingenuity,” “strength” and “winner.” Feel-bad ones include “litigious,” “colludes” and “risk.”
via Wall St. Computers Read the News, and Trade on It - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Wall St. Computers Read the News, and Trade on It - NYTimes.com
Math-loving traders are using powerful computers to speed-read news reports, editorials, company Web sites, blog posts and even Twitter messages — and then letting the machines decide what it all means for the markets.
via Wall St. Computers Read the News, and Trade on It - NYTimes.com
March 2012
Curated News - YouTube’s Original UI Designer On Creating Great Tech With People At The Center | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
We have to make thoughtful decisions as a society about the types of technology and products we want to build and support. We have the freedom to choose where to put our development resources. It’s not easy, but if we put our mind to it we can create solutions that increase happiness, change the world, and even benefit our economy.
Curated News - Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald’s Entire Menu, Survives - Technology Review
Data science is so new that there are no textbooks on the subject, and no university curricula designed to turn out data scientists. Yet it’s integral to everything from quantitative trading on Wall Street to ad targeting on the web and the optimization of real-world supply chains.
via Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald’s Entire Menu, Survives - Technology Review
Curated News - The Disruptive Power of iMessage - NYTimes.com
Photos, videos and documents can now be part of computer-to-phone correspondence. Your dialogue can be archived and preserved forever.
Curated News - Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
He says the future is in creating a single program that puts in one place all of the personal data that right now is being kept in different devices and apps. Without that, he says, it’s up to the user to make sure all of her various gadgets and programs are accurate, up-to-date, and (er) honest.
via Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Curated News - Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
WHEN HENRY FORD FIRST created the Model T, it didn’t have a dash-board. Early drivers had no idea how fast they were going or how much gas was in the tank. We’ve been functioning in much of the same way when it comes to monitoring our health.
via Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Curated News - Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Starting QS was about anticipating that this boom was coming, and wanting to produce a context for intelligence and reflection
via Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Curated News - Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Self-trackers measure, time, and count just about everything they do, keeping track of it all as a way to improve their health and their existence.
via Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Curated News - Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Siri is a “cultural preparation for a kind of intimacy with our machines that will take us to a new level”
via Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to be Human? - Boston Magazine - bostonmagazine.com
Curated News - And Here’s The Secret Reason Apple Is Crushing Google…
Apple, meanwhile, has a product-design and marketing culture, in which “technology” merely serves to support a product’s function and form.
Curated News - The online future is personal, and that requires big data — Tech News and Analysis
We are now capable of collecting and analyzing orders of magnitude more information than at any other time in history,” thanks to the database tools we have, Kimball said, but “the one constrained resource is understanding.
via The online future is personal, and that requires big data — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - If It Weren't For Tim Cook, The iPad Would Have Cost $5,000
The real reason Apple is the most valuable company in the world right now isn’t that it makes ultra-sexy iPads and iPhones. It’s because it makes ultra-sexy iPhones and iPads and charges the same price as its rivals, or less, for those gadgets.
via ‘If It Weren’t For Tim Cook, The iPad Would Have Cost $5,000’
Curated News - Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
individuals are about to gain the power of digesting their own data creation in incredibly compelling ways.
via Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
Curated News - Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
The movement represents a game-changing shift in how individuals – not multi-billion dollar corporations, but individuals – create & digest data in order to affect personal change.
via Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
Curated News - Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
In its most concise form, self quantification is the tracking of daily activities through technologies, delivering back to the user some “performance” analytics. The data and metrics help the user alter a behavior in order to self-improve.
via Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
Curated News - Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
This movement is about to get huge as the sheer volume of those classifying themselves as self-quantifiers is doubling annually.
via Big Data + Mobile + Sensors + Visualization + Gamification = Quantified Self | TopCoder, Inc.
Curated News - What is the Future of Social Media Analysis? | SmartData Collective
As people today create increasingly more data through social media channels, companies, government and academia have little choice but to engage with it to further enhance consumer experiences, create better products and services and understand human behaviour online and offline.
via What is the Future of Social Media Analysis? | SmartData Collective
Curated News - Business: Where angels will tread | The Economist
Some 90% of the world’s data have been generated in the past two years.
Curated News - Researchers prove that memories reside in specific brain cells | KurzweilAI
Our results show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells,” says says co-author Xu Liu, a postdoc in Tonegawa’s lab, “and simply by reactivating these cells by physical means, such as light, an entire memory can be recalled.
via Researchers prove that memories reside in specific brain cells | KurzweilAI
Curated News - Researchers prove that memories reside in specific brain cells | KurzweilAI
“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa
via Researchers prove that memories reside in specific brain cells | KurzweilAI
Curated News - The next big data challenge: More data, more speed, more, more… - Tech News and Analysis
This exploding demand means the technologies around outputting data in a useable, understandable format, ingesting it into storage so that it’s manageable and searchable, and the analytics to parse that data so it’s useable will only grow.
via The next big data challenge: More data, more speed, more, more… - Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - Esther Dyson, “People find themselves fascinating.”
Esther Dyson, “People find themselves fascinating.”
Curated News - The Next, Next Thing | TechCrunch
There have been three saltational leaps — next, next things — that stand out in the history of modern computing: Interactive, general purpose, personal computers; graphical user interfaces; and the Web.
Curated News - The Next, Next Thing | TechCrunch
Good engineering is often about incremental improvement. Good business is often about finding product/market fit, while good design is often about giving users an interface that is easy to understand.
2011
December 2011
Curated News - Famed Investor Esther Dyson Knows How To Make Big Bucks About What’s Coming Next. So What’s Next? - Business Insider
Interesting investor take on where a large chunk of tech talent is right now …
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- BI: I’ve read that you think we have so many stupid companies such as group buying companies that are being built. Is that sucking up all the good talent?
- ED: Yes, and I still believe that.
- BI: What’s a solution to that?
- ED: Time. It will become apparent eventually.
Curated News - Apple’s Secret Plan to Steal Your Doctor’s Heart | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
This exactly the kind of customer loyalty you want - people so attached to the devices that they fear having them taken away.
“Even doctors who are using an iPad for the first time often become attached, Fishman says. ‘Their biggest fear is what if we took it away.’”
via Apple’s Secret Plan to Steal Your Doctor’s Heart | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Curated News - The Internet: Triumph of human evolution - Science - Salon.com
I couldn’t agree more.
“Computers and the Internet now are in a sense creating a global brain where you can access information almost instantaneously and anyone has access to it.”
via The Internet: Triumph of human evolution - Science - Salon.com
News: In Race for Fastest Supercomputer, China Outpaces U.S. - The Daily Beast
Wow, I wasn’t aware of China’s ambitious supercomputing agenda. The race to the first exascale supercomputer will be an interesting one to watch.
“Already, it has 74 of the 500 biggest supercomputers in the world, up from zero a decade ago and second only to the U.S., which has 263. And while the U.S. struggles to fund new development, China seems to have limitless resources to pursue its ambitious goals.”
via In Race for Fastest Supercomputer, China Outpaces U.S. - The Daily Beast
November 2011
Curated News - According to comScore, 92 million unique visitors hit LinkedIn’s site world-wide in October and spent an average of 15 minutes on the site. Facebook had 790 million unique visitors who spent more than six hours on the social network.
According to comScore, 92 million unique visitors hit LinkedIn’s site world-wide in October and spent an average of 15 minutes on the site. Facebook had 790 million unique visitors who spent more than six hours on the social network.
via HEARD ON THE STREET: The $100 Billion Question for Facebook Fans - WSJ.com
Curated News - It is critical to recognize that the pace of our reliance on pervasive connectivity via our wireless devices is rapidly outstripping our ability to deal with the absence of those services.
It is critical to recognize that the pace of our reliance on pervasive connectivity via our wireless devices is rapidly outstripping our ability to deal with the absence of those services.
Curated News - The tiny bits of data that we record each day —check-ins on Foursquare, messages posted to Twitter, status updates on Facebook and photographs uploaded to Instagram — form a kind of “trailing diary,”
The tiny bits of data that we record each day —check-ins on Foursquare, messages posted to Twitter, status updates on Facebook and photographs uploaded to Instagram — form a kind of “trailing diary,”
via Services That Feed Nostalgia for the Recent Digital Past - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Attention, it is often said, functions as an increasingly important currency in the post-industrial world.
Attention, it is often said, functions as an increasingly important currency in the post-industrial world.
via Where the Twitterati Live - Technology - The Atlantic Cities
Curated News - the technology could eventually help with tasks like choosing which of hundreds of digital photos taken on a family vacation should appear in a photo album
the technology could eventually help with tasks like choosing which of hundreds of digital photos taken on a family vacation should appear in a photo album
via Beauty Now in the Eye of the Algorithm - Technology Review
Curated News - Is country ready for McCreery? | StarTribune.com
Review: Roll the Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum into one with a gorgeous, angel-voiced singer (Hannah Blaylock) who sounds like Emmylou Harris with more power and less vibrato. With their smart material and talent, they could be bigger than Lady A. Grade: A
Curated News - Court makes it official: You have no privacy online — Tech News and Analysis
All we know is that the government wanted personal data about their activity on Twitter — including their IP addresses, any “contact information” related to the account, as well as “records of session times and durations,” and could even include the content of individual messages (including private messages).
via Court makes it official: You have no privacy online — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined.
In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined.
via At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be.
Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be.
via Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting - NYTimes.com
Curated News - Mr. Hoffman has been investing in companies that are data-driven or starting to work with data in interesting ways.
Mr. Hoffman has been investing in companies that are data-driven or starting to work with data in interesting ways.
via Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn Has Become the Go-To Guy of Tech - NYTimes.com
Curated News - If you can digitize reality, then you can move your world faster than before.
If you can digitize reality, then you can move your world faster than before.
via Competing through data: Three experts offer their game plans - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing
Curated News - They suggest strongly that people don’t have to lose muscle mass and function as they grow older. The changes that we’ve assumed were due to aging and therefore were unstoppable seem actually to be caused by inactivity. And that can be changed.
They suggest strongly that people don’t have to lose muscle mass and function as they grow older. The changes that we’ve assumed were due to aging and therefore were unstoppable seem actually to be caused by inactivity. And that can be changed.
Curated News - This second economy that is silently forming—vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive—is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us.
This second economy that is silently forming—vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive—is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us.
via The second economy - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Growth
Curated News - How Lytro’s Weird Design Tells A Story About Revolutionary Tech | Co. Design
Even though they are introducing a risky, $400 product into one of the most crowded consumer markets on the planet, they had at least one profound advantage: They were starting from scratch.
via How Lytro’s Weird Design Tells A Story About Revolutionary Tech | Co. Design
Curated News - Codecademy - Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed.
Curated News - Data is good," Mr. Greene said in an interview. "The more data we have access to, the more insight we have.
Data is good,” Mr. Greene said in an interview. “The more data we have access to, the more insight we have.
Curated News - I see emergence of what I call a “smart buyer” who uses their smartphone to make smart decisions — whether it is for price, location or the brand to spend money with.
I see emergence of what I call a “smart buyer” who uses their smartphone to make smart decisions — whether it is for price, location or the brand to spend money with.
via Mobile and the rise of the smart buyer — Tech News and Analysis
Curated News - those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.
those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.
| via [Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science | Wired.com](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/) |
October 2011
Curated News - consumers create longer lasting relationships with utilities that make their daily lives easier.
consumers create longer lasting relationships with utilities that make their daily lives easier.
via
Curated News - How is this service providing something crucial for users, some kind of utility they can’t get elsewhere?
How is this service providing something crucial for users, some kind of utility they can’t get elsewhere?
via Why fear of Facebook is not enough for rivals to succeed — Tech News and Analysis