May 2013
“Alarmed by the scope and audacity of the breach, the company went public with...”
– Chinese hackers who breached Google gained access to sensitive data, U.S. officials say - The Washington Post (via infoneer-pulse)
“Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create...”
– Alexia Tsotsis, David Karp’s Dilemma (via stoweboyd)
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Airline Creates Bespoke Novels Timed That Last As... →
drewvigal:
The Australian airline Qantas aims to provide a unique experience by offering a selection of specially curated books, each of which is just long enough to last the duration of your flight.
Some forward thinking of providing media tailored to the environment it’s meant to be consumed. File under media moment.
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The NYT's Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet -... →
Via:
Interesting stuff on what does well online> MT @albertocairo: summary of @amandacox’s@openvisconf keynote source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles… #dataviz
— Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) May 18, 2013
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Emergent Futures Tumblelog: The Community, Tumblr... →
emergentfutures:
There are a couple of services that are really important to my life and my business. One of them is Tumblr and the other is Evernote. In promoting Evernote for example I often tell people that if Microsoft buys it I will retire. That is because it has become so important to my work flow and because of my view that large corporations hardly ever get these sort of services right.
...
“The loss of tropical rain forests is likely to reduce the energy output of...”
– Felicity Barringer, NYTimes. Good, quick read. (via climateadaptation)
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Avoiding Unnecessary Paints - HTML5 Rocks →
Rendering performance is critical to users enjoying your application, and you should always aim to keep your paint workload under 16ms. To help you do that, you should integrate using DevTools throughout your development process to identify and fix bottlenecks as they arise.
Inadvertent interactions, particularly on paint-heavy elements, can be very costly and will kill rendering...
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5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery →
Best of the set: .grep() or .map() instead of defaulting to .each() with conditional logic inside. I’m sure there’s a blog post out there about the speed of jQuery vs. Underscore’s implementations….
Follow-up: JSWeekly #130 points to a comparison of Underscore’s .map() and .reduce(), their performance and ECMAScript5’s inclusion of them as [].map() and...
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A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On... →
Cellular eavesdropping seems a lot more tractable [than land-line eavesdropping], if only because mobile calls are conducted on a broadcast channel. That means you can wiretap with almost no carrier involvement. In fact there’s circumstancial[sic] evidence that this already happening — just by different parties than you’d think. According to a new book by reporters Marc...
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Scoops and Software: How The New York Times Tells... →
Embedded in the heart of the New York Times, Aron Pilhofer runs an experimental news team made up of veteran journalists and top-notch computer scientists. Their job is to tell stories using software, data, and old-fashioned journalistic skills. Here’s how they do it.
In case you’re curious about my team and colleagues. (I’m currently not paying attention to our team’s...
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chartsnthings: Sketches from Money on the Bench →
chartsnthings:
On Monday we published something a little different than most of the graphics we make – a running, updating tracker of how much money major league teams are paying to players on the disabled list.
I love sports, but I’m not a huge baseball fan and I’m neutral on the Yankees scale – I don’t…
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Fast Wi-Fi on Flights May Serve the Airlines, Too... →
The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by the opportunities that high-speed broadband service presents for airlines themselves to essentially sell more things to the customers, whether the product is in-flight entertainment, food and drink, customized services to elite-status passengers or products at the destination, including hotel packages, sports and...
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Paul Irish on Chrome Moving to Blink ∙ An A List... →
What the Chrome team is up to. Worth a quick read and skimming of the linked docs if you haven’t had time to follow along lately.
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Soapbox Envy: CSS is not an amoral monster. →
undercaffeinated:
Quit thinking of pages as static, box-like things.
Hell, if you can, stop thinking in terms of pages, and instead think in terms of content. Unlike a memo or a broadcast, web media allow you to present things in whatever context you damned well please. If you want to split one page into twenty as circumstances might dictate, you can make something that does that.
Via
...
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Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion →
infoneer-pulse:
Jeffrey Beall is a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, but he’s known online for his popular blog Scholarly Open Access, where he maintains a running list of open-access journals and publishers he deems questionable or predatory.
Now, one of those publishers intends to sue Mr. Beall, and says it is seeking $1-billion in damages.
The publisher, the OMICS...
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Exploiting a Bug in Google's Glass - Jay Freeman... →
Long but fascinating post (skimmable unless you like Android device debugging and development) where Mr. Freeman got all-but-root access to his Google Glass and poked around.
He kindly highlights the most interesting parts for laypeople, so scroll to the bottom and look for his conclusions after the yellow box. Key subheads: “What can someone do via my Glass?” and “What...
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My Medical Choice - NYTimes.com →
Angelina Jolie on her preventative double mastectomy:
Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for...
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U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone... →
infoneer-pulse:
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of...
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“I think if you’re going to really think about how to use the internet in an...”
– John Green wants you to tag your posts. (via rachelfershleiser)
How well are you using tags?
(via books)
Tags. Tags. Tags. Tag your posts, folks!
(via libraryjournal)
Back when I started this collection, tags didn’t really exist. They certainly weren’t much of a navigation option....
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Two strategies: The Washington Post vs. The NYT |... →
Frédéric Filloux sums up his post thusly:
Both are great American newspapers, both suffer from the advertising slump and from the transition to digital. But the New York Times’ paywall strategy is making a huge difference.
WatchNew Tech City: Tech Writer Anil Dash on The Web We Lost - WNYC
Blogger Anil Dash says we tend to trumpet the tech revolution, with its vast social networks and slick smartphones, as a triumph of usability and empowerment. But Dash says a spirit of collaboration and emphasis on the user experience has been lost along the way.
He wrote about this shift on his blog in a post called The Web We...
CSS3 Transitions — Thank God We Have A... →
Also via HTML5Weekly.
New Map Compares Subway And Walking Travel Time →
drewvigal:
So rather than wasting time fighting the crowds and claustrophobia, you can take a quick stroll and save a little of money as well.
And get a little exercise as well. Brilliant.
“Vendors are pitching a faster web. Consumers are expecting a faster web....”
– Steve Souders, from How fast are we going now? | High Performance Web Sites. The post is a summary of Steve’s presentation on the same topic given at the HTML5Developer Conference.
From both the deck and the post:
The deck, at a key slide:
This is also closely tied to my previous...
“I think there are certainly many different ways of using Twitter. But I think...”
– Mark Luckie, creative content manager for Twitter, in interview about whether Twitter is getting into the news business
(This guy gets conversational journalism)
Stunning Google Earth Photos show our world...
om:
Our capability as humans to destroy our planet and re-create it is astonishing. The whole project makes you realize that in order to understand something important and profound, you have to look at everything over a period of time.
via GigaOM
And also visit Google’s Timelapse website
“In our exclusive TODAY Moms survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers, 42 percent said that...”
– ‘Pinterest stress’ afflicts nearly half of moms, survey says - TODAY.com
Despite these negative effects, I think it’s also a great place to capture one’s aspirations and useful as a mood boarding tool for designers.
(via ario)
Why Design Matters: If Snow Fall Were Published in...
pilhofer:
I am in beautiful Bergen, Norway, this week for the Nordic Media Festival. I gave a talk this morning on digital storytelling and, of course, everyone wanted to talk about Snow Fall.
As part of the presentation — and to drive home my point about design — I mocked up what Snow Fall might have been had our brilliant design, graphics and video teams not taken this project on.
Since a...
Planet Money and Kickstarter: Is web-based... →
Via Radar/Torkington, who summarizes it thusly:
The internet turns everything into public radio. There’s a truth here about audience-supported media and the kinds of money-extraction systems necessary to beat freeloading in a medium that makes money-collection hard and freeloading easy.
Issue 1: What Makes You So Special - Nautil.us →
Awesome new online magazine, describing itself as, “Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. We deliver big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives.”
The first issue is up. I shall be spending some time with this over the next few days.
Via:
I’m not sure why the internet hasn’t been losing its mind over this fantastic...
Challenges with sports analytics - Numbers Rule... →
A one-two combo move of JunkCharts & Numbers Rule Your World posts digs into colleague Kevin Quealy’s recent Charts-n-Things backstory for NYT’s NFL Draft interactives. JunkCharts first says nice things about Kevin’s Tumblr and design effort, then Numbers* digs into the statistical challenges, including something new to me called the cohort effect (which I may even...
