Facebook Turns Off Website Internally To Force Mobile Development via Fast Company.
This is a great way to force folks to think of mobile and understand why it’s important to site development. We till spend 90 percent of our workday in front of laptops and desktops — often connected to large and beautiful monitors. While this is great for productivity, I’m afraid it causes a bit of mobile blindness.
Interesting read by WaPo’s Sally Jenkins (who I normally don’t love) on the “genius cluster” around athletics and what it can teach us about developing these clusters in other areas:
Great athletes know something critical the rest of us don’t: how to acquire genius through work. “If you look very carefully at those who end up being the best you discover — by doing intensive tracking of them — that they do practice more, and better, than those in the class below them,” Shenk says. If we look at the quantitative and qualitative difference in the habits of great athletes we can then extend them to achievements in other fields. We might start with staging more science contests.
America’s ‘genius cluster’ in sports via The Washington Post.
via The Seductive Danger Of Half Measures, by Aaron Harris on TechCrunch:
Keeping a conscious eye on what the point of a test or iteration is, not just to itself, but to your overall plan and mission how building a certain number of tutors in a given area influences student activity and community creation, in my case, rather than just the number of tutors removes the halfsies quality of a test. Rather than continually shifting a business strategy to reflect the results of a single test, aggregating data across a set of them, and altering your strategy accordingly creates consistent momentum for your company where the success or failure are equally useful.
Within that framework, there needs to be set decision points – moments where you predetermine that, based on given sets of data, you will make a decision.
The London Transport Museum has put up a collection of 7,000 posters dating back to the 1930′s for users to browse, allowing them to search by artist, theme, date and color (or colour, as the case may be). The collection includes a fair share of inforgraphics from the 1920s and beyond demonstrating the advantages and widespread use of mass transit at the time. As Treeugger notes, the use (or overuse) of infographics today is clearly nothing new.
Source: Think Infographics are New? At Londons Transport Museum, They Date Back to the 1920s via TreeHugger
Via this isn’t happiness: Charles Bukowski outlines his modest terms for a poetry reading. If you hire Bukowski, I’d imagine you wouldn’t know what to expect. However, as he notes, “Auden gets 2,000 a reading, Ginsberg 1,000, so you see I’m cheap. A real whore.”
Flickr user Chris Spurgeon has some great pre-lunar presentation slides from NASA, including this chart on the destructive power of weapons through time. His collection also includes several artist renditions of various stages of a mission to the moon — from lift off, to landing, to return — including this stunner of the Apollo booster before lift-off:
So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions…