The future is already here, I'm just trying to aggregate it.
I love reading old Harvard Business Review case studies from the 90’s just so I can read about all these great examples from companies, that 20 years later are always horrible. I’m currently reading about BellSouth, GM, TWA, and 3DO (exactly, who?).
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” - Tyler Durden
Views on Generational Trust & Generosity
Looks like students and millennials have less faith in people. See more findings on college students’ aspirations and expectations over at the Society Pages. For example: students generally have higher demands on the world, and they are more likely than workers to say it is important or essential to have a prestigious career with which they can make an impact, but wealth is less important than prestige or impact.
See Net Impact’s full report here: What Workers Want in 2012.
It is always interesting when you see emotions get quantified like trust. Yes, this is survey-based data, but what about that whole ad-world fight to quantify and measure influence.
Seems to me this is less about generations and more about age and experience. At least I’d like to think we get less cynical and more empathetic with age.
Glass is a slick implementation of the wrong idea. Google has worked so hard at making the device simple that it has succeeded too well — Glass simply can’t do anything Google hasn’t allotted for.
So something happened with Tumblr today?
I used to read a lot of non-fiction, especially business books. In fact I’m still on a few publishers lists for receiving advanced copies of business books. But I find myself reading more science fiction, and I’m really enjoying the genre some call progressive or speculative science fiction. This genre also seems to cover cyberpunk, and dystopian genres (I could be wrong here on the genus and families of fiction types, but I think this one of those things that isn’t generally agreed on).
Non-fiction can tell you what happened, or at best take a guess at what is happening, but fiction tells you what could be. Even when non-fiction tries to explain what’s happening and what is yet to come, they’re still really just telling you about the past. And conversely, even when science fiction is trying to write about the past (like with steampunk) they’re still telling you about the future.
Non-fiction is about how we reacted to something. Science fiction is about how we would react to something. And even though there are a lot of exceptions and I still read my share of great non-fiction, for me, understanding how people react to change (which is the core of what sci-fi is about) is far more valuable that someone trying to explain to me what already happened.
Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked.
Welcome to Google Island | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
It’s okay if that freaks you out, just a little. Now go read Nick Harkaway’s The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World.
Google Now Gets New Cards For Reminders, Music, Public Transit, TV, Books And Video Games
This is one of my favorite features about Android. It gives very useful contextual recommendations, especially when I’m traveling and even when I travel internationally.
I could see it now; it would be like the Island of Misfit Toys, but with crazy scientists instead. What could go wrong?
On a simular note, I’ve been reading The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius and really enjoying the fun collection of short stories.
My theme song. – Preview it on Path.
