Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Google Inc.’s life sciences group has created a health-tracking wristband that could be used in clinical trials and drug tests, giving researchers or physicians minute-by-minute data on how patients are faring. The experimental device, developed within the company’s Google X research division, can measure pulse, heart rhythm and skin temperature, and also environmental information like…
The murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, last week put a bright spotlight on white supremacists who use the Internet to organize, proselytize, and radicalize—a process that ended in bloodshed when 21-year-old Dylann Roof allegedly went on a killing spree motivated by racism. The massacre has returned scrutiny to white supremacist communities…
Over the weekend, Taylor Swift took on the biggest company in the world — and won — in a battle that ultimately reveals how weak the position of Spotify and other streaming music companies really is as they are squeezed between superstar performers and giant platform companies. The background is Swift’s longstanding opposition to free…
Tucked in the woods 30 miles north of Washington is a plant packed with energy-guzzling machines that can make even an environmentalist’s heart sing — giant conveyor belts, sorters and crushers saving a thousand tons of paper, plastic and other recyclables from reaching landfills each day. The 24-hour operation is a sign that after three…
Published on Jun 21, 2015 Online harassment is a major problem, but it’s rarely prosecuted. If only we’d been warned about this in the early days of the internet. Category Entertainment License Standard YouTube License Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Online Harassment (HBO) – YouTube.
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles about the effects of software and automation on the economy. You can read the other stories here and here. The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering…
This weekend at WordCamp Denver, Kevin Conboy announced that Automattic’s long-awaited O2 project is now publicly available on GitHub. In a recent interview with WP Tavern, Matt Mullenweg confirmed that the o2 development team is shifting its focus to WordPress.com’s core products but that the o2 code would be public for anyone to use. o2…
The sneaky designers at Beats by Dre employ a clever trick to make you think that the company’s plastic headphones are durable products worth the premium price. Beats by Dre headphones are garbage. Besides their crappy sound, they’re basically designed to break. And yet they sell millions of pairs of headphones. It’s practically a perfect…
To Beggars Group Labels Artists and Managers: We thought it was time to update you on the situation with Apple Music, following speculation in the press, some of it ill-informed. Apple have been a wonderful partner for the last decade, and we confidently trust they will continue to be so. We have recently been in…
It wasn’t until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and…