Etsy is the top online platform for selling crafts. Samantha Close created this great 30-minute documentary about the invisible workers that keep this platform running. Check it out below.
Month: June 2020
What do your tweets say about you?
Type a twitter handle in this site and find out what your tweets say about you (or someone else). May be a nice tool for reverser surveillance in job search. Analyze your future boss’s (or company’s) twitter account to decide whether to take that job. Pic is of my own twitter account :-O
Innovation Origin Story: Civilization
I love origin stories about innovations because they show how much could have gone wrong and how a delicate combination of intuition, analysis and chance ultimately lead to success. In this short video, Sid Meyer (one of the most successful computer game designers alive) tells the story of one of his best known games: Civilization. Worth the watch even if you do not like computer games.
Neoliberal Bot
I find people that offer quick fixes and spread out self-help advice to be very harmful. When these people are academics and should know better, they are evil. I just found a great account on twitter that captures the how empty all of this self help advice actually is. Make sure you follow @lifeadvicebot
Ignoring bad leadership is bad for business
There’s plenty of research about how bad leadership creates health problems for employees. This piece argues that it is also bad for companies. I wonder how many leaders are brave enough to fire a toxic manager.
How do recover from a paper rejection
Nice piece from Nature on how to recover from getting a paper being rejected. If I may offer my own bit of advice, there are three points that have been helpful to me:
- Decide wether this is salvageable or whether it needs to become a book chapter.
- If it is salvageable, then begin the rewrite by writing a mock letter to the review team. Reviewers are not stupid, so it is important to make mindful choices about which points to address and which to ignore.
- In no case send the paper as is to another outlet, even if it is a lower tier journal.
Cool books: ‘Relating to things’
My main drive to do research is to understand what are the deep mechanisms at work around me. I feel that if I can at least see all of this hidden processes, I can carve some more agency in my life. A recently published book, called “Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial” offers amazing new insights about our relationship with things. I found it fascinating. I’ll let the book introduce itself:
We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation – inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each other in ways that do not involve us at all.
Case studies include Amazon’s Alexa, the Internet of Things, Pokémon Go and Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner. Authors explore everything from the care work undertaken by objects, reciprocal human/machine learning, technological mediation as a form of control, and what it takes to reveal things that tend to be hidden and that often (by design) conceal the ways in which they use us.”