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A Facebook of the Future: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg Show Us Their New Content, New Algorithms, and New Alliances:

The best article about Facebook I’ve read in a long time – an excellent summary of recent history there.

Meat – a charming short story about mankind:

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

Visceral Apps:

when properly done, a visceral app actually causes your body to release endorphins.

Worth a read considering this was a real emphasis with Facebook Home and its UI physics too.

““That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation.””

– Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week via @tomstandage

The Power of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer, Understand the Brain, and Predict the Future:

In the 1980s cognitive scientists began to posit that human cognition itself is an emergent process. In your brain, this thinking goes, different sets of neurons fire in favor of different options, exciting some neighbors into firing like the waggling bees, and inhibiting others into silence, like the head-butting ones. The competition builds until a decision emerges. The brain as a whole says, “Go right” or “Eat that cookie.”

Great little Wired piece about the study of swarm patterns and transferring the lessons between different disciplines.

Killing Home Working:

If someone smart makes (what looks like) a dumb decision, then they probably know something you don’t. There is, of course, a chance that you know something they don’t, but the further away from the situation you are, the less likely that is.

A good examination of the Marissa Meyer stuff from various angles. Having worked remotely for almost 6 months now, a lot of this rings true for me. I wonder if one lesson is that you need a working from home programme managed by someone who has a fully done it for a decent duration.

You don’t want experts. You want jacks-of-all-trades:

I feel like this is one of those things that’s easy to say when you happen to be a generalist. The fact is, people are either specialists or mediocre generalists. Or worse… Mediocre specialists.

Why Bitcoin poses an interesting ethical conundrum for journalists paidContent:

“What are the ethics of writing about Bitcoin if you’ve bought some?” – David Meyer

Kind of says this in the article but I think buying a small amount and declaring it is probably sweet spot. The fact is if you’ve invested with a hope to make some real money and then not mentioned it, it’s such a conflict of interest you could only be doing it on purpose.*

*and no, I don’t own any…

“why not offer an alternative cut back version of Google results that shows fewer ads and reminds the user why they fell in love with the search engine in the first place?”

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