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Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company’s tremendous success with their various i-gadgets. It is a convenient truth: You…
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Bollen: Do you ever feel weird about fame? It does allow you to meet amazing people on this planet and do unimaginable things. Stipe: I love it. With the difficult parts of fame, that alone makes it so worthwhile, because of the doors it’s opened for me. I’ve worked really, really, really hard at what…
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Stipe: The idea was to present a 21st-century version of an album. What does an album mean in the year 2011, especially to generations of people for whom the word album is an archaic term. An album for me as a teenager in the ‘70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of…
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Programming iPhone Sensors
Programming iPhone Sensors paperbits: O’Reilly Media is publishing a book on programming and communicating with sensor networks with iOS devices, called iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino. The examples and apps in the book rely on the Redpark Serial Cable, which provides a dock-connector–to-RS-232-serial link for iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch. This cable makes communicating…
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laughingsquid: ArtBloc, A Mobile Art Venue Made of Two Shipping Containers but you have to be able to move the shipping containers around, and so you need to have two tractors, or be in a state/municipality that allows double length trailers. Oh, and you’ll need a crane that can lift the second container. Visually, though,…
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Almost two generations of human beings have been educated and socialized to think in terms of universal selfishness. “We need to get the incentives right” has been the watchword for anyone engaged in designing any kind of interaction, organization, or law. “What’s in it for him/her/us?” is the question we have trained ourselves to ask…
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In order to foster cooperation, it is critical to set up systems that appeal to participants’ intrinsic motivations—that is, what they want to do from within—instead of systems based on monitoring people and rewarding or punishing them according to their behavior. Two facts make this tough to implement. First, intrinsic motivation is in its infancy…
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beautyandthebook: Don’t look at the price… Just enjoy. recursive storytelling
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heyoscarwilde: 8 Bit Anatomy illustration by Diego B. :: via flickr.com
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In science, Pasteur codified serendipity as a method. Fortune, he said, favors the prepared mind. Others have defined (good) luck as the coincidence of preparation and opportunity.