The story of their lost footing is also the story of something larger — the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions. Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the …
2013 prediction: the human-technology bologna sandwich
The biggest trend in 2013 will be a business process shift to what I elegantly deem the “bologna sandwich model” of humans and machines. That means: this will be the year organizations figure out how to use employees not to replace technology (“Would someone please go find and count those Twitter mentions?”) but to envision …
The antithesis to 10,000 hours
There’s a lot of reasonable thinking out there about how a skill is mastered, including the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m the first to advocate for the value of persistence — in marketing analytics, software development, and countless other disciplines there’s tremendous value in chasing every issue to its core and in finishing the job, …
Visualizing characters + action over time = magic
Excellent visualization of Game of Thrones characters and their events trajectory (spoiler alert: lots of killing) over time by Jerome Cukier (h/t Nathan Yau). Love the proliferating use of data visualization to understand complex character structures and plot lines in novels; see also Infinite Atlas and this selection from brain pickings.
Creating a network for women entrepreneurs
…women-owned firms employ just 6% of the U.S. workforce and contribute just 4% of all business revenues. Women might be making overall progress in the rate at which they are launching new ventures, but are failing to launch and build high-growth ventures. — Jennifer McFadden, who proposes radically transparent networks as one possible solution to …
The Tempest, digital humanities edition
We didn’t want this to be the authoritative version of the play to be admired or read in solitude; we want it to be a generative version of the play, one which sparks innovation and creates new knowledge. – Prof Elliot Visconsi, talking about his new iPad app supporting a social reading and learning experience of …
Enabling IT for the digital consumer shift
Last week at a Boston-based CIO Summit, I spoke about the challenges facing traditional IT roles in a shifting enterprise technology landscape. Consumerization of IT is a foregone conclusion: employees are bringing not only their personal devices (BYOD-sanctioned or otherwise) but more significantly their habits and expectations born of living in a full-on digital world. The …
How universality benefits the web profession
We’ve spent two decades talking about a web that’s inclusive and flexible. We’ve devoted countless hours to creating spaces where conversations and relationships can thrive. The longer we tolerate a community that excludes others, the more we, as an industry, are defined by exclusion—and the further away we remain from the universality we’ve worked so …
7 tips for digital and social event strategy
There’s a lot of apt criticism of social media snake oil salesmen — including this terrific Onion video (embedded in a good sendup of TED). But social media does deliver news, shape opinion, and forge connections in important ways. In the forging connections department, in-person events remain vital. As much as digital platforms enable you …
Becoming better communicators
We want people to care about design as much as we do, but how can they if we speak to them in a foreign language? It’s important that, as we do with any user, we find a shared vocabulary and empower everyone else to become evangelists for our cause. — Inayaili de Leon in A …