David Lidsky's Blog, page 2872
October 12, 2015
Today in Dogs: Every Dog I Saw Today
Every day has its dog.
a.footnote {vertical-align: super; font-size: 0.8em; text-decoration: none;}I am on vacation this week, and I think you should be as well. So Today in Tabs is going all cartoon for a week! We will pay no attention to the internet nonsense of the day, but instead present a range of excellent cartoonists doing what they do. I strongly encourage you to enjoy these cartoons, forward them to your friends, and then get on with your day, secure in the knowledge that nothing more interesting or important is likely to happen, online or off.
The British Brand SCP Celebrates 30 Years Of Anti-Establishment Furniture
Founder Sheridan Coakley discusses material innovation, collaboration, and the mark of a truly good design.
[image error]Sheridan Coakley opened his furniture company SCP in 1985 with the mission of producing well-made and honest designs. Thirty years later, he's still at it simply because he loves the business. At its inception, SCP (shorthand for Sheridan Coakley Products) went against the grain of exuberant postmodern design. Today its principles of functionality and integrity have become widely embraced.
Watch: Boeing On How They Developed The World's Lightest Material
Their "microlattice" metal is 100 times lighter than styrofoam but strong enough to be used as structural components in airplanes.
For years, Boeing has been developing an extremely lightweight material that could be used for airplane parts. Despite being made from metal and being nearly as strong as titanium, the material is 100 times lighter than styrofoam.
Explore 14 Billion Years Of Wikipedia History With This Hypnotic Data Viz
Matan Staber's Histography takes every Wikipedia entry ever and turns it into an interactive historical timeline.
If every moment in human history was a single steel ball, Histography is like an 4-D Newton's Cradle, visualizing how all of these events bump up and knock up against each other on a 14-billion-year time frame. It's beautifully hypnotic—and impressively, it's all sourced from Wikipedia, which means that it keeps on updating itself.
Explore 14 Billion Years Of Wikipedia History With This Hypnotic Data Viz
Matan Staber's Histography takes every Wikipedia entry ever and turns it into an interactive historical timeline.
If every moment in human history was a single steel ball, Histography is like an 4-D Newton's Cradle, visualizing how all of these events bump up and knock up against each other on a 14-billion-year time frame. It's beautifully hypnotic—and impressively, it's all sourced from Wikipedia, which means that it keeps on updating itself.
Bumblebees Have A New Job: Delivering Organic Pesticides
If you're already out pollinating, why not just carry a little extra?
The humble bumblebee might help disrupt the multi-billion dollar synthetic pesticide industry. A new system uses bees to help deliver natural pesticides and beneficial fungi directly to plants—and because bees are so much more precise than the typical sprayers on farms, they can use a tiny fraction of the pesticide and make plants stronger.
Bumblebees Have A New Job: Delivering Organic Pesticides
If you're already out pollinating, why not just carry a little extra?
The humble bumblebee might help disrupt the multi-billion dollar synthetic pesticide industry. A new system uses bees to help deliver natural pesticides and beneficial fungi directly to plants—and because bees are so much more precise than the typical sprayers on farms, they can use a tiny fraction of the pesticide and make plants stronger.
Open Office Getting You Down? Maybe You Need An Office Treehouse
If you can't focus, perhaps you just need a little change of scenery to something more rustic.
Open offices seem to cause more problems than they solve. Noise makes us more stressed, less motivated, and less creative. We're more likely to get sick. Listening to coworkers—even if we think we've tuned them out—can impair memory and even basic math skills. And every time we're interrupted, it takes around 23 minutes to get back to whatever we were doing before.
Open Office Getting You Down? Maybe You Need An Office Treehouse
If you can't focus, perhaps you just need a little change of scenery to something more rustic.
Open offices seem to cause more problems than they solve. Noise makes us more stressed, less motivated, and less creative. We're more likely to get sick. Listening to coworkers—even if we think we've tuned them out—can impair memory and even basic math skills. And every time we're interrupted, it takes around 23 minutes to get back to whatever we were doing before.
October 10, 2015
How Artificial Intelligence Is Finding Gender Bias At Work
Several companies are now using language-and-image-processing tech to spot what we humans can't—or won't.
California recently enacted a strict gender-equality law, the Fair Pay Act, which puts the burden of proof on a company to show that it has not shortchanged an employee's salary based on gender. It's a powerful tool to address a wrong that has already happened. But can discrimination be prevented in the first place? Even managers who don't think they are biased may be—and just their word choices can send a signal. A new wave of artificial intelligence companies aims to spot nuanced biases in workplace language and behavior in order to root them out.
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