9th May 2020
May is Living Streets’ National Walking Month. ‘Walking is good for our minds, our bodies and our neighbourhoods and has been a lifeline during the past year, helping people stay active and connected.’ (ht @davidpearlhere).
‘The Creative Review Annual is one of the most respected and trusted awards for the commercial creative industries, which celebrates the best work of the last year across design, advertising, digital, craft, music, creative effectiveness, and more. Each Annual is a time to honour great work but also a chance to reflect on the trends and ideas that have emerged over the past 12 months. Welcome to The Annual 2021 Winners.‘
From MIT. In 2017, China stopped sending its hackers overseas to compete in security competitions, which aim to find hidden weak spots inside the world’s most popular technologies. Instead, it set up its own: The Tianfu Cup, which launched in November 2018 and was won by researcher Qixun Zhao, who showed off a remarkable chain of exploits that allowed him to easily and reliably take control of even the newest and most up-to-date iPhones. This how How China turned a prize-winning iPhone hack, against the Uyghurs.
From Tom Roach. “If ‘Marketing Myopia’ was an over-focus on products vs consumer needs, its modern variant is an over-focus on the present vs the past, present & future, that puts us in danger of losing sight of the bigger picture for our brands.”
In the early 1990s, a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar argued that humans couldn’t handle more than 150 stable relationships, based on the size of the human brain’s neocortex and observations of other primate groups socialising. Now, a team of researchers in Sweden say that number is bunk.
Mmm…we’ll have to see if this works. Twitter will now prompt users to review and revise “potentially harmful or offensive” replies.
From Conde Nast Traveller. ‘A compilation of Mother Nature’s greatest hits, these 51 destinations need to be on your travel list.’
From MIT. We reviewed three at-home covid tests. The results were mixed. Of all the kits used, Lucira was far and away the favourite. This is a laboratory-type test, with techniques similar to those used by professional labs, and you feel a little bit like a scientist using it.
Very cool. The world’s largest photo of New York City. Taken from the Empire State Building.