Tag Archives: MIT

Stories From This Week

30th January 2021

Really interesting visual piece on The Future Of Fandoms – ‘a rapidly emerging cultural and commercial currency’. From Zoe Scaman, Founder at Bodacious.

A Collection of All the 2021 Trend Decks. If you like poring over trend decks this is a treat. This collection includes trends in tech, social, consumer, space, and more from the likes of Deloitte, Brandwatch, Dentsu, MIT, We Are Social, WGSN, and Trendwatch. Also see tab for review of 2020.

Jimmy Wales’ favourite Wikipedia page ,apparently. Interesting take on comedy, apparently it all seems to be about the letter ‘k’.

A new wave of apps are baking the immediacy and rawness of audio into the core experience of social media, making voice the way people connect again. The Future of Social might be Audio. 

Wonderful. discussing skateboarding with filmmaker Werner Herzog(3’54”).

A couple of tongue in cheek campaigns from the world of travel, this week…Firstly, the Lapland town of Salla highlights climate crisis with a 2032 Olympics campaign and New Zealand wants people to stop ‘traveling under the social influence’ (2’31”).

From geniussteals. ‘Understandably, we are living in a period of intense nostalgia, as we reflect on the things that brought us joy pre-pandemic. However, is nostalgia good or bad for mindfulness? Despite the temporary relief that nostalgia brings us, can heavy reflection actually harm our daily mental health? Noel Hunter, PsyD, notes that a healthier route includes a balance of past and future nostalgia – memories we are creating in the present.

This is great fun, if you can take the abuse. How Bad Is Your Spotify?  An A.I. project from The Pudding*, that asks you to connect your Spotify and then engages you in a text conversation about how bad your music choices are. (2 min play) (*is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays.)

According to The Ringer, these are the 50 best cult movies. But, isn’t the best one missing?

A 23 bed detached house for sale in Portsmouth (£4.24m). Looks nice. Just one catch…

Ten Stories We Have Enjoyed This Week

6th September

1) Is Modern Life Making Us Dumber ? 
We already know that we have smaller brains than our distant ancestors and more recently research has indicated that overall IQ’s are dropping.Apparently the rot set in when we stopped hunting and started farming. 

This is not a solution but it can help limit the damage – Why Walking Helps Us Think. 

2) The Brighton Digital conference is on this month and kicked of with the standout Dots : Connecting Ideas event ( #dotsconf ) which featured such innovation luminaries as @neilperkin, @faris and @herdmister. If you did not manage to make it you can find all speeches on here. 

My favourite quote from the day – You are a mash up of everything you let in your life HT Hugh Garry (@huey) 

In the same vein , from @brainpickings this week – On Why Dot Connecting is The Key to Creativity. 

3) A rather ‘time sensitive’ travel and information guide – 33 things to Eat, Drink, See and Do , before climate change ruins everything. Some of the highlights include – Cherries, Las Vegas, Oysters and of course – The North Pole. 

4) From Frederic Filloux – Legacy Media: The Lost Decade In Six simple Charts. 

5) So Apple may have had a data breach ( or not? ) Who then is at risk now? 

But this is more interesting – Our moral perspective on different kinds of leaks and how inconsistent we are. 

Slate’s Amanda Hess takes on commentators who have shared advice such as “don’t take nude selfies” that appear to be blaming the victim: “These messages instruct women that they are to blame for being sexually exploited because they dared to express themselves sexually in private and in consensual contexts. (When hackers steal credit card information, the public isn’t blamed for daring to shop.) As Lena Dunham succinctly put it, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web.'” Hess brings up a lot of important points. But there is a difference between blaming the victim and reminding everyone of the inherent risks built into the network. We shouldn’t blame someone who had their personal photos hacked any more than we should blame a victim of credit card theft. But we should advise both to assume that if it’s on the Internet, it’s not safe. 

6) The Digital Revolution Exhibition finishes next week. Definitely worth a visit if you haven’t been. 

At the exhibition, City of Drones allows players to pilot virtual crafts through a ‘generative geometric environment’. City of Drones charts “the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract cityscape,” in which, “players pilot a virtual craft to explore an infinite urban landscape.” It looks great and you can get an indication of how it works here. 

7) Interesting piece on why we always like to hear bad news and positive thinking and optimism come less naturally. 

8) Worth checking this out ,weekly from MIT – Recommended From Around The Web – Including : There is no hope for Amazon’s Fire Phone, Ferguson reveals a Twitter loop, Three things you didn’t know about Arachnids that live on your face…. 

9) A must for all lovers of sophisticated writing – The Unlikely Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of “Viz” Comic (spoiler alert – it’s not as funny as it used to be…..) 

10) Essential weekend viewing : Slow-mo skateboard tricks – Impressive and soothing. 

Finally – love the new delivery mechanism for the latest IKEA catalogue.Welcome to the ‘bookbook’. 

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

Saturday 19th July 2014

1) From WARC – The 100 smartest marketing campaigns in the world ( ht @Faris) Interesting stuff and a really eclectic blend here, including – Vodafone, AMEX , Philippines Dept of Tourism, P&G and Art Series Hotels. 

2) Snapchat Adds Filters That Unlock Art Based on Your Location. 

3) Its 45 years since the first moon landing. Here are some fabulous pictures from that day 

…and here is what it might have looked like if it had been directed by Stanley Kubrick (video). 

4) Wonderfully done. If you are missing the World Cup here you can relive the Greatest World Cup Moments with this hand drawn Flip Book. 

5) Rupert Murdoch is after Time Warner. He’s had a £8 billion offer refused …… But he is really after HBO. 

6) Nice piece of Branded and useful Content from Heineken – Their @wherenext service helps users find their city’s hot spots. 

7) Yahoo Seeks to Bring the Concert to Your Couch – If successful, the program will help establish Screen, Yahoo’s video site and competitor to YouTube. For Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter, and the rest of the music industry, it could create a franchise for online concerts. 

8) Interesting perspective from MIT – Forget the Wisdom of Crowds – Neurobiologists reveal The Wisdom of the Confident. 

9) Extraordinary – Journalist Ryan Block records the already infamousComcast customer service call from hell. 

10) Nicely done. Lego’s ‘Doctor Who’ 50th Anniversary Video Tribute. 

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

12th July 2014

1) A look at the Wall St Journal’s predictions for the future …. from 1989.The really interesting things are the one’s they got wrong. 

…and a 30-year history of the future: Nicholas Negroponte’s #TED talk from TED 2014. 

2) From Trendwatching – The Most Bang on Trend Innovations from the first half of 2014. 

3) The World Cup Final is on Sunday but we already know who won the World Cup – Adidas. ‘Argentina, sponsored by Adidas AG, triumphed on penalty kicks in Sao Paulo to eliminate a Dutch side outfitted by Nike Inc. of the U.S. In the final, it will face fellow Adidas-backed team Germany, which defeated Nike-supported Brazil 7-1 on July 8. The Herzogenaurach, Germany-based company also outfitted the Spanish team that won the last World Cup in 2010’. 

4) The $ 1 Billion that Facebook paid for Instagram may have actually been really good value – ‘The photo-sharing social media service has a fast-growing, hyper-engaged user base that advertisers love. Now it just needs to figure out how to make money for corporate parent Facebook’. 

5) Beautiful. High-flying highlights from the International Drone Photography Awards. 

6) Forget the Shortest Route Across a City; This New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful 

7) The best Grand Depart ever? For years I have been watching the Tour De France and ( especially ) from the aerial shots , you really appreciate what a beautiful country France is. Watching the aerial shots of the Yorkshire Dales at the weekend , it struck me just how beautiful the UK can be as well. Here is the video that persuaded Tour De France organisers to start this years race in Leeds. 

..and how selfies are ruining The Tour. 

8) From @alandebotton : ‘Of course one should read Plato’s 36 books, but if you have only 4 minutes, here is a shortcut’. 

9) Love this – Music Streaming Keeps Growing, But Vinyl Isn’t Going Anywhere. 

10) Great piece of advertising from First Direct – A platypus walks into a bar….. 

This Week’s Top Ten Stories

22nd February

1) Why Facebook Had To Have WhatsApp.The messaging service is hugely popular outside the U.S., with over 450 million users. Facebook just bought the only app that could truly call itself a Facebook killer – Read More

2) MIT Technology Review presents the 50 smartest companies
of 2014 – Read More

3) The most scandalous social network? Secret is , allegedly, is about people in San Francisco – devouring their Secret feeds, with an unpredictable mix of gossip – It’s all here, maybe true and maybe not, but guaranteed to get you guessing about who posted it – Read More

4) Some interesting tools and apps you can use to get to know a city – read more. And Citymapper is an incredibly popular travel guide to London, Paris, Berlin and New York. According to Wired half the phones in London have it loaded – Read more

5) Winston Churchill’s statue finds a home in a London hotel bar – The bar offers the Churchill Martini, apparently he liked his martini served without vermouth added – ‘it just had to be present in the room’. – Read More

6) Keep on Running? – Heat maps reveal where people run in major cities – Read More

7) Like to travel? A big fan of Disney? Here are 52 Disney animated movie locations mapped around the world – Read More

8) Great piece from Wired on how data is improving football teams performance on the pitch – The Winning Formula – Read More

9) Where Data Viz began – a brief history of infographics – Read More

10) The Future of Love, from TED – Read More

And finally, on January 15, 2014, Alex Honnold free-soloed El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) in El Portrero Chico, Mexico in a little over 3 hours. The climb rises 2,500 feet to the summit of El Toro. It could be the most difficult rope-less climb in history – Read More

This Week’s Top Ten Stories from The Digital Filter

9th February

1) Facebook launches Facebook Paper alongside it’s existing offering in the app store. Only currently available in the US, commentators are saying this is the future of Facebook on mobile – read more. 
This is what Facebook themselves are saying about it. Watch the video here– read more. And this is nice – to celebrate it’s 10th birthday, each user gets their own video of highlights from the last 10 years – Read More 

2) Microsoft have a new ( and young CEO ) who hails from Hyderabad, India Here is the Times of India on why Satya Nadella will be different from Steve Ballmer – read more. 
…and this is how they make their money – Office first , then Windows – which is fast being caught by the server business. Entertainment (xbox) is tiny and Bing is still losing money, although not as much as before – Read More 

3) NASA shows 60 years of climate change in 15 seconds Note – increasing amounts of orange and red are not good – Read More 

4) Where were you when JFK died? My grandparents and parents remembered exactly where they were , and a similar event for my generation was the death of Princess Diana. This piece from The New Yorker looks at how we now gather and share the news, with reference to the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman – Death still means that people go looking for answers, but now they use Google. Real-time chronology, trending subjects, and curated news feeds mean that the Internet, with its mix of individual expression and automated sorting, writes the first draft of the eulogy – read more. 

and on the same topic – Rush : ‘ How breaking news is breaking us’ –Within the space of 17 minutes, the Internet-accessing world may have known that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his apartment before his three young children, with whom he was scheduled to spend the day, and his longtime partner, Mimi O’Donnell.” The WSJ broke the story with a tweet. And within a few minutes it was everywhere. But would it have really mattered if all of us found out about it a few hours later? That’s a question we no longer even ask these days. We’re in too much of a rush for that – Read More 

5) (As we know) real time social media can be dangerous. JC Penney got plenty of coverage when these badly spelt tweets went out during the Superbowl – Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this??? and Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. They then sought to recover with this – Oops…Sorry for the typos. We were #TweetingWithMittens. Wasn’t it supposed to be colder? Enjoy the game! –Read More 

6) Interesting post from Econsultancy on how ‘Content Marketing’ is just another term for ‘Advertising’ – Content marketing and advertising clearly aren’t as separated as they’re made out to be. One does not replace the other, and we can stop worrying about the apparent ‘lack of budget’ for content marketing. We’re just dressing it up differently, that’s all – Read More 

7) Some fabulous pictures here – The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards – Read More 

Continue reading →