Ten Stories From This Week

7th March 2021

50 examples of corporations that failed to innovate. All the usual suspects are in here. Top three being, Kodak, Nokia and Xerox. (ht @here_forth)

Nice piece from Gianni Giacomelli, Head of Innovation Design at MIT Collective Intelligence Design Lab. The distance-less future, and you– ‘The industrial revolution centralised work into shared facilities. That’s where we all largely stayed until the impossible became possible a year ago, when the world started becoming truly “phygital” and people started getting the hang of doing work remotely.

Scrolling infographic from NYT, investigates the view that the warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the Gulf Stream to weaken. In the Atlantic Ocean, subtle shifts hint at dramatic dangers. 

EcoVeritas CEO David Harding-Brown recently observed: “Sustainability as an umbrella term is becoming meaningless; a series of macro statements that consumers can no longer relate to or engage with.”  …And this is Marketoonist’s take on sustainability marketing.

Animate the faces in your family photos with this technology. (They say)‘experience your family history like never before!‘ This twitter thread shows how it has brought some famous faces to life.

Tim Harford on the ‘hard lessons of home schooling.’ ‘Even in the narrowest economic terms, this comes with quite a price tag. An OECD report suggests, that the students “affected by the closures might expect some 3 per cent lower income over their entire lifetimes”. Since these children will one day be a quarter or even a third of the workforce, economic growth can be expected to be 1.5 per cent lower each year “for the remainder of the century”. That calculation was done in September before many schools closed again. 

From Information is Beautiful. The Covid-19 Coronavirus Data Dashboard. Live vaccination visuals and COVID/Coronavirus interactive visualisations. See total number of vaccinations given, doses per 100 people, % of population inoculated. Updated daily. 

Meet ‘The Farmer’—Dave Van Dame, a staple of Alta Ski Area for the past 48 years. Sweetgrass Productions and Alta teamed up to tell the visual story of Alta’s most famous snow ‘farmer’. This guy has quite the skiing technique. (3′ 33″)

A number of videos doing the rounds, with songs being played in empty shopping malls. I Want To Know What Love Is, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), and Africa, by Toto. Some perspectives suggest these are mocked-up, but the effect is pretty eerie, either way.

Really beautiful piece by Prof Galloway, on the death of his beloved dog Zoe. A wonderful, soulful read for dog owners, or indeed anyone who has suffered loss.