DPL Reading List – August 19, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
What I Learned Working With Jony Ive’s Team On The Apple Watch – “The heart rate sensors on the Apple Watch we know today are the creation of Messerschmidt and his team. Because health and wellness are perhaps the main use cases for the Watch, Messerschmidt played a central role in the Watch’s overall design, and had regular interaction with the vaunted Industrial Design Group led by Jony Ive.”
This Guy Trains Computers To Find Future Criminals (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Just like weathermen err on the side of predicting rain because no one wants to get caught without an umbrella, court systems want technology that intentionally overpredicts the risk that any individual is a crime risk. The same person could end up being described as either high-risk or not depending on where the government decides to set that line. ‘The policy position that is taken is that it’s much more dangerous to release Darth Vader than it is to incarcerate Luke Skywalker,’ Berk said.”
A Good Idea Isn’t Enough. 3 Lessons From Building Skype And TransferWise (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Looking back, the ideas behind both companies seem like common sense: letting the whole world speak for free and making international transfers as easy as sending emails. But in fact both were a completely new way of looking at things. A way that the incumbents in the sectors either couldn’t or wouldn’t consider. It was not legacy technology that stopped the incumbents. It was them being tied to a legacy business model. That of poor service and high fees.”
How Phones Can Help Predict Thunderstorms – “In the last five years, however, the number of pressure sensors in the world has exploded. That’s because smartphone manufacturers have started putting them in their phones, mainly to help determine a device’s altitude for location tracking: Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones have packed barometers since 2011, and the feature came to Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 2014. Despite the sensor’s prevalence—a good chunk of the nearly 3 billion smartphones in the world now have one—meteorologists haven’t yet been able to take full advantage of its potential.”
How To Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better – “Being a good designer—being a good visual designer — requires intentionality. That means that you’re thinking through these questions and answering them as you’re making design decisions, not only when someone asks you the question after the fact.”
How Complaining Rewires Your Brain For Negativity (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future—so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it.”
How A Single Conversation With My Boss Changed My View On Delegation And Failure (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Listen, if there isn’t something going off the rails on your team, then I know you are micro-managing them. You are really good at what you do, and if you stay in the weeds on everything, you’ll keep things going perfectly, for a while. But eventually two things will happen. One, you will burn out. And two, you will eventually start to seriously piss off your team. So I better see some things going sideways, on a fairly regular basis.”
