DPL Reading List – December 1, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure – “If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. And unless people and organizations manage to keep learning as fast as the world is changing, they’ll never keep growing and evolving.”
How Design-Driven Innovation Will Surpass Technology in 2018 – “I find design-driven innovation intriguing because it’s based on the observation that the usefulness and desirability of a product or service is not determined by its technological sophistication, but rather by whether people experience it as a valuable addition to their lives.”
‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups – “Here, [Molly] Graham explains why scaling companies and teams is, in her words (and she’s putting it lightly), “crazy hard” and what you can do as an early employee or a startup founder to make it easier on yourself and your team. She covers what rapid scaling actually feels like as an experience (something too few people talk about), the toughest phases of growth and how to survive them, and — most importantly — how you can anticipate the biggest challenges before they really hurt your momentum and your chances for long-term success.”
Where This Supercomputer Is Going, There Are No Hard Drives – “[Hewlett Packard] is betting its future on ginormous-RAM computing to distinguish itself from competitors like Cray, Dell, and IBM. Cambridge’s new system has a heavy arsenal of RAM–6 terabytes, or 750 times what a typical laptop has–and can be expanded up to 48TB in the future.”
Study: Clean Design Really Is Better – “You’re looking for rental cars, concert tickets, or shoes online. On some websites, you stick around and look for awhile; on others, you can’t get away fast enough. In all likelihood, the websites you were drawn to were visually clean, with more white space, less text, big images, and a simple design. That’s not just my own personal preference–a new study by the design analytics company EyeQuant shows the impact of clean, clear design on a lower bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who leave a web page without clicking on something.”
New AI Can Diagnose Pneumonia Better Than Doctors – “In the case of CheXnet, the research team led by Stanford adjunct professor Andrew Ng, started by training the neural network with 112,120 chest X-ray images that were previously manually labeled with up to 14 different diseases. One of them was pneumonia. After training it for a month, the software beat previous computer-based methods to detect this type of infection. The Stanford Machine Learning Group team pitted its software against four Stanford radiologists, giving each of them 420 X-ray images.”
Skeuomorphic Design — A controversial UX approach that is making a comeback – “Modern skeuomorphism, therefore, is the bridge at the intersection of digital and industrial design. It is about facilitating non-traditional device interaction without sacrificing usability. It is about enriching and enlivening real world objects in the context of our human physiology.”
