DPL Reading List – January 19, 2018
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
The Making of Apple’s Emoji: How designing these tiny icons changed my life – “…I would suggest to any designer looking for their reason to get up in the morning to find their humble mentor, or be one, and get on the road to friendship. Because magic happens when design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design.”
How companies strangle innovation - and how you can get it right – “An existing company or government organization is primarily organized for day-to-day execution of its current business processes or mission. From the point of view of the executors, having too many innovation ideas gets in the way of execution.”
Why Microsoft Resurrected A 15-Year-Old Mouse – “Among the mouse’s most ardent fans are gamers, who almost universally find it to be the most swift and precise way to interact with fast-paced games such as first-person shooters. Gamers cherish the responsiveness of physical mouse buttons-the more the better-over the simulated mouse clicks offered by trackpads. They also prefer good old-fashioned corded mice to Bluetooth ones, in part to avoid the risk of even the slightest lag or the battery conking out mid-game.”
Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone? – “After going to grayscale, I’m not a different person all of a sudden, but I feel more in control of my phone, which now looks like a tool rather than a toy. If I unlock it to write an email, I’m a little less likely to forget the goal and tap on Instagram. If I’m waiting in line for coffee, this gray slab is not as delightful a distraction as it once was.”
HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons – “Cryptography can be a hard subject to understand. It’s full of mathematical proofs. But unless you are actually developing cryptographic systems, much of that complexity is not necessary to understand what is going on at a high level.”
Google Street View Now Has A Soundtrack, Thanks To AI – “So Imaginary Soundscape is really just doing what people have done for years-but it’s doing so in an automated fashion, free of human labor, that allows its techniques to scale to an entire globe of streets, boulevards, and highways with ease. Indeed, it’s a good reminder of both the promise and limitations of AI. While neural nets can absolutely discern and react to imperceptible trends that we cannot otherwise see, much of the time, these advanced systems aren’t operating on a logic that’s beyond the core capabilities of any human.”
Train Your Employees to Think Like Hackers – “When you adopt a hacker mindset, you aren’t traumatized by rapid advances in computer technology. Instead, you embrace them and recognize their ability to make the world a better and safer place. That’s not just good for security – it’s good for business.”
