DPL Reading List – February 9, 2018
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles’s Post-Game Interview Is a Powerful Lesson in Leadership – “[Foles] knew that great teams aren’t only about who’s on your team, but about how the team works together. By showing humility, setting the example, and praising his teammates, Foles demonstrated emotional intelligence. In doing so, he inspired trust–the deep, long-lasting trust that requires connecting with others on an emotional level.”
The Mental Benefits of Vacationing Somewhere New – “Far too many business and personal trips are designed to maximize comfort and minimize uncertainty. (Theme parks and cruise ships come to mind.) But holidays are a terrific self-development opportunity. What workplaces need now are agile people who are comfortable being uncomfortable, understand others’ perspectives, and are able to innovate rather than regurgitate what is already known. You might be out of the office, but that doesn’t mean you should stop working on yourself.”
The Next Great Design Challenge: Make AI Comprehensible To Humans – “Increasingly, artificial intelligence is proving itself to be as good as, or better than, humans at a range of tasks, from reading mammograms to deciding who should get a mortgage. We are well on our way to forming new kinds of partnerships, in which humans have to trust the recommendations of machines. But unless those machines are capable of explaining why their recommendations are the right ones, we won’t trust them.”
A Slide Rule for Real Programmers – “When does your computer need a slide rule? When it is the UNIVAC II. This special-purpose 1950s circular slide rule from Remington Rand was used by programmers to optimize how the room-size mainframe executed instructions. The computer had a drum memory that was constantly rotating, and the most efficient program would position the drum so that the next instruction would begin executing wherever the current instruction finished.”
7 Tips to Enhance Mobile Interactions – “Mobile apps are expected to be clear and easy to operate so that they could be effectively used anytime and anyplace. Designers’ task is to create an intuitive interface which will guide users within the app helping them operate its functionality without problems.”
Scribd’s Quest To Be “The Netflix Of Reading” Is Finally Paying Off – “Amazon stepped into e-book rentals in 2014 with its $10-per-month Kindle Unlimited service-providing just a portion of what Kindle offers for sale, and generally not the biggest titles. But a small competitor named Scribd started even earlier and offers larger quantities of popular content-for a buck less. In the past year, it’s grown subscribers by over 40% to 700,000 (still well behind Kindle Unlimited’s estimated 2.5 million-plus) and has started making a steady monthly profit. After introducing unlimited reading and then moving away from it, the company is bringing it back, with some limitations designed to make it economically viable.”
How I Organize My Week To Do Three Days Of Deep Work – “While working on cross-team projects, the context switch was making it very difficult to get things done. Especially when working on projects that span multiple teams, there is a huge amount of context that needs to be formed in your mind before you start solving the problem. Building context can take hours, only to be lost by a random interruption.”
