DPL Reading List – February 23, 2018
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Google Thinks The Future Of The Web Is . . . Email – “Usually this sort of insider baseball development standard stuff isn’t worth writing about, but AMP for Email comes at a particularly salient time. The opaque algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can make promoting content organically (i.e., without paying) a tricky matter. As a publisher especially, you may have an important piece of news for the world to read, but unless you pay to promote it, you’re just hoping that the right people see the story and share it across social media.”
Eight Trends That Will Define The Digital Assistant Wars In 2018 – “Although Amazon and Google sold millions of smart speakers in 2017, the digital assistant wars are just getting started. This year, Alexa and Google Assistant will try to expand into new places and build bigger ecosystems. And they’ll do it while fending off new threats from rivals like Apple and Samsung.”
Why Your Office Is Beginning to Look Like a Forest – “Because the wilderness is our natural habitat, biophilia advocates say, we feel more at ease there than in a sterile office. Research has found that offices outfitted to look more like the natural world lead to happier, healthier and more productive employees. “When you look at a tree, you’re smarter,” explained Daniel Skiffington, a senior associate at NBBJ.”
Use These Five Tricks To Never Forget Something Important Again – “Forget to send that email? Return a call? Meet a deadline? If you chalk up memory mishaps to having too much to think about, you might be making excuses. “We all have a good memory; the problem is no one taught us how to use it,” says four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis.”
This MIT Startup Is Developing A Fitness Tracker For Your Brain – “What would it be like if you could look at your watch and catch your mood forecast for the next few days? If you knew your stress levels were likely to be 40% higher tomorrow, would you make sure to go to bed early and get enough sleep? Would you plan to grab coffee with a friend who always makes you laugh early in the day? That’s the ultimate dream of Rosalind Picard, the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Lab at the MIT Media Lab. She studies how to predict stress and anxiety, and her startup Empatica sells wearable sensors that pick up on the physiological signals that come from stress.”
This Is The World’s First Graphical AI Interface – “Machine learning and artificial intelligence are so difficult to understand, only a few very smart computer scientists know how to build them. But the designers of a new tool have a big ambition: to create the Javascript for AI. The tool, called Cortex, uses a graphical user interface to make it so that building an AI model doesn’t require a PhD.”
Need A Creative Idea In 10 Minutes? Play With The Stuff On Your Desk – “The main idea, she says, is to “take inspiration from your surroundings, nature, people, stories, and your imagination. And don’t forget to have fun! That’s a key component of creativity.” But don’t worry about the outcome, says Birsel. “It doesn’t have to be a new Picasso. It can just be a funky little thing. The goal is to get yourself “thinking about the same things differently. Once you’re in that space, you can move toward thinking about something else differently.””
