DPL Reading List – October 5, 2018
Here are some of the articles we found this week.
The Facebook Security Meltdown Exposes Way More Sites Than Facebook – “Beyond the impact on Facebook accounts themselves, the company confirmed that breach impacted Facebook’s implementation of Single Sign-On, the practice that lets you use one account to log into others. The idea is to use a trusted service—like Facebook Google, Twitter, and so on—to log into sites and services across the web, rather than create a unique profile for each one. That saves time, and ensures you’re logging in through an entity you trust. In this case, it also appears to have potentially made Facebook’s breach an internet-wide calamity, at least for those impacted.”
How Blockchain Can Help Marketers Build Better Relationships with Their Customers – “Marketing and technology leaders have the potential to leverage blockchain to reinvent their customer relationships. Early action on this far-reaching technology will put companies in the best position to benefit from what we think will be widespread adoption.”
A 200-year-old guide to color, redesigned for the internet age – “Published in 1814 by the painter Patrick Syme based on the work of geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, Werner’s is a working dictionary of colors found in the natural world, complete with swatches and examples of animals, minerals, and vegetables where a particular hue could be found in the wild.”
What is atrial fibrillation, and why is your watch telling you about it? – “Because the watch also detects the onset of a-fib, this feature could be easily integrated into the software—throw up an alert suggesting the user take an ECG whenever the system in the background detects possible a-fib. While the quality of a Holter monitor will probably be better, this may not be needed to determine when someone’s heart bears closer examination. For whatever reason, however, Apple has chosen not to go this route, at least at the moment. That decision may be wise. Their first iteration of the hardware and software will be a public health experiment the size of which makes it exceptional. It’s probably a good thing to look carefully at the results before pushing further.”
Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies – “Even 25 years later, the emergence of Myst still represents a watershed moment in the development of computer video games. It’s an achievement on par, I think, with the launch of Pong, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris. Myst expanded the art form, expanded the market, and challenged assumptions. It also made a lot of people happy.”
The Spooky Genius of Artificial Intelligence – “AI might not be “smart” in a human sense of the word. But it has already shown that it can perform an eerie simulation of evolution. And that is a spooky kind of genius.”
A Nobel Prize Winner Explains How to Finally Think Clearly – “Nobel Prize winner and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wants us to consider how we make important decisions using different parts of the brain. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman proposes two systems that govern how we think, and you might not even know when one of them is at work.”
