Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
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In Spain, Entire Villages Are Up For Sale — And They’re Going Cheap : Parallels : NPR
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, says Avelino Luis de Francisco Martinez, the mayor of Cortegada, a rural town in southern Galicia. An abandoned hamlet that’s part of his town isn’t for sale. He’s giving it away.
“For free! Someone just has to promise to renovate the 12 ruined houses,” he says. “They’re beautiful — bucolic! Next to a river and an 18th century royal procession path.”
The challenge? “We just need to find someone to live here in this century,” he says.”
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Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
What Makes Software Good? — Medium ““Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.” This implies, for one, that good documentation does not excuse bad design. You can ask people to RTFM, but it is folly to assume they have read everything and memorized every detail. The clarity of examples, and the software’s decipherability and debuggability in the real world, are likely far more important. Form must communicate function.” tags: weekly education apply facdev software Chinese father hires virtual hitman to ‘kill’ son in online games – so he will get a job | Daily Mail Online “A Chinese man concerned about his unemployed son’s gaming addiction hired online hitmen to ‘kill’ his avatar. “ tags: weekly The New Aesthetic — There’s Something Fishy About The Other Nefertiti… ” Perhaps the file was obtained from someone involved in printing the reproduction, or it was a scan made of the reproduction? Indeed, the common belief in online 3D Printing community chatter is that the Kinect “story” is a fabrication to hide the fact that the model was actually stolen data from a commercial high quality scan. If the artists were behind a server hack, the legal ramifications for them are much more serious than scanning the object, which has […]
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners | Threat Level | WIRED “In their malware demonstration, the researchers used a distinctive image to signal to their software that the scanner should replace a certain person’s image with an innocuous one. “ tags: tsa scanners weekly technology future The Smithsonian Wants You! (To Help Transcribe Its Collections) | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian “Those looking for a challenge might try their hand at transcribing the English-Alabama and Alabama-English dictionary. Compiled from 1906 to 1913, the massive work includes thousands of vocabulary terms. Volumes three and four still need some work. “ tags: transcription smithsonian crowdsourcing weekly Cybersecurity czar is proud of his technical illiteracy – Boing Boing “Michael Daniel thinks “being too down in the weeds at the technical level could actually be a little bit of a distraction”; Ed Felten counters, “Imagine reaction if White House economic advisor bragged about lack of economics knowledge, or Attorney General bragged about lack of legal expertise.”” tags: weekly technology government Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The Golden Calf of Process and Standardization
Way back in the dim recesses of time, about 2009 to be precise, Netflix published an interesting slide deck on how they structure their business. I remember reading it and I believed it was an interesting and positive way to frame a company culture. I shared it with a few people in our district and life rolled on. The concept has come back to me repeatedly in recent days and it seems to fit a variety of scenarios well enough that I thought it was worth talking about again. Essentially, I see this concept applying at the national, state, district/county, school, and classroom levels. The images below are my slight adjustments to the Netflix slides. All credit goes to them or whoever they got the idea from. In the beginning . . . Small (often new) organizations have a very high proportion of highly skilled employeesI think how they become high skilled is worth looking at that may be more related to attention, communication, etc. as opposed to just raw awesomeness. and as a result don’t need much in the way of processes, rules, regulations, policies etc. That’s the green area. As organizations grow and complexity increasesI’m interested in looking more at the relationship of these two variables. What gets more complex at scale, to what extent, and is […]
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