And So We Meet, Again: Why The Workday Is So Filled With Meetings : NPR “Experts say poorly run meetings grind away at employee engagement and make companies less reactive by bogging decisions down in human red tape. Some companies, including Mattel, try to create limits around the size, duration or frequency of meetings. But meetings often last longer than they need to, Rogelberg says, because managers don’t understand Parkinson’s Law. This is the idea, backed up by research, that tasks take as long as the time allotted. If you budget two hours, it takes two hours.” h/t D’Arcy Norman tags: meetings time weekly Off the 3-D Printer, Practice Parts for the Surgeon – NYTimes.com “Before he operated on Violet, Dr. Meara wanted a more precise understanding of her bone structure than he could get from an image on a screen. So he asked his colleague Dr. Peter Weinstock to print him a three-dimensional model of Violet’s skull, based on magnetic resonance imaging pictures.” tags: medical weekly 3d printing A cleric in the world’s most populous Muslim nation has declared selfies a sin – Quartz More fodder for the selfie class I will never teach. tags: selfie religion muslim sin weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

As we may understand — Medium “However, in applying some of the (nicer!) ideas in practice, particularly towards influencing more sustainable behaviour at work and at home, around issues such as office occupancy and food choices, as well as energy use, it became clear that the models of people inherent in many kinds of ‘intervention’ are simply not nuanced enough to address the complexity and diversity of real people, making situated decisions in real-life contexts, embedded in the complex webs of social practices that everyday life entails. (This is, I feel, something also lacking in many current behavioural economics-inspired treatments of complex social issues.)” tags: weekly design think understand thoughtvectors univ200 Visions of a Future, Drawn From the Past — Vantage — Medium tags: art landscape weekly future technology nature Social Anxiety: Why Artist Amalia Ulman’s Fake “Middlebrow” Instagram Is No Different From Yours | The FADER “Indeed, probably the most intriguing thing about Ulman’s project is watching the artist construct a convincing illusion of a real-life person’s real-life Instagram feed. Of the 100,000+ followers she has as of this writing, I can’t imagine that all of them are “in on the joke.”” tags: social anxiety artist instagram sociology weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Study Shows ‘Readability’ Scores Are Largely Inaccurate “Teachers, parents and textbook companies use technical “readability” formulas to determine how difficult reading materials are and to set reading levels by age group. But new research from North Carolina State University shows that the readability formulas are usually inaccurate and offer little insight into which age groups will be able to read and understand a text. ” Study Shows ‘Readability’ Scores Are Largely Inaccurate “Teachers, parents and textbook companies use technical… http://t.co/hlLBsk886g — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) January 11, 2014 tags: IFTTT Twitter reading scores data weekly tweet 2014 Olympic Freestyle Uniforms – snow camo to mask movement from judges “One of the coolest innovations has to be the snow camo. Mogul skiers are judged by their amount of body movement while going through the course. With a unique pattern for each country, the hope is the snow camo will help mask some of the unwanted movement.  “ tags: freestyle uniforms moguls technology camo judges olympics weekly tweet Scarlet Song | I like the result but the real interesting portion is the description of the process. tags: transmedia art photography process artist photo weekly © 2008 Gary S. Stager “I have strong reservations about both grades and rubrics. I believe that both practices […]