More Corporate as Governance
Facebook is creating its own foreign service, hiring a network of ambassadors from India to Ireland to represent the Palo Alto-based social network with foreign governments and cultures.
Emulating Google. More on that here.
The Review Stack
I have a stack of books piling up I need to review. Been heads down on a few projects. Doesn’t look like the pace is going to let up for a little while. But, for those interested, here they are (pics are the links):
The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia by Danny Hoffman
Supernatural Noir edited by Ellen Datlow
I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck
Citizen Rex by Mario and Gilbert Hernandez
The Profession by Steven Pressfield
Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War by Alex Vernon (a former professor)
The Third by Abel Keogh
Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight by Tony D’Souza
The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot
Gameifying Test Prep
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The KIPP-Grockit partnership will yield a private network for SAT and ACT test prep for use by students and teachers in three of KIPP’s largest schools in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Grockit’s adaptive learning platform is designed to personalize instruction based on each user’s strengths, weaknesses and how they interact with material. The network will also come with a live, online instructor support.
On Toasters
Random musings while spooling up with a cup of joe.
A toaster is designed to warm up your slice of bread at a temperature high enough to turn it to progressive degrees of brown. In contrast to a pan, or an oven, it takes less time, and is hands off. Without cheap timing tech, the mechanical slider was a decent approach.
Which is why this gets the job done:
But from an information design perspective, the knob is a failure to think through what exactly a toaster does. It doesn’t just brown. It browns to spec. Sure, you can try a few times, figure out which number you like, and stick to it.
Or you can have an elegant solution:
- Replace the slide/pop it with a timer that is calibrated to each member of the household’s preference.
- Go horizontal, with a sliding mechanism that delivers your toast away from the heat.
- Make it transparent so that you can see your progress:
