Taste for Makers February 2002 I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." Taste. Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. For those of us who design things, these are not just theoretical questions. If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that "taste is subjective." Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle unexamined. Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they tell us. What goes through the kid's head at this point? Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes.
Pakistan drone statistics visualised These graphs accurately reflect the Bureau’s data on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan to the most recent strike. They are designed to illustrate in the simplest possible way key statistical data from our investigation. Click on a graph to enlarge. You are free to download and to reproduce them, provided the Bureau is credited. Pakistan drone strikes: illustrating minimum reported total casualties, minimum reported civilian casualties and minimum casualties aged under 18. This graph illustrates the minimum reported civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan year by year. This graph shows the total number of people reportedly killed in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. This graph shows the tally of total drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 – 2013.
11 Profiles in Bad Leadership Behavior CIO — Most of us have worked for a bad supervisor at one point in our lives. (If you haven't, consider yourself very lucky.) Perhaps they yelled a lot and kept everyone walking on egg shells, or maybe they couldn't or wouldn't articulate what they expected. However it manifests itself, bad leadership can kill your company's productivity and can spread like a cancer. Just because you hold a leadership position doesn't mean you are a good leader. According to Brush, many people in leadership positions don't understand that employees don't come self-motivated. The effects of bad leadership can range from mundane to catastrophic. To make sure you keep your career on an upward trajectory, it's important to determine where your strengths and shortcomings lie. The 11 profiles listed here fall into the demotivating behavior category, so If you find yourself fitting some of these descriptions, it's time for some self-examination and perhaps time to make some changes. The Lousy Listener
Yemen strikes visualised These are visualisations from the databases compiled during the Bureau’s extensive investigation into the US covert war in Yemen. They are conservative representations of the Bureau’s data which is made up of ranges not absolute figures. These graphs are drawn from the lower end of each range. They are accurate up to the latest strike. See the full data for 2014 The minimum confirmed and possible additional US strikes in Yemen each year since the first in 2002. The minimum number of people killed in confirmed and possible additional US drone strikes in Yemen. The minimum number of civilians reportedly killed in confirmed and possible additional US drone strikes in Yemen. The minimum confirmed US operations in Yemen from 2002 to the present, sorted by type.
How to Worry Less About Money by Maria Popova What Goethe can teach us about cultivating a healthy relationship with our finances. The question of how people spend and earn money has been a cultural obsession since the dawn of economic history, but the psychology behind it is sometimes surprising and often riddled with various anxieties. In How to Worry Less about Money (public library) — another great installment in The School of Life’s heartening series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living, which previously gave us Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane, Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex, and Roman Krznaric’s How to Find Fulfilling Work — Melbourne Business School philosopher-in-residence John Armstrong guides us to arriving at our own “big views about money and its role in life,” transcending the narrow and often oppressive conceptions of our monoculture. This book is about worries. The U.S. Market scene, 1922 Share on Tumblr
Who’s making the case for — and against — military drones? A BQM-74E aerial drone launches from the guided-missile frigate USS Thach (FFG 43) during a live-fire exercise in 2011. (Photograph by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class, Stuart Phillips/US Navy.) Unmanned aerial vehicles — that is, drones — have a lot of people (and entire countries) hot under the collar. Every few days it seems a new report comes out about the death of another group of “faceless” people, whether it’s suspected terrorist leaders or civilians. With little transparency from the governments launching drone strikes, that leaves speculation and debate to the watchdog organizations, foreign policy analysts, legal experts, media outlets and, of course, us opinionated regular folks. The first known drone strike was on November 4, 2002, when a CIA missile launched from a drone killed six suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen. Why use drones? For many critics, the problem is actually one of governmental transparency. Regina Dugan: From mach-20 glider to hummingbird drone P.W.
Jay Rosen: The People Formerly Known as the Audience That's what I call them. Recently I received this statement... The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you've all heard about. Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem--too many speakers! The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another-- and who today are not in a situation like that at all. * Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency.
Drones will save us, drones will destroy us: citizens sound off at FAA meeting When it comes to allowing drones to fly over US soil, Americans are of two minds: embrace domestic drones for such uses as crop dusting, high wire inspection, search and rescue, and border security, or run screaming and seek shelter from the surveillance state in the sky. Those dueling views were on display yesterday during a "public engagement session" hosted online by the US Federal Aviation Administration to gather input from citizens on the coming swarm. It quickly devolved into a massive venting session The two-hour long livestreamed conference call was open to any member of the US public to participate, providing citizens another opportunity to comment on the agency's newly proposed privacy policy on drones. But it quickly devolved into a massive venting session for and against the FAA's proposed drone privacy policy, and drones themselves. Many callers complained they couldn't even find the draft privacy policy document online. "What you're doing here is a sham."