Data science is “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” says Harvard Business Review. (via NYTimes.com)
"The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do."
- Marc Andreessen | How the internet is making us poor – Quartz
STUDY: Secret to ordering healthier food is seeing how far you have to walk to burn it off
Scientific American reports that New York City’s public awareness posters that show how many miles a person has to walk to burn off the calories in a 20oz soda can persuade people to make healthier decisions. Seeing calories is one thing, but translating that into exercise provides a whole new level of understanding.
"The disorientation everyone blames on “information overload” may in fact have less to do with the amount of data we are being asked to process than the number of simultaneous people we are being asked to be."
- (thenewinquiry via nathanjurgenson)
"Young people today have lots of experience… interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It’s almost as if they can read but not write."
- MIT Media Labs’ Mitch Resnick | Everyone Should Code
"To put this in context, this means that 14.5% of all Wikipedia page views now are via mobile… In the 15 months it has taken for mobile traffic to triple from 1 billion to 3 billion, overall Wikipedia traffic grew just 33 percent, indicating that many loyal readers are shifting their time to mobile devices,” adds Kapoor. “Secondly, when Wikipedia hit 500 million mobile page views two years ago, 71 percent of that traffic was to the English Wikipedia. Today, only 52 percent of mobile traffic is to English Wikipedia, illustrating that mobile growth has become a global phenomenon."
- Driven by developing countries, Wikipedia passes 3bn monthly mobile page views, aims for 4bn by June (via thenextweb)
(via emergentfutures)
"This is the first time in the history of the world where the map maker is worth more than the territory that it’s mapping."
- Jeff Bezos on Google, as recalled by a former Amazon executive to Reuters. (via parislemon)
"Video game violence is not a new problem. Who can forget in the wake of Sim City how children everywhere took up urban planning? It was all ‘Tune in, turn on, and zone for residential use, man!!!’"
- STEPHEN COLBERT, remarking on gun nuts trying to shift blame for gun violence to video games (via inothernews)
"Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether."
- Clay Shirky | Is the book a crucial cultural artifact, or just an outdated container for content?
"We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been."
- Nicholas Carr | Is the book a crucial cultural artifact, or just an outdated container for content?
America’s first bookless public library will look ‘like an Apple Store’
Bexar County, Texas says that it will open the first 100 percent digital public library system in the country, unveiling plans for its first location this past week. The plan has been in the works for a while, headed up by Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who says he was inspired to create a digitally native library while reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
» via thisistheverge
You Probably Write a Novel's Worth of Email Every Year
So we know that the average worker spends 13 hours a week — 28 percent of office time — on email. Which multiplies out to (eek) 650 hours a year.
But what does that time investment look like as physical — well, “physical” — output? How does it amass as words typed and sent and otherwise generated? Here’s one estimate: 41,638 words.
To put those 41,638 discrete pieces of communication in perspective, that word count, in the aggregate, is roughly equivalent to a novel that is 166 pages in length…. slightly greater than The Old Man and the Sea (127 pages long), slightly less than The Great Gatsby (182 pages), and just about equal to The Turn of the Screw (165 pages).
