Mathew's TumblrHub (deprecated)

My pilot Hub on Tumblr is no more, as I’ve finally gotten around to launching MyHub.ai, where you’ll find https://myhub.ai/@mathewlowry/

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government. via: Diigo, IFTTT

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientists ... particularly sizable gaps between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to trust in scientists whose work is related to the environment... Higher levels of familiarity with the work of scientists are associated with more positive and more trusting views of scientists ... things that would influence their faith in scientific findings...: Open public access to data and independent committee reviews inspire the most confidence ... equal shares of Democrats and Republicans (54%) believe the public should play an important role in guiding policy decisions on scientific issues... via: Diigo, IFTTT

For those who have grown up with social media... childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. ... this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity... children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before... Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it “from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar.” Social media just makes us more adept at it... On the other hand... such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly... impede our ability to edit memories, cull ... and move on... Everyone... benefits from experimentation in adolescence... a psychosocial “moratorium” in which we hover “between the morality learned by the child and the ethics to be developed by the adult"... The Internet interrupts the privacy of this er via: Diigo, IFTTT

half a dozen specialist curators ... find speakers in two ways: ... applications ... through the TED website ... scouting for talented speakers by going to conferences and asking their network ... they create short lists... The TED curators’ advice ... can apply to any conference where you aspire to be a speaker, via: Diigo, IFTTT

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproductive...Ratings are more accurate instead when they cost something to give. via: Diigo, IFTTT

there are big issues with tags that limit their usefulness... tags are scattered... over 1 million unique tags. Many ... duplicates ... or so close that they have the same audience... represent each tag by a vector of numbers in a multi-dimensional vector space...find the meaning of these thousands of tags in a way that can represented by vectors ... I pretended each post’s tag list was a “sentence” ... fed into a training algorithm which usually takes real sentences... it figures out a tag’s vector values by looking at the tags that are used along with it ... these kinds of vectors are also known as “embeddings”... the dimensions work in concert to represent information about the tags... we can find tag vectors that are close to each other... We can also do arithmetic on our vectors... eg average the “Tech” vector with “Education” to land in the vicinity of EdTech tags... We can also solve analogies... essentially "Education" is to "EdTech" as "Agriculture" is to _"... We can also plot the tag vectors... interpreting them as points in space... a myriad of ways to do this “dimensionality reduction”... identify duplicate tags and normalize them... solve other prediction problems with machine learning... these “dense” expressive vectors ... should improve the algorithms’ ability to predict... Here are some things we’d need to consider... “word-sense disambiguation”... De-biasing embeddings... Associating tags across languages... train a cross-lingual model that embeds the tags from both languages in a shared vector space, so they could be directly compared... via: Diigo, IFTTT

show how the nature of diversity in our urban areas around the world has been changing over the past few decades... the use of sentences in data visualization is one of my favorite things. You’re adjusting a sentence using these dropdowns, which gives it a narrative component and tells you some really basic things... there’s no reason to not use text to describe what people are looking at and give them a sense of what’s there via: Diigo, IFTTT

Most successful entrepreneurs are older—and the ones running the highest growth businesses, according to research at MIT and the Kauffman Foundation, are nearly twice the age Zuckerberg was... I consistently see five traits that give older founders an edge. The takeaway, though, is that there are ways to hone that edge, even if you’re younger. via: Diigo, IFTTT

our team of researchers and policy analysts work together to analyze new data and create a platform for local stakeholders to make more informed decisions.... We arm local policy-makers with customized and data-driven insights so they can craft tailored, hyperlocal solutions. via: Diigo, IFTTT

a sophisticated and intuitive balance between vision, curiosity and passion; and a continuous process of experimentation and iteration... Grow the Ecosystem, and It Will Grow You... providing an ecosystem platform to others ... would allow Amazon to grow exponentially faster than if he poured all the company’s energy and capital into simply growing a larger ecommerce business... Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers... it’s also not enough. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf... via: Diigo, IFTTT

from 2010 to 2014, five American metro areas had the same level of business creation as the rest of the country...Rapid technological change, along with other drivers like the Great Recession and decreased dynamism are creating three economic challenges: Divergence between geographic regions... Concentration of startups and their value ... concentrated in a few metro regions Growing inequality among types of workers ... while the technology sector is growing twice as fast as the world economy... the vast majority of that wealth creation is concentrated in only a handful of places.... Startups are the key vehicle by which regions and their citizens can take advantage of technological change, and startups depend on strong ecosystems... places that fail to ... invest in startup ecosystems... will experience economic stagnation... attraction-based economic development ... a highly competitive, zero-sum game whose economic benefits are difficult to prove. via: Diigo, IFTTT

Your subconscious never rests... your goal is to direct your subconscious mind to create the outcomes you seek... unlock connections and solutions... Here’s a simple routine to get started:... Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish. Ask yourself loads of questions ... Write those questions and thoughts down on paper. The more specific the questions, the more clear will be your answers.... Ten minutes after waking up... start writing down whatever comes to mind about those things. via: Diigo, IFTTT

How seeing the other side’s narrative can de-polarize your mind... the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative, but about whether that story is somehow representative... in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once... via: Diigo, IFTTT

we’ve conflated data with truth. And this has dangerous implications for our ability to understand, explain, and improve the things we care about... data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct... subject to biases, limitations, and other imperfections... Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.... Data is a necessary ingredient in discovery, but you need a human to select it, shape it, and then turn it into an insight... Here are four big ways that we can introduce imperfections into data...We should not just ask “what does it say?” but ask, “who collected it, how did they do it, and how did those decisions affect the results?” via: Diigo, IFTTT

- recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

I am not telling anyone to be mates with racists or stop being leftwing. I am just asking that we be less comfortably numb. The result of not speaking to those who don’t inhabit our precious bubbles will confront us this week via: Diigo, IFTTT