The BBC built an awesome web page testing tool
It’s called Wraith and it uses a headless web client like PhantomJS and ImageMagick to diff how your site gets displayed.
Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.
Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.
—From tweeting death by Meghan O’Rourke
MIT has posted a very detailed internal report about its role in the arrest and prosecution of Aaron Swartz
That one new feature you added? That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user? If the result of your work consumes someone’s cognitive resources, they can’t use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they’re using your app. This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.
Of course it’s not implicitly bad if our work burns a user’s cog resources.Your app might be the one place your user wants to spend those resources. But knowing that interacting with our product comes at a precious cost, maybe we’ll make different choices.
That one new feature you added? That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user? If the result of your work consumes someone’s cognitive resources, they can’t use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they’re using your app. This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.
Of course it’s not implicitly bad if our work burns a user’s cog resources.Your app might be the one place your user wants to spend those resources. But knowing that interacting with our product comes at a precious cost, maybe we’ll make different choices.
—Kathy Sierra is writing again at Serious Pony, which is just wonderful. This post on the designer’s responsibility helping our users manage their cognitive load is absolutely required reading.
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I gave a short-ish talk at San Francisco Creative Mornings about food, which I was equally excited and terrified to do. It actually turned out mostly ok! If you put this in a tab in the background, you don’t have to watch me reading off my screen too much or worry about my pocket square desperately trying to escape.
The problems with using Twitter as a model for the general population are simple. You don’t have to be a pollster to understand that searching for tweets that match some keywords hardly constitutes proper probabilistic sampling. We might display a map that shows colors mentioned by Americans on Twitter, but nobody would say this is an accurate map of favorite colors for each region of the USA. Naturally, most graphics play it safe and say overtly that they are only representions of Twitter and are not meant to provide deeper insight beyond that into the general population.
However, the distinction is lost on a lot of readers. I think many of us find these graphics so appealing because we see ourselves reflected in our data streams.
The problems with using Twitter as a model for the general population are simple. You don’t have to be a pollster to understand that searching for tweets that match some keywords hardly constitutes proper probabilistic sampling. We might display a map that shows colors mentioned by Americans on Twitter, but nobody would say this is an accurate map of favorite colors for each region of the USA. Naturally, most graphics play it safe and say overtly that they are only representions of Twitter and are not meant to provide deeper insight beyond that into the general population.
However, the distinction is lost on a lot of readers. I think many of us find these graphics so appealing because we see ourselves reflected in our data streams.
—Jake Harris, one of the smartest news nerds in the biz, on the perils of polling Twitter.
That is jaw-dropping. It is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.
That is jaw-dropping. It is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.
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If you had “a condemnation of the Supreme Court overturning a key provision of the voting rights act” as a guess to the origin of this quote, you’d be close, but, sadly, wrong.
It’s actually Antonin Scalia, apoplectic that five of his fellow justices found the abhorrent Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.
The highlights of Scalia’s DOMA dissent are schadenfreudetastic.
There is a tendency among those who grew up under the rule of law to treat it like the Rock of Ages, an immovable substrate in which all the institutions of the state are forever anchored. And so even ordinarily skeptical people tend to assume that the government obeys its own laws when no one is looking. To an astonishing extent, and to the great credit of American civic life, this is actually true.
But I think a better metaphor for the rule of law is that it is the soil in which democratic institutions take root. Like the soil, it can be depleted. And once depleted, it is not easily replenished. Secrecy erodes the rule of law because it makes democratic accountability impossible. Secrets can’t be held too broadly, so secrecy concentrates responsibility and asks too much of human nature. That is why every intelligence agency, unless given rigorous outside oversight, commits terrible excesses.
There is a tendency among those who grew up under the rule of law to treat it like the Rock of Ages, an immovable substrate in which all the institutions of the state are forever anchored. And so even ordinarily skeptical people tend to assume that the government obeys its own laws when no one is looking. To an astonishing extent, and to the great credit of American civic life, this is actually true.
But I think a better metaphor for the rule of law is that it is the soil in which democratic institutions take root. Like the soil, it can be depleted. And once depleted, it is not easily replenished. Secrecy erodes the rule of law because it makes democratic accountability impossible. Secrets can’t be held too broadly, so secrecy concentrates responsibility and asks too much of human nature. That is why every intelligence agency, unless given rigorous outside oversight, commits terrible excesses.
—Maciej Ceglowki’s response to David Simon’s shrug about the NSA’s domestic spying system is vitally important.
Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself.
Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself.
It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.