I really like the idea behind SimplySecure—focusing on making security more intuitive and usable. There’s a long history of usability and security being at odds and they’re doing some good work to try and fix that.
This discussion with them about how designers can improve the state of security and privacy online is well worth a read.
The smart folks at Google are now using a technology called RAISR to shave up to 75% off the file size of the images they display. It uses machine learning to enable it to be much more intelligent about the upsampling methods applied to images. Clever stuff!
A study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that “rich” teens use the web very differently from “poor” teens.
…richer teenagers were more likely to use the internet to search for information or to read news rather than to chat or play video games.
If you dig into the actual report itself you’ll find a bit more context.
After accounting for differences in the ability to read and understand printed texts, students’ socio-economic status has only a weak, and often not significant, relationship with performance in the PISA test of digital reading. In other words, students with good reading skills, regardless of their background, have a much easier time finding their way around—and mining the considerable assets of—the Internet.
Seems to echo many other reports about barriers to internet access in stating that literacy—whether digital or language—remains a significant obstacle.
Harry started a newsletter late last year, and it’s been pretty fun—I particularly enjoy the cocktail recipe in each issue.
His latest issue mentions this really well-done video from TED-ed about sorting algorithms. The video uses an example of having to sort a pile of books and does a really nice job of illustrating the differences between the various algorithms at your disposal.
Fun visualization of 1,000 American’s activity over the course of an average day.
Run from data-driven companies. In thrall to semi-science and blinded by their dogma, they’ve lost the ability to see intelligent alternative perspectives on their business, their products, and the world. Embrace instead data-informed companies. This isn’t mere grammatical pedantry — a company genuinely informed by data understands the risks of datafication and adopts sophisticated, balanced approaches to strategy that blend quant, qual, and even some of that unfashionable prediction and intuition.
Pretty impressive investigation and creative work done by the GitHub folks to make their diff pages, some of the slowest on the site, three times faster.
I love companies that are as invested in giving back to the community as they are at doing quality web-work. The Guardian is certainly one of them, and their latest post is a great example. They walk through several errors and mistakes they made on their site this year, why those mistakes were made, and how they fixed them.
Great introduction to the various different types of browser caches by Yoav Weiss, told as a tale about Questy’s Journey. The illustrations by Yoav’s daughter, Yaara, are also wonderful.
Matt Griffin’s wonderful documentary about the web is now available to stream for free on Vimeo.