Made Better in Japan. Fascinating look at food, service, and fashion in Japan. Focuses on the obsessive approach to quality that many places adopt. Japan is among the top countries on my list to visit.
Made Better in Japan
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Category Archives: Asides
Create lasting content
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On Content: less is more. Sean Blanda nails it here. Great set of guidelines for any writer to aspire to. I wish more publications understood and followed these ideas.
Work+
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Work+ A new iPhone app from Tender Creative that aims to help you discover new places to get work done. Looks like a nifty tool. Kind of similar to an idea I wrote about previously.
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers
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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers. Shouldn’t this be the kind of shady behavior that an app store review process prevents? Would be fantastic to see answers to these 3 questions.
Update: Path’s CEO answered those three questions a minute after I posted this. His response to #2 is a cop out. “Industry best practice” is just a way of avoiding blame. Protect your users data and do what’s right, not what’s typical.
Parking in Los Angeles
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Between the Lines. Fantastic piece about parking in Los Angeles as it compares to other cities. Some of the numbers (revenue, number of spots, number of meters) are astounding. Such sprawling parking kills the possibility for a dense, urban city. Earlier, “Parking Lots as Public Spaces.”
Locked in the Ivory Tower
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Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research. The proscriptive part of the article is shallow, but the process of how an article gets published is fascinating. If you’re looking for an area of higher education ripe for disruption I’m not sure it gets much better than this.
BadgeStack
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BadgeStack Project. Interesting badge-based learning software built on top of WordPress. Looks like there’s a hosted side of it as well. (via Matt Pearson)
Making It in America
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Making It in America. What manufacturing in America looks like in 2012. Fantastic work by the Atlantic.
Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer
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Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer. A slightly different approach to a similar problem as what I wrote about a while back. Creating habits that lead to predictable productivity is my biggest goal for 2012. Relatedly, I might try a more adjustable desk setup.
Concussions in adolescents and the future of football
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Jonah Lehrer on concussions in adolescents and the future of football. There is a part of me that wishes I played football in high school. I think I could have been a decent wide receiver. Reading this article makes me glad I didn’t.
