A useful guide for those of us trying to push user research forward in our organisations.
Moves to modern research: A new maturity model for user-centric organisations — — dscout
The strange death of libertarian England — — Stumbling and Mumbling
Related to the idea that British people just aren’t interested in liberal ideas at the moment, Chris Dillow wonders whatever happened to right-libertarianism.
The Tories won on policies that repudiated many of their professed beliefs: a higher minimum wage; increased public spending; and the manpower planning that is a points-based immigration policy.
After outlining some reasons why this shift has occurred, he notes some less respectable explanations:
One is that we have lost the cast of mind which underpins right-libertarianism — that of an awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge. We need freedom, thought [Friedrich] Hayek, because we cannot fully understand or predict society…
We live, however, in an age of narcissistic blowhards who are overconfident about everything. This is a climate which undervalues freedom.
5k 6–X — The next five parkruns
In my blog post about my first five parkruns, I told the story of how I unexpectedly beat my 5k personal best at Highbury Fields parkrun. This post outlines what happened in my next five parkruns, where I got some unexpected personal bests and lost a whole run. Read full article
CommentOpera: Phantom of the Turnaround — Hindenburg Research
If you still have the Opera web browser installed anywhere, now might be the time to stop.
With its browser business in decline, cash flow deteriorating (and balance sheet cash finding its way into management’s hands…), Opera has decided to embark on a dramatic business pivot: predatory short-term lending in Africa and Asia.
The article goes on to outline evidence of some seriously dodgy practices. What a sad end to the Opera story.
Balwearie High School opening (BBC archive)
This video is apparently footage from a 1964 BBC interview from the opening of my old high school, Balwearie in Kirkcaldy. It’s fascinating to see how much of it looked exactly the same when I went to school between 1998 and 2004 — and how much of it was totally different.
For example, it is a revelation to see what the roof was originally like. The attractive and useful rooftop garden and astronomical equipment was gone, replaced with a plain felt roof with a haphazard walkway of paving slabs.
The school was also about twice as big by the time I went there. No-one confused it for a luxury hotel. But then again, that’s what 30 years will do to a building.
I wonder what it’s like now, 20 more years on.
Via Rich Gordon
New sim swap hacks highlight carriers’ wobbly security — — Light Reading
Researchers at Princeton University called three of the four major [US] carriers and tried to convince customer service representatives to move phone numbers to new sim cards. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile each received ten calls from the researchers, who posed as customers.
Astoundingly, in all 30 cases the fake customers successfully convinced the carriers to move the numbers to new sim cards.
This matters because so many other services (such as banking systems) rely on SMS for authentication. If you only need to convince one customer service representative to swap a phone number, you could potentially have access to… almost anything.
Photo — 2020-01-15
Had a lovely evening celebrating six years together with Alex, at Timberyard.
Things Fall Apart —
This articulates something I’ve been pondering for a while. Is the current political climate the result of a gradual erosion of the unwritten rules of civil society?
It turns out that the Civil Society in Britain is built on very shaky foundations. In the past few months we have seen the illegal suspension of Parliament, an act that carried no consequences whatsoever; we have seen Civil Servants bullied out of their jobs by politicians who were then rewarded for their harassment by promotion and increased status; we have seen the government spend £100s of millions on trying to deny the consequences of its own policy on Brexit and, in doing so, do possibly irreparable damage to the global reputation of the UK.
The post also makes an interesting point about how the BBC covers the UK in a way that assumes it is a stable democracy, and turns a blind eye to developments that would see other countries being scrutinised heavily.
Leaders in the past were guided by a strong sense of right and wrong — doing what’s right in the name of stability. Those days are now gone.
Accessible polling cards: Keeping it low-tech — — Website and Communications Blog
How do you make participation in workshops and training sessions as accessible as possible? My colleague Lizzie Cass-Maran has created these low-tech voting cards (using letters, colours and shapes to include as many people as possible) that are easy to make yourself — and a lot less fiddly than some of the technology solutions out there.
Dark mode favicons — — CSS-Tricks
This is pretty cool. Google Chrome will begin supporting SVG favicons. And because you can embed CSS within SVG, you can use media queries to create dark mode favicons. Smart!