Duncan Stephen

Linknote — 7 February 2018 — 49 words

Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga

> Computers can certainly continue the process of specialisation, parcelling out jobs into repetitive chunks, but fundamentally they are general purpose devices, and by running software such as Microsoft Office they are turning many of us into generalists.

Linknote — 6 February 2018 — 147 words

Technology — Web

Google memory loss

This is interesting. It appears as though Google is losing older documents (such as 10-year-old blog posts) from its index.

I’m in two minds about this.

On the one hand, Google has long been something other than a mere web search engine, and rightly so. They want to get you relevant answers to your query. And old blog posts will rarely be the answers to many people’s queries.

But on the other hand, someone ought to be indexing the web. And if Google can’t (or don’t want to), who can?

My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.

Linknote — 5 February 2018 — 33 words

User experience — User research

Five user research rules of thumb

A useful article, not just for the rules of thumb, but also for generally provoking a reminder of what the job of a user research really involves.

Linknote — 4 February 2018 — 94 words

Technology — Web

Mosaic’s birthday: 25 years of the modern web

It feels like the world wide web has had more 25th birthdays than I’ve had hot dinners.

This article marks the 25th anniversary of the Mosaic web browser. You may not have heard for it, and I certainly never used it — it was before my time.

But Mosaic was one of the first graphical browsers, and one of the first to enable people to view images within pages. The makers of Mosaic went on to create Netscape Navigator, which in turn became the basis for Firefox.

Linknote — 2 February 2018 — 148 words

Technology

Why you should check email less often, and how to do it

Why do we check our email on average 18 times a hour, when most of us don’t receive anything like that many emails? Tim Harford suggests ways we can decrease our addiction to checking our email, and explains how checking it frequently makes our habit worse.

The psychologist BF Skinner once found himself running out of food pellets for one of his projects, which like many of his experiments involved rats pushing levers to receive rewards. To eke out his supply of pellets, Skinner restricted their release: rats would get no more than one pellet a minute, no matter how often they tapped the lever. Rather than discouraging the rats, this intermittent reinforcement soon had them hooked. These days, we’re the rats, the computer is our Skinner Box, and email is our intermittently released food pellet.

Linknote — 30 January 2018 — 115 words

Technology

Cars found trapped in Edinburgh’s ‘robot car park’ 15 years on

This news story has blown my mind in so many ways.

Firstly, that in 2001 we had the technology to use robots to store cars in a car park.

Secondly, that someone thought to give it a try in Edinburgh.

Thirdly, that this building has existed in a very central location in my city for 15 years and I had no idea about it.

Fourthly, that this prominent location has remained unused for 13 years.

The ‘abandoned’ cars are just the icing on the cake. This is Wall-E territory (although it turns out they were in fact owned by the car park and used as test cars).

Linknote — 29 January 2018 — 141 words

Web

Fears of the IndieWeb

I am toying with the idea of embracing the IndieWeb community and adding some IndieWeb features to this website.

This article from Michael Singletary pinpoints one of potential flaws of the IndieWeb, and a reason I have been reluctant to join it.

…I’m worried about the long-term survivability of this as a whole. With Known, specifically, I noticed that many of the plugins required for syndication and backfeeding are either maintained by extremely small groups of people that do not update them frequently (the Twitter plugin, for example), or others that require non-monetary motivation to keep up their service (like Brid.gy, for example). While it is great to see community-driven projects and services like these, I worry about waking up one morning to find that my content no longer syndicates or talks to other services.

Linknote — 27 January 2018 — 136 words

Business — Economics — Technology

AI don’t kill people, people do

Reflections on whether technological advances will ‘take our jobs’.

> …[I]n Western societies, technical advancement has allowed many of us to extricate ourselves from physical, dangerous and demeaning forms of work, and to create careers that are fulfilling beyond renumeration: creatively, intellectually, socially… “job satisfaction”.

Historically, technological advances haven’t meant humans losing jobs. But it has meant we have taken on increasingly complex and interesting jobs. Perhaps the future will bring us further job satisfaction.

That’s not a bad place to be at all. A reminder that we should be grateful for the luxury we have in being able to pursue a good career in the first place, rather than slaving away to make ends meet.

See also: [Why you shouldn’t follow your passion](https://duncanstephen.net/why-you-shouldnt-follow-your-passion/)

Linknote — 26 January 2018 — 89 words

Digital — Human-centred approaches — Technology

People and tooling

On the increasingly complex nature of design and development.

The way we build for the web right now feels problematic in so many ways. Instead of welcoming everyone from our teams with their various skills, we create layers of complexity that shut many out.

I sense this is deliberate, albeit in a subtly unconscious way. There is a culture among some in technology that seeks to belittle and exclude those who find complicated things intimidating. So development has grown in complexity over time, probably needlessly so.

Linknote — 25 January 2018 — 147 words

Digital — Technology

If you’re still shying away from using technology to improve customer experience – you’re doomed

Some observations from Paul Taylor on digital experience in Myanmar, where internet usage has skyrocketed recently.

For three weeks I’ve not dealt with any paper, any spreadsheets, and very few emails. I’ve negotiated seven hotels, seven flights, taxi’s and boat trips through a mix of apps, increasingly powered by automation and artificial intelligence.

In some respects coming home seems like arriving in the third world, rather than coming from it.

It reminds me of stories about smartphone usage in China, which is totally different to the west.

Westerners try to use their phones like tiny PCs. But because many people in developing countries didn’t have widespread access to PC, they don’t have those mental models. As such, they take fuller advantage of the capabilities of modern mobile devices.