Riccardo Mori (Riccardo Mori)My habits and preferences betray my somewhat long history with computers and technology. I didn’t grow up with smartphones and tablets. My first home computer was a Commodore VIC-20. I was 27 when I first used a mobile phone. Despite what some people may think, I’m not averse to change and my brain is still flexible enough to pick up new habits or change old ones. What happens when you get older, though, is you tend to consider more often whether changing a habit or rethinking a workflow is actually worth it. And what I’ve always said about the iPad in this regard is this: if I’m faster, more efficient, more productive with a Mac (or, in certain fringe cases, with an iPhone), why should I learn a more convoluted path to be able to do the same thing — but more slowly and less efficiently — on an iPad?
Riccardo hits the nail on the head. I've been an iPad user since the first iteration in 2010. While I love using my current iPad Pro, the hyperbole that the iPad is the only computer most people need bothers me. I perform too many computing tasks which, although possible on the iPad, are inefficient. While I can do much of my image editing in Adobe Lightroom Mobile, it takes me much longer to do so.
Large cities (or valleys) aren't the only places where innovation happens. I think Silicon Valley gets more attention and investment dollars than it deserves.
A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.
The survey divides businesses into three main groups. Roughly 30 percent of firms are substantive innovators, launching new products and services, making data-driven decisions, and creating intellectual property worth protecting; another 33 percent are nominal innovators who engage in more incremental improvement of their products and processes; and 38 percent show little or no evidence of innovation, so are considered to be non-innovators.
The first table below charts this breakdown for rural and urban areas. Establishments in urban areas are more innovative, but not by much. Roughly 20 percent of rural firms are substantive innovators, compared to 30 percent of firms in urban areas.The Rise of the Rural Creative Class by Richard Florida witing for CityLab
New research indicates that the advice to walk 10,000 steps per day was more marketing than fact.
Scientific or not, this bit of branding ingenuity transmogrified into a pearl of wisdom that traveled around the globe over the next half century, and eventually found its way onto the wrists and into the pockets of millions of Americans. In her research, Lee put it to the test by observing the step totals and mortality rates of more than 16,000 elderly American women. The study’s results paint a more nuanced picture of the value of physical activity.
“The basic finding was that at 4,400 steps per day, these women had significantly lower mortality rates compared to the least active women,” Lee explains. If they did more, their mortality rates continued to drop, until they reached about 7,500 steps, at which point the rates leveled out. Ultimately, increasing daily physical activity by as little as 2,000 steps—less than a mile of walking—was associated with positive health outcomes for the elderly women.What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You by Amanda Mull
The landscape of the social web. It’s an old post.
A last and different way to look at Social Networks could be the metaphor of landscapes, with mountains as barriers, and roads and rivers as attractors.
Closely knit groups would be villages, echo-chambers isolated villages with no nearby roads. Larger groups, sub-optimally meshed are towns and cities, where the risk of too little meshing lurks (homeless people, drop outs etc as a consequence). Lurkers might be unnoticed city dwellers, or tourists from other landscapes, that only become visible if they make themselves known as tourists, leave footprints or marks on/in the landscape as it were. (Kilroy was here). Lurking and Social Networks
