UXP2 Dark Patterns is an interesting website that describes five different types of dark UX patterns, such as sneaking and forced action, and provides a name and shame list of sites using these patterns against their users.
Engineers at University of California San Diego created a wearable fingertip device that can generate 400 millijoules of electricity from sweat during a 10 hour sleep. Apparently our fingertips produce 100 to 1000 times more sweat than any other part of our bodies!
Researchers at Rice Unievrsity have observed networks of fungi demostrate economic market principles of Walrusian equilibrium when they negotiate the exchange of carbon & nutrients with host organisms. Manipulating these interactions may allow the organisms to sequester even more carbon, on top of the 5 billion tonnes of carbon they already secure per year.
In 1935 a Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov set a record by extracting 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift, compared to the shift average of 7 tonnes. Stakhanov was hailed as the new standard for super workers in Soviet Russia and used to create a new movement called Stakhanovism to promote workers giving their all in the service of their work. Eighty-five years later, this cult of work is alive and well in the corporate workplace where employees are expected to hand over their lives to their jobs and play the corporate power & optics games that are rife in that environment.
David Galles atthe University of San Francisco created a fantastic website with animations that visual data structures and algorithms as they are executed.
Researchers at the University of Sydney found that when the brain sees faces in objects, known as face pareidolia, the same areas of the brain's face detection network are used as when seeing people's faces. They also found a bias link between the emotion the brain perceives in a face and evaluation of emotion in subsequent faces.
A study of freely volunteered data from fitness trackers of 243 people with COVID was compared with the tracker data of 641 sick people without COVID. The study showed that it takes the body two to three months to recover from COVID-19. Resting heart rate takes the longest to return to baseline after two to three months, with step count returning to normal levels at around day 24.
Vegetables aren't real! At least in a botanic sense. In this informative and mind blowing NPR Shortwave episode, I learned that vegetables are just a culinary designation and not a scientific classification. Brocolli, cauliflower, kale - all the same plant. Listen on later in the episode where we are told that strawberries aren't even berries!
Melvin Conway stated in 1968 that "Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure.". Andreas Wolff published an interesting post on CTO Craft about using an inverse Conway Law when designing the struture of an organisation.
