Friday’s Finds

I started Friday’s Finds in May 2009 as an attempt to capture what I was finding on Twitter, as I had joined that platform in December 2007. I felt that I was making a lot of connections but at that time it was difficult to search and retrieve tweets.  So I started curating weekly compilations. After a few years these became fortnightly and remain so. Next week marks 10 years of my Friday’s Finds. I now have a decade of links and references that I have found to be of professional or personal interest. I often search these in my ongoing research or for client work. They add to my social bookmarks on Diigo. Last year I compiled a list of the best finds of 2018. You can also go back and see what were the best finds of 2013.

Here are some finds from the previous fourteen nights [a fortnight].

@GeorgeMonbiot — “If you asked me: ‘which industry presents the greatest environmental threat, oil or media?’, I would say ‘the media’. Every day it misdirects us. Every day it tells us that issues of mind-numbing irrelevance are more important than the collapse of our life support systems.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” ―Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

@EskoKilpi — “When managers think about diversity they typically look for diversity of gender and race but the real goal should be diversity of thinking, diversity of mind.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me, I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say and maybe if I talk long enough it will make sense.” —Guy Montag, in Fahrenheit 451,  via @RossDawson

Sarah Cone — “Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was unanimously found guilty by all judges, he was acquitted. Why? The legislators noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is unknown.”

Bruce Schneier — ” … we need to decide if we are going to build our future Internet systems for security or surveillance. Either everyone gets to spy, or no one gets to spy. And I believe we must choose security over surveillance, and implement a defense-dominant strategy.” via @aukia

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“A body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.” —Thomas Paine 1737-1809

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” —Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective, via @duncan_stuart

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@chriscorrigan — “Elites are bad: to the left, elites are those with money. To the right, elites are those with education.
Successful people are good: to the right, those with money are successful. To the left, those with education are successful.”

@rhappe — “Why do we need arts, writing, & history education? Because it requires making decisions in ambiguity. Where do I focus? What do I leave out? When am I done? This is a critical skill in a world of information abundance, it requires practice, & it is the only way to make progress.”

“Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal … because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don’t see, which are directly in front of your eyes.” —Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha via @connecto [seek > sense > share]

“An ounce of information is worth a pound of data. An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information. An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge.” —Russell Ackoff

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@RitaJKing — “I advocate for calling AI applied imagination instead of artificial intelligence. We need to start thinking.”

@LynnBoyden — “Why is there no place in any car for me to put my purse?”

@WhiteOwl — “We think we design jobs for organisations but really we design organisations for jobs.”

@MayaDrøschler — “I heard two scientists on the radio discussing men’s and women’s shame. Men’s shame is about being weak, women’s shame is about not being likable. Men must be strong and protective to escape their shame, women must be nice and popular. Both men & women reinforce this structure.”

@rhappe — “Why do we need arts, writing, & history education? Because it requires making decisions in ambiguity. Where do I focus? What do I leave out? When am I done? This is a critical skill in a world of information abundance, it requires practice, & it is the only way to make progress.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” —Alan Watts

“Respect and deference are two different things, sir, too often mistaken for each other.” —Maxine Peake as Martha Costello QC, Barrister in Silk via @tantramar

“Sorry to break it to you but arguments and facts don’t change people’s minds. It’s been proven neurologically that only relational warmth, not a war of words, can light up our neocortex awakening us to something new.” —@danwhitejr

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.” —Karl Kraus, via @TrutherBotPop

We analyzed 16,625 papers to figure out where AI is headed next

“Every decade, in other words, has essentially seen the reign of a different technique: neural networks in the late ’50s and ’60s, various symbolic approaches in the ’70s, knowledge-based systems in the ’80s, Bayesian networks in the ’90s, support vector machines in the ’00s, and neural networks again in the ’10s.

The 2020s should be no different, says [Prof. Pedro] Domingos, meaning the era of deep learning may soon come to an end. But characteristically, the research community has competing ideas about what will come next—whether an older technique will regain favor or whether the field will create an entirely new paradigm.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@csessums — ‘Metrics are great; however, don’t forget the law(s) – Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” & Campbell’s Law: The more a metric is used, the more likely it is to “corrupt the process it is intended to monitor.”’

The death of consensus, not the death of truth via @willrich45

“We are living in a time of tremendous social change and contention. Within the West, power is being negotiated around issues of climate change, migration, race and ethnicity, and gender and gender identity, amongst many other issues. At a geopolitical level, traditional alliances are beginning to realign and change in unexpected ways, and we should expect the EU and China’s visions of the internet in particular to have a stronger hold on global discourse about internet governance. It’s not enough to adapt for a digital environment; we have to understand the politics and societal dynamics behind these changes …

The question I leave for you today is this: What are the new institutions of journalism, and how are they adapting for the actual dynamics of the networked world, where communities of affiliation are not simply separating into echo chambers but actively acting in contention with each other? How will we in journalism operate in an environment of dissensus? What can we do to shape our media environments of today?”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” —Kurt Vonnegut, via @ShaunCoffey

@robpatrob — “In Athens, democracy degenerated into populism, leading to the war with Sparta and defeat. Maybe there is a cycle?”

@PhilosophyMttrs — “Word of the Year” — Ultracrepidarian — adjective noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise

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