opinion

"High-tech jobs...also have a broader impact on employment... for every job created in the high-tech sector, another 4.3 jobs emerge over time in the local economy. That is more than three times the local 'multiplier' for manufacturing jobs."

"But if the new knowledge about baby names strips away a bit of our individuality, it also connects us with each other—in ways we’re just beginning to understand."

"The critical reason for this is likely to be missed by those who worship at the altar of density and contemporary planning dogma. These cities grow primarily because they do what cities were designed to do in the first place: help their residents achieve their aspirations."

"I found a large number of people that felt that generational divisions are just 'marketing BS.' … It may not matter when you’re a part of something, but it matters a little when you feel alienated from all of it."

"Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. ...reached the same point in relation to information that we faced... in regard to food."

"Start with the complicated power dynamics that arise when professors invest in student companies… The lines between Silicon Valley and Stanford are ever more steadily blurring."

"It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that...are widely deployed today... The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven."

"Yup, ideas and knowledge are renewable and available. But do they lay the bricks for the data centers that house Facebook’s servers? ... The food on your plate, it too is just bits and bytes?"

"Silicon Valley as a whole—has embarked on a path of technological intimacy in which the everyday objects we hold dear... 'a lot of things going on with the application of technology to really intimate things'."

"it’s easy to start believing answers because the computer told you so, without understanding why those answers might not correspond with reality ... And here’s the key: ... Data scientists have to be the biggest skeptics."

"the history of glasses -- another form of wearable technology that succeeded in spite of early criticism -- could offer some lessons, and some hope. Yet the success of the device will ultimately depend on ... Function will determine whether we accept Glass's form, not the other way around."

"One reason structural holes persist is our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interactions..."

"If you are 17 or under, a federal prosecutor could have charged you with computer hacking just for reading Seventeen magazine online—until today. It’s not because the law got any better."

"Do you want your definition of a computer to center on Facebook Friends and the limited et of actions you can take with them? I can't answer that for you, but I can say that it is a tradeoff, and the more you think about it, the better."

"'intuitive' is just a sloppy quasi-synonym for 'familiar.' ... No technology is intuitive. It’s all just familiar or unfamiliar at first."

"The first three decades of touch are important to reflect upon in order to really appreciate the multitouch technology we're so used to having today."

"repressive regimes all over the world are using the Internet to more efficiently...control...and the IT industry is helping... Tech magnifies power, and there's no technical difference between a government and a corporation wielding it."

"the system will have to overcome a major, and surprising, problem: people have come to see it primarily as a way to make money ... instead of being used as a currency, ... an investment."

"Some people consider qualitative research methods…to be squishy or lacking rigor. Some folks find quantitative methods…to be myopic or dehumanizing. Some of the 'method wars' that have been fought in the past surface again in the presence of 'big data'..."

'technology talk' "sustains the technophobe-technophile poles of the current debate, making it much harder to engage in substantial critiques of individual tech—if only for the fear of being labeled a Luddite."

"Data gives you the what, but humans know the why. The best business decisions come from intuitions and insights informed by data."

"An obituary that can't easily marry the professional and the personal is symptomatic of a society that has trouble marrying them, too."

"There was no factual inaccuracy in the original piece, no libel, not even an offensive opinion... Now we see America’s newspaper of record handing over its editorial reins to the mob."

"Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations."

"Bitcoin was devised as a system for removing the possibility of corruption from the issuance and exchange of currency ... Bitcoin would place its trust in mathematics ... [but it] is still an experiment."

"Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse ... despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently."

...and what it means

"In our real-time culture, meme speed matters. Primacy is more important than privacy … The technology may have changed, but the money still flows the same way: to creators of contracts not creators of content."

"But a recurring theme is how much writers struggle to craft meaningful stories in worlds where death is so common as to become unremarkable."

"because of the productivity gains, innovation, and progress you talk about, isn’t it getting easier and easier over time to have enough, even if you’re at the bottom of the income/wealth distribution? Here’s what I’ve learned:"

"If you buy that the key to doing real fashion online is more merchandizing savvy than algorithms... Fashion — with a capital F — is inherently exclusive ... It’s as much about what you cut out as what you include."

"has a stark resemblance to gold. Both are backed by no one. Both are ... inconvenient for day to day use ... Bitcoin is designed with the ideals of the contemporary cyber movement in mind: decentralization, peer to peer, cryptography."

"After all, we need to use things, and everything we need to use should have a clear means to interact with it. So no, the future of user interface isn’t no interface at all but a series of interfaces that complement the world around us and them."

"We intoxicate our judgment about their value in the markets... every company, by the current standard, could be called a tech company, which of course, is another way of saying that none of them should be."

"I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love."

The Visa Options Rundown:

"Fashion is fickle, yes, but is any of it ever actually new? What’s new to me is a designer choosing—in this digital age where we can work from anywhere—to make his work where and when he’s inspired, regardless if it’s a known fashion hub or not."

"Even the dumbest of memes have been recruited in the service of sales... For a gathering so driven by the pursuit of money, the question of who has it—and who doesn't—goes almost completely unmentioned..."

"Feminism is the one F-word that makes eyes widen in polite company ... The stereotypes invariably focus on the pettiest of details."

"Certified as 'open,' the most heinous and suspicious ideas suddenly become acceptable... Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas."