“Last year we began testing a quality filter setting and we’re now rolling out a feature for everyone. When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience.”

New Ways to Control Your Experience on Twitter | Twitter Blogs

This is a bit like the proverbial tree falling in a forest. Does this mean that Twitter now gets let off from policing the trolls?

The troll has still behaved badly, it’s just that the target doesn’t see it. Importantly, the friends of the troll see the comment.

Will Twitter allow someone to study the change? This is very important.

This puts the current state of corporate data mining to shame…

The Wikiverse project is an interactive 3D visualization of Wikipedia, reimagined as a cosmic web of knowledge. Here, articles are stars bound together to form topics, fields and subjects.

Wikiverse: a galactic reimagining of Wikipedia

Ori Systems

Populations are getting increasingly dense. Space costs more year on year. However, we do little to optimise it’s use. Each room has a different purpose.

This is a great solution, for a version one. Version two needs to be modular and then Ikea can start to get scared!

This article is worth spending some time on.

We’re heading for a very different world and that will require a very different set of skills. So why are we teaching the same skills?

Discussion of school reform seems to talk a lot about getting new technologies into schools, not new subjects.

Imagine a project in which students identified a potential problem in their community, collected and analyzed data about that problem, and then presented that report to someone who could potentially make changes to the community.

Perhaps their data could come from public records, or perhaps their data could come from interviews with community members, or from some other physical collection mechanism they devise.

Thoughts on the future of math education | mathbabe

Now you’ve had a think about how this applies to schools, what do we need to do to remake the business training program? 

What percentage of the workforce cannot program? Why?

Om and Gruber are having a public disagreement about Eddie Cue.

My comments (made on Leo LaPorte’s Twit) about Apple, Eddy Cue and the fragile state of iCloud services have struck a nerve, with most disagreeing with me and only a few actually agreeing with the gen

Source: Gruber & I disagree about a few issues about Apple

The basic story is that Cue was at a basketball match when iCloud was experiencing an outage. Om says that Cue should have left the match to lead his times, Gruber thinks that Cue was allowed to stay because he couldn’t have helped anyway.

I think Gruber is missing the point — attending a game when a division you are responsible for is down for six hours is a clear lack of empathy for the customers, and also is a sign that standards are falling of what used to be an Apple Standard for building products of delight. Sure, things might have taken as much time to fix the iCloud, but the message you would have sent out to rest of the Apple team would have been different.

I believe deeply that they’re both wrong, and worse, we’ll never know if Cue is doing this right.

As the leader of an engineering team, Cue’s role is to lead the post incident process. It’s true that he can’t do much in the heat of the moment except “cheer lead” the team.

However, the following weeks are far more important. Did he lead the post incident review, follow up on the identified problems, get a full and frank root cause analysis? Only if changes to infrastructure and process are made will he have delivered.

This is his role and it helps if he isn’t part of the incident and has nothing to hide.

Inside China’s ‘Silicon Valley of Hardware,’ Shenzhen, with hardware hacker Bunnie Huang

Inside China’s ‘Silicon Valley of Hardware,’ Shenzhen, with hardware hacker Bunnie Huang

When this is the background of the city that you live in I think that you fundamentally don’t see limitations in the same way as someone from Western Europe.

Add to this the way that IP is treated in China and I think that the next generation of urban Chinese will radically change the way that we do things.

This Simpsons couch gag is a clever Ikea spoof / Boing Boing

How is the Simpsons this inventive after all these years?

In the old days where companies merged, you sat in one company wondering how the employees of the other company felt.

My company, CSC, is merging with HP-SE in March. We’re excited, and thanks to social media, we know that the feeling is mutual.

“I not only unreservedly endorse the merger.  I am perhaps the most excited as I have been in a decade due to the potential of these two firms joining forces. Frankly, an IT services powerhouse is being created that will be truly dedicated in transforming our client’s IT services to future state practices that will empower them for much success in the next decades.”

The HPE – CSC Merger Will Create a Powerhouse of Change… | Scott Stawski | Pulse | LinkedIn

“The BBC micro:bit is a computerised project board that’s being given to every year 7 (11-12yr old) kid in the UK.”

micro:bit Simon

The micro:bit is a fantastic project, with fantastic objectives. This is something that only the BBC could do.

How do we spread this beyond the UK and to rest of Europe?

Ideas?

“the number of registered developers increased by 2 million in the last year to a total of 13 million”

State of the Ecosystem