Back when she was a member of SEAL Team 6—Kristin Beck liked to grow her beard real long. But as disguises go, that was nothing compared with the life she lived as a man. What’s it take, and how does it feel, for a paragon of masculinity to travel so far to find her true self?

true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction... Bostrom is arguably the leading transhumanist philosopher today... bringing order to ideas that might o…

Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing... of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990's, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunni…

While the platform has long been a bastion of visual storytelling, it has also been historically lax with its limitations on gratuitous writing and hashtagging. That all changed today... An epidemic of hashtag fatigue is coming... The first step was de-prioritizing the hashtag in discovery feeds. The next step is burying it in yours... To e…

Imagine taking a team of highly creative people and sticking them in sterile, lowest-cost-per-square-foot spaces, and expecting them to achieve the best work of their lives?... we've been focussing heavily on the design of our work spaces... Chaining people to their desks (or cubicles) is a sure-fire way to kill great ideas and creativity. -…

The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates a “compulsion loop”... we need more and more to get the same effect. Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates.…

I am done with attending badly run meetings and if you have any sense so should you be... running a good meeting comes down to the following: - I am done with bad meetings — Medium

Some people might be satisfied just to let each theory be used for what it is good for and to worry no further. But people like that do not become theoretical physicists. - The most beautiful theory | The Economist

The GDS was set up to improve online public services but disagreements with the top brass over its ambitions have seen four leaders abruptly resign - Why are senior staff fleeing the Government Digital Service? | Public Leaders Network | The Guardian

Authors and publishers use Leanpub to publish amazing in-progress and completed books.

Making ‘a net positive contribution to people’s lives’ doesn’t necessarily satisfy investors... it’s possible to imagine regulation that actually expands users’ choices. It doesn’t need to be especially invasive or dramatic, and it would be designed to give users more control over their experiences online... Here are three things we could do…

For Jay Rosen... Blogging is doing your work in public… For me it’s slightly different – this is where I do my thinking in public

Photos, infographics, memes, illustrations, and videos are just a few forms of visual content that are having a huge impact on the way people consume information. All of these visual assets will only continue to grow in importance ... look at these 11 eye-popping statistics on how content and technology are changing humans Infographic: http://i…

... resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards... a media division …

This week NHSCitizen - one of the case studies I brought to myEuroPCom 2015 workshop on online communities- holds its first NHSCitizen Assembly, where the NHS Board meets citizens to ActionPlan the participants' top 5 priorities. Time to summarise the Hangout-On-Air I had on NHSCitizen with the Democratic Society's Anthony Zacharzewski,

Intention is a powerful force. But this force has its own special foes.Distraction. Multitasking. These weaken your ability to execute on your goals. What if you could get the power of setting intention, plus the superpower of beating distractions?... Niklas Goeke is going to show you how. - Destroy Your Inner Multitasker — Productivity Dea…

Just as you’re about to publish your draft, we’ll suggest a couple tags for you to use based on what you’ve writte... to increase the number of tagged posts on Medium, but also to help users discover the right tags to use... In our algorithm, we use what is called a nearest neighbors approach... to compare posts... representing posts as vector…

We hope you'll find this to be one of the most comprehensive social media resources available, and that no matter what your skill level is, there's plenty in here to help you improve your social presence. - Social Media: The Free Beginner's Guide from Moz

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

So is the world any more “outraged” than it’s always been? Nah. We’re just getting toyed with. - 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. — Medium

Silver is a combination of an iOS app, a Mac app, and a Sketch Plugin that seamlessly communicate with each other to make your mobile design process as smooth as possible - Introducing Silver : Lightweight Mobile Prototyping in Sketch 3 — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium

The number and diversity of communications skills needed to implement a communications strategy never stops growing. How are you organising them?

the Instagram experience, with its constant flow of images and text boxes, presented an alternative story geometry that demanded from me new things. Shorter stories... a deeper consideration of photographs and the rich, nuanced ways that words and pictures work together. ... a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool...…

People are increasingly turning toward Instagram not just as a place to post filtered photos, but to spill their lives and thoughts into the captions as well... if you’re already posting pretentious, evocative images, you’re more likely to be in an artsy-musings state of mind... Facebook, at 1.5 billion users, has felt cacophonous and impersona…

After studying innovation among 759 companies... found that corporate culture was a much more important driver of radical innovation than labor, capital, government or national culture... what is an innovative corporate culture? And ... is there any way you can build one? This article addresses both questions by offering a simple model of the k…

Practices, research, and ideas from Google and other organizations to put people first. re:Work is organized around some of the biggest ways you can make an impact in your workplace. Each subject contains guides, with tools and insights, for addressing specific challenges.

focusing less on how audiences interact with content on the screen but more about how, because of stories, we engage with each other as a community. Less transaction, more relation; less on audience, more on community... in 2003 I launched the initial version of Interactive Narratives ... Finding inspiring multimedia work was one benefit. But f…

disruption theory is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Despite broad dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied... refinements over the past 20 years appear overshadowed by the popularity of the initial formulation... too many people who speak of “disrupt…

Two successful cases that have allowed to outline a step-by-step roadmap in which a possible approach for developing smart city strategies in large European cities is described. - Urban regeneration in the digital era: how to develop Smart City strategies in large European cities | Luca Mora, PhD | LinkedIn