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"For many years, open source software seemingly lay at the fringe of the tech industry. A subculture that many didn't understand and that seemingly threatened the broader industry. It is amazing how much has changed. Today, open source software, especially Linux, is so pervasive that you probably interact with it every day. From supercomputers to GoPros and nearly every data center in the world, open source software is the default platform."

"For many years, open source software seemingly lay at the fringe of the tech industry. A subculture that many didn't understand and that seemingly threatened the broader industry. It is amazing how much has changed. Today, open source software, especially Linux, is so pervasive that you probably interact with it every day. From supercomputers to GoPros and nearly every data center in the world, open source software is the default platform."

Interview with Gina Likins and Donna Benjamin At OSCON in Portland this year, Donna Benjamin and Gina Likins are combining forces to talk about a topic that is sometimes easily dismissed: conflict resolution. Given the growing need to address conflict in technology, and that even popular projects like the Linux Kernel adopting codes of conduct, it's no surprise that conferences feature talks on human interaction."

Interview with Gina Likins and Donna Benjamin At OSCON in Portland this year, Donna Benjamin and Gina Likins are combining forces to talk about a topic that is sometimes easily dismissed: conflict resolution. Given the growing need to address conflict in technology, and that even popular projects like the Linux Kernel adopting codes of conduct, it's no surprise that conferences feature talks on human interaction."

"During the humid summer months of 1954, twenty-two 11 and 12-year-old boys were randomly split into two groups and taken to a 200-acre Boy Scouts of America camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Over the next few weeks, they would unknowingly be the subjects of one of the most widely known psychological studies of our time. And the ways these groups bonded and interacted with each other draw some interesting parallels to our understanding of workplace culture."

"In a recent meeting of the Indianapolis Developers Association, we discussed the topic of Virtual Reality and where it stands today. We found that most of the developers in the meeting were familiar with Virtual Reality, but were less familiar with Augmented Reality. Most had never heard of the term Mixed Reality. All three terms involve seeing images that are not real, but rather that are virtual. How the three terms differ is in how you interact with the virtual elements."

[The power of answering 'why?' ... I urge all of you who are parents, teachers, youth leaders, or any other role where you get to interact with children and youngsters not to shy away from explaining the difficult concepts. ...

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who's who. The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language "People have wondered for a long time what makes one person cognitively different from another person," said cognitive psychologist Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, coauthor of the study published Jan. 7 in Current Biology. "Our study is one tiny piece of the answer to this question." The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it's crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes. To test this, Kanwisher's team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable."

"Half a billion people around the world spend more than 20 hours a week "wearing" avatars, that is, using digital representations of themselves. Did you know that a virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the politician himself? That your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as when she walks into the room? That if you make your onscreen surrogate mimic your friend's head movements, he's more likely to do what you say? Within three years, many online interactions will not simply involve passages of text typed on a keyboard but will instead be rich exchanges involving sophisticated representations of ourselves. Those digital beings are called avatars, and today at least half a billion people around the world are routinely socializing through them over the Internet, for example in online games."

[This is as much a book about regrettable race relations as it is the most revered band in history. In the end, author Edgar O. Cruz defines the Beatles more as fantastic and brilliant plagiarists of mostly African-American music, not the greatest composers since Beethoven. ...]

" It is critically important to not just get work done but to also ensure the people doing the work feel a sense of connection."

Clay Shirky joined an intimate group at the Berkman Center for a deep dive discussion on one chapter of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, which deals with protest culture -- ad hoc vs institutional, and what it means.