Interactivity (Spam Mail #6)

Hi there,

Back to regular programming with a mix of various links and articles this week. I’ll share more expanded thoughts in future issues. My aim is to write deeper about topics only when I’ve been able to properly digest what I’m seeing and reading.

This week I want to mention interactivity. Most of the 💩 Cool shit links I share have some element of it. I believe it’s a great way to help explain ideas and augment learning. It also makes things simply more fun. I have a few links today that really touch on this, marked with a 🧠. Check ‘em out.

I’ll be off for the next two weeks. Enjoy the holiday break and see you in 2021.

💩 Cool shit

Random and awesome links from the web to end the week with.

2020 is a Song - A time capsule of songs that got us through this fucking year.

🧠 The Evolution of Trust - I love interactive learning. Play this game to learn about game theory.

Huluween The Screamland - OK, I’m late to this but it's a really fun interactive haunted house in your browser.

Galaxy Sim - I’m a sucker for a simulation. Create black holes and have fun making your own virtual galaxy.

Moonbridge - Have fun with some 3D animations and create your own WebGL experiments.

Gift Genius - Need last minute gifts? A natural language recommendation engine powered by GPT-3 to help with your shopping. I got mixed results but hopefully you can find a gem.

🧠 Why do buses bunch? - An interactive explainer on why all the buses show up at the same damn time.

💎 Word gems

Thought provoking long-form reads to savor on the weekend.

🎧 They Made the 'Pfizer Vaccine' (Sway by NYT Opinion / Kara Swisher)

A podcast interview with the scientists who developed the COVID-19 vaccine being distributed by Pfizer. Creating, manufacturing, and distributing a vaccine within a year is a monumental scientific achievement. 2020 has been a year of historical moments, and the creation of this vaccine is definitely one of them.

That we could conduct an entire clinical development program in such a record time is because we started work streams, which you normally you do subsequently, in parallel. So normally you conduct your Phase 1 trial and take your time in order to analyze that. And thereafter, you decide and set up the Phase 2 trial. Here, we basically prepared the more advanced trials in parallel to conducting the Phase 1 trial, at risk of not having a candidate, which would then go into Phase 3. And another aspect which helped was the very interactive conversation and cooperation with regulatory authorities around the world, who did not insist on taking the normal administrative times they need to assess your clinical trial in order to activate and approve it. So that there were no shortcuts, but there was a very intense collaboration of all stakeholders to ensure that we have this expedited program.

LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe (Divinations / Fadeke Adegbuyi)

LinkedIn is a strange place, right? Thought leaders, evangelists, change-makers, multi-hyphenates, InMail-ers. I’ve always found it an odd place to visit. It’s like a slightly fictional version of real corporate life. This piece really cuts into the weird and hilarious tropes of LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, jobs are not a trade between an individual and a corporation, or a way to fill the space between 9 to 5. On LinkedIn, jobs are life-affirming or life-saving opportunities, rescuing people from a life of meaningless toil or imminent ruin.

The Social Life of Forests (New York Times / Ferris Jabr)

Competition drives evolution, at least that’s the typical line of thinking from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. This is a fascinating break from that mindset, exploring how organisms survive together in forests in a symbiotic relationship. The idea of forests socializing is metaphorical and poetic, but also pushes forward on a lot of current thinking. This feels like knowledge humans have instinctively, but only now science is catching up and ‘learning it’.

Fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors.

How bullshit insane our brains are (Twitter thread / @Foone)

I just love this Twitter thread about how our brains trick us to compensate for limits in our visual system. Go read the full thread, it’s fun and eye opening (yes, lame pun very much intended).

🧠 Communicating with Interactive Articles (Distill / Fred Hohman, Matthew Conlen, Jeffrey Heer, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau)

Using the web to create interactive journalism sits right at the intersection of this newsletter. I love how the web allows great storytelling to reach people, and especially seeing the web’s interactivity used to reimagine how we learn new topics.

This research paper explores that intersection. It looks at how tech can be used to make interactivity and data visualization easier for writers. The paper itself is quite dense, but it links out to a wonderful selection of interactive articles. Go look through them, bookmark ones you like, and read them over the break. It’s worth it.

Prompting readers to remember previously presented material, for example through the use of quizzes, can be an effective way to improve their ability to recall it in the future. This result from cognitive psychology, known as the testing effect, can be utilized by authors writing for an interactive medium. While testing may call to mind stressful educational experiences for many, quizzes included in web articles can be low stakes: there is no need to record the results or grade readers. The effect is enhanced if feedback is given to the quiz-takers, for example by providing the correct answer after the user has recorded their response.

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🎊