Must Reads

John Hooper, The Guardian, December 28, 2014

Rescue services were facing a double emergency in the Adriatic after a ferry plying between Greece and Italy caught fire with at least 466 people on board and two merchant vessels collided off the north-eastern Italian port of Ravenna. According to conflicting reports, up to four people were missing following the collision and several were injured. The two ships – one Turkish and the other flying the flag of Belize – collided in thick fog. […read more]

{source}
<iframe src=”https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/world/video/2014/dec/28/greek-officials-detail-ferry-rescue-operation-norman-atlantic-video” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
{/source}

Nick Tasler, Harvard Business Review, October 4, 2013

Strategic decisiveness is one of the most vital success attributes for leaders in every position and every industry, but few leaders understand where it comes from or how to find more of it. It is not surprising that picking one strategic direction and then decisively pursuing that direction are hallmarks of good leadership, if not boilerplate management skills. The big mystery is why these obviously important skills are still rare enough to distinguish excellent leaders from average managers. This article’s author came to recognize the three primary sources of decisiveness — nature, training, and incentive — and also how you can manipulate them to claim an advantage for yourself and your organization. […read more]

Eric Johnson, RE/CODE, December 26, 2014

If you unwrapped a new Xbox or PlayStation game console on Christmas, you probably know by now that Microsoft’s and Sony’s respective online networks have been struggling. These “denial of service” attacks are not only a problem for people who want to play a multiplayer game online. They also affect anyone trying to register a new account, buy games or use media apps to stream movies and music from the Web. The goal appears to be to cause mayhem and headaches for Microsoft and Sony rather than to steal private data or achieve a political goal. […read more]

Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times, December 25, 2014

While small private schools can often afford to provide their students with tremendous hand-holding, large public high schools across the country struggle with staggering ratios of students to guidance counselors. Nationally, that ratio is nearly 500 to 1, a proportion experts say has remained virtually unchanged for more than 10 years. And when it comes time to apply to college, all of the students need help at once. […read more]

David E. Sanger, The New York Times, December 23, 2014

For years now, the Obama administration has warned of the risks of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” a nightmare attack that takes out America’s power grids and cellphone networks and looks like the opening battle in a full-scale digital war. But over the past week, a far more immediate scenario has come into focus: a shadow war of nearly constant, low-level digital conflict, somewhere in the netherworld between what President Obama called “cybervandalism” and what others might call digital terrorism. […read more]

Faisal Hoque, Fast Company, September 4, 2013

Creativity is the common theme that drives both entrepreneurs and artists alike. But creative people are often also paradoxical. This article’s author shares ten traits – often contradictory in nature, that are frequently present in creative people – that were outlined by professor of psychology and management Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s in his seminal book “Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People.” […read more]

Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 13, 2014

This article’s author discusses Danish writer and thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s “The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard,” which contains an entry in which he observes a pervasive pathology of our fallible humanity, explaining the same basic psychology that lurks behind contemporary phenomena like bullying, trolling, and the general assaults of the web’s self-appointed critics, colloquially and rather appropriately known as haters. […read more]

Rafael Behr, The Guardian, December 23, 2014

The digital revolution has made politics faster and noisier, but in 2014 surface volatility masked underlying stasis. It has been a year of big news and small change. Sudden transformations in politics are rare. The safest prediction of what will happen next is… it will look a lot like what is happening now. This was famously demonstrated in a 20-year study of political forecasting in the US by the Canadian academic Philip Tetlock. […read more]

Makers, October 20, 2014

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is well aware of her Internet popularity, saying she “keeps abreast of the latest that’s on Tumblr.” In a Sunday evening interview at the 92nd St. Y in New York, the Supreme Court Justice spoke with NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg who brought up Notorious RBG, a Tumblr devoted to the Justice’s various acts of intellect and dissent. […read more]