elisehein

Thanks for raising! I guess I feel it's a necessary disclaimer out of respect to people who do have the first-hand experience. But I can see how it can come off as an excuse for not getting it right, and it certainly shouldn't be.

FWIW, I did talk to a screen reader user for this article (the accessibility consultant I mention – he is the chair of a local blind union), but indeed I don't know anybody personally and he could have easily brushed me off as random cold emailer, so I'm grateful for his comments.

While unrelated to the topic of discrimination, I just wanted to take this chance and say that Ellen Ullman writes beautifully -- I recognised her signature style before seeing the author's name at the bottom.

Here is another beautiful excerpt from a book of her's that I'm sure everyone can relate to http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/26/close-to-t...

Discussions about how to save time on eating and cooking -- essentially the ultimate life hacking -- always make me think about early man and his lifestyle that must have consisted mostly of hunting trips that may well have taken up days at a time, and then returning home with the prey and enjoying every bit of the reward. I wonder if they ever contemplated on how they could minimise all this time they spent on keeping themselves alive to make room for .. ehm, what else was there to do anyway?

And that is wonderful for her :)

I've grown up with the same perceptions of gender equality in the Soviet job market. However, I get the feeling that this does not so much have to do with a heightened sense of morality or anything, as it does with the fact that work in the USSR was simply a chore or an obligation that was assigned to you. Often people didn't do a particular job because it suited their personality or they were exceptionally good at it, most jobs were government orders anyway. There was no such thing as career planning. People's careers sort of just happened.

I went for "please sign up on Path and add me as a friend because unlike on Facebook, there are some things that I share which I really sincerely would like YOU (and not every other random person) to see". I've got my family and closest friends on Path now, about 12 people in total, most of whom add content regularly and I'm happy :)

Having said that, as much as I like Path, I do sometimes feel like I'm doing them a favour promoting it so aggressively, and the favour hasn't quite been returned yet.

That's so cool for your friend :) I hope you've taken some of the credit, encouragement is such a huge part of success.

I'm a girl doing a CS degree and also often think that the amount of help I get from my boyfriend (who has graduated by now) borders on cheating which really makes me feel miserable from time to time, and constantly having someone next to you who you know can complete any task you have with so much less effort doesn't help a lot either.

Other times, however, I acknowledge that as long as he isn't plainly handing the solutions over to me (which he never does) but just kind of acts as my rubber duck, all that can really be said is that it's just a fortunate situation where you constantly have someone to bounce ideas off of. It's also a question of not becoming dependent of that person -- at first I felt that he literally always knew the answer to whatever I was struggling with, but by now I've realised that it's simply about the ability to think out loud and make conclusions as you go along, and I know that I have all the potential to do that on my own as well.

I guess it's kind of what the article is saying as well -- if you're used to someone being better than you and kind of like a mentor, it's difficult to adjust to a situation where you might just have caught up with them in terms of skill and expertise.

This might not be the case for quite a few Estonian startups though -- with 1.3 million people you're desperately lacking a large enough target market for the niche products that some startups are developing, and looking to other countries may actually be a part of a strategy, not simply a case of 'I happen to be an Estonian living in the UK so I'll just go with the flow and do my startup here'. I would call these startups Estonian.

Interestingly, if I would've read the discussion out of context, I definitely would have thought the author meant digital as shadowy and gradienty, and analog as flat.

It just makes my skin crawl :/

I've been lucky enough to have visited NK as well and unsurprisingly everything I read lined up perfectly with my own experience. Most likely tourists from all over the world are always shown the stock tour. Our guides were incredibly insistent that we see everything, too -- that means no suggestions for other activities and definitely no wandering off.

One of my most memorable take-aways was also a visit to a school that we were told was one of the best in the country. We were taken to a room where students had formed groups around several desks, all performing different tasks (one desk had microscopes, the other a pc, yet others had more contraptions, probably for demonstrating mechanical processes). As was mentioned in the story, they weren't actually doing anything, they were just sitting there looking at the machinery in front of them and trying to look like they were about to discover something huge. They must've been the best actors in the school, and probably were very proud of themselves to have been chosen to present to such a prominent audience.

I think beginning an academic or a research paper with a question or something like "Some people say..." or "Recently" or "Nowadays" is often a very good strategy even though it might be clichéd, because telling the reader exactly what is going to follow in the text is very much expected. When I read with the sole intention of finding a specific piece of knowledge, I want to be able to tell from the introduction (or the abstract) whether I will find that piece of knowledge in the given text.

That being said, I think all other kinds of texts should be as story-like as possible, in the sense that they should be gripping and interesting from the very first sentence -- I want to be a little bit lost and not know where exactly the writer is taking me. In this case, I really like the idea of jumping straight into a scenario (or anecdote), I remember having been suggested by my teachers in middle school to do so. Having opened the text with a scenario, you can also use it in the conclusion to wrap things up and let the reader know how the story ended, given the conclusions reached in the body of the text.

My book recommendation is "How to write a sentence (and how to read one)", http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/01/27/how-to-wri... It has whole chapters on both first and last sentences.

You could easily follow every single story without ever commenting on any of them.. Not to mention the amount of unregistered users

I actually found the voice of the speaker, especially her accent, quite fascinating :)

While I think the talk articulates very well what the issues are with the wide spreading of online porn, the problem is not that this isn't known -- it's how to cope with realising that your own desires are preventing you from enjoying anything other than some of the examples the speaker highlights.

I am loving these illustrations

I think Beamer is great for things like lecture slides and other presentation where the aim is to pass on dense amounts of information. When using slides to illustrate rather than summarise, however, it requires a series of hacks to position, resize, add custom colours and images or fonts. It also gives you standard elements that you probably don't want in these illustrative slides, such as the slide number, author and subtitle on the footer of each slide.

In a way though, this could serve as a kind of test for the student beforehand to see which parts they're comfortable with. I recently gave a presentation like this as part of my course and tried to follow the style described in the article. I started out with quite a nice visually appealing set of minimalistic slides, but ended up with a hybrid of that and what you usually see in lectures that also need to serve as handouts for later. So yes, I agree that people giving presentations as part of school projects should be cautious about trying to do more than they are ready for, but I also think it's somewhat a shame that we aren't given enough opportunities to practice that other side of presenting as well.

I think beautiful slides can be made with minimal effort when adhering to the points in the article and using a simple black text on white background approach. Increasing the font size to an absurd can make things look funky and seems to be a trend, as well as having slides with a single powerful word or two.

www.noteandpoint.com is a good source for inspiration -- whenever I find myself in a situation where I need to produce a presentation quickly but want to make it look good, I just go through these. My most recent favourite is this one -- http://noteandpoint.com/2010/02/keeping-it-personal/ Goes to show how much you can do with a simple bold serif font. It's also worth looking at this one http://noteandpoint.com/2011/11/how-to-create-slides-that-ro... -- How to create slides that rock, learning by example :)

I use SwiftKey too, and am quite happy with it. Nonetheless, 'm not really convinced when it comes to enhancing a keyboard with such a feature without first having tweaked it to near perfection. At the moment, I still get quite a lot of autocorrection errors that I need to then fix manually (if I happen to notice them before hitting send..), which is not as quick as it could be, but still bearable. I can't imagine going back and trying to fix something if whole sentences are typed in one go. Having said that, if I didn't have to worry about autocorrection errors, this would be awesome.

One of the reasons why SwiftKey doesn't perform as well as it could for me might be that I use it with two languages, typing in each more or less 50% of the time. The fact that it can predict the next word based on the current one does help here in order to get the language right, but the three measly slots it has for word suggestions are still cluttered with words from the other language most of the time when I type. I think performance would boost if it could detect the language during the first few words and only suggest words in that language from that point forward. Then again, I often mix the two languages in a single sentence..

My Natural Language Systems professor just went through that topic yesterday -- that in the case of all machine translation applications, the ultimate goal is to get as high up in a 'natural language pyramid' where the tip is a single universal language. So we get the most use out of elements of any two given languages that have as much in common with each other as possible; these common elements could then be applied to other similar languages.

Interestingly, he also proposed that the closest thing we have right now to that 'tip' language is sanskrit.

I'd like to learn more about two things:

1. Designing and prototyping in the browser -- how to do it as quickly as possible and get rid of the distraction of details (I always find details difficult to ignore when trying to do quick mockups in the browser, hence why I resort to pen and paper)

2. Case studies of user research activities that have led to particular design decisions -- what are the first steps I should take in order to create an interface that is specifically targeted towards a certain user group or demographic

Unrelated, but does anyone have an idea why all of the countries appear in alphabetical order but then suddenly Spain jumps up in the middle of all the E-s? The UK follows soon after. All I could think of was Spain=Espana, but England definitely isn't the same as the UK..