1. Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change by Amy Bucher. The book was recommended to me at a product in healthcare conference and it turned out to be exactly the right read. Most healthtech apps aim to influence their users’ behaviour — be it a regular meditation practice, exercise, or healthy eating. Bucher shares her extensive experience on how to design for behavioral changes that stick.
  2. Top 10 Ideas in Statistics That Have Powered the AI Revolution by Kim Martineau at Columbia News. Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia, and Aki Vehtari, a computer science professor at Finland’s Aalto University, recently published a list of the most important statistical ideas in the last 50 years. They focus on methods (rather than theories) in statistics and machine learning.
  3. How to Make Sure A/B Tests Aren’t Leading You Astray at Mode. A/B tests are a tried-and-tested method to improve one’s product and create a better experience for users — based on quantitative data rather than opinions or anecdotes. But as powerful as they are, they come with their own set of potential pitfalls.
  4. Switching to Remote (and back): UX Research During a Pandemic by Julia Zadoorian-Klammer and Natalie Korotaeva. One of the many changes the pandemic brought is our approach to user research. How can we best assess our users responses if we can no longer count on helpful clues such as body language? The article gives helpful tips and tool recommendations.
  5. The Trouble with Brain Scans by Kelsey Ichikawa for Nautilus. fMRI captures the active movement of blood over time that is related to neural firing and cognition. We tend to grant these results great authority. However, researchers’ decisions about which operating system, program, or scanner hardware to use can have a great impact on the outcome. “The problem lies in what we ask and expect of these scientific results, and the authority we give them. After all, the phrase “the brain lights up” is an artifact of the images that we craft.”
  6. DeepMind Puts the Entire Human Proteome Online, as Folded by AlphaFold by Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. Deepmind, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and its research partners have released a database with nearly every human protein (the proteome — 20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome and 350,000 other proteins from common organisms).
  7. Investigation: How TikTok’s Algorithm Figures Out Your Deepest Desires by Wall Street Journal. It’s really hard to find good information on how the TikTok algorithm works. WSJ ran an interesting experiment that sheds some insights — although their language is heavily biased, which diminishes the incredible work of their data team.
  8. Interview with a Hyper-Successful Creator on OnlyFans at Liberty’s Highlights. The interview dives into her multi-channel use, her business approach, and investment strategies. Reading her responses I get a sense of empire building, so it’d be interesting to see what follows next (given that this type of work tends to have a much faster age-related end than other professions). Precursor was the interview by Conor at InvestmentTalk.
  9. Overview of the 14th Five Year Plan by Lillian Li at Chinese Characteristics. Interesting take on the new Five Year Plan by the Chinese government. According to Li, “[…] China aims to reshuffle from an export-led, light manufacturing base that prioritises unequal growth to a consumption-led, high-tech manufacturing-based, low-carbon country (with sustainable fertility rate).”
  10. Neuroprosthesis for Decoding Speech in a Paralyzed Person with Anarthria by Moses et al. (2021). Researchers trained a system to interpret electrical impulses from the brain of a person who had lost the ability to speak 15 years ago, and displayed them as words on a video screen. They implanted an array of 128 electrodes into the brain and trained the model on an input of 100 common phrases and words.