The Independent: “Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’”

We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.

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If this meant playing pope to this century’s Michelangelos, well, all the better: It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it, Mr Braden said. And after many centuries people say, Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth! It’s a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn’t been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn’t have had the art.

Frances Stonor Saunders

Fascinating piece of Cold War history – and indeed art history. It doesn’t surprise me at all that an espionage agency would use any tool at its disposal to destabilize an opponent and ultimately win a war. A strong cultural identity is essential when fighting a long, drawn-out conflict; it’s what we need today to counter the rise of extremism; it’s what Europe needs to shape itself into a real, living entity; it’s what China is trying to rebuild to sustain its economic and political rise on the world stage.

Bloomberg: “Uber hires Veteran NASA Engineer to develop Flying Cars”

Moore’s research (PDF) into so-called VTOL—short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, flying cars—inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last summer.

Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of Google’s rivals: Uber Technologies Inc. Moore is taking on a new role as director of engineering for aviation at the ride-hailing company, working on a flying car initiative known as Uber Elevate. I can’t think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real, he says.

Brad Stone

Another (potential) area where Uber and Google are set to be in harsh competition. Although, as I wrote before, I have serious doubts whether these concepts will ever reach mass adoption the way cars have.

The New York Times: “How Stable are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs are flashing Red’”

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation”, which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

For decades, global events seemed to support that idea. Data from Freedom House, a watchdog organization that measures democracy and freedom around the world, shows that the number of countries classified as “free” rose steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. Many Latin American countries transitioned from military rule to democracy; after the end of the Cold War, much of Eastern Europe followed suit. And longstanding liberal democracies in North America, Western Europe and Australia seemed more secure than ever.

But since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year. Is that a statistical anomaly, a result of a few random events in a relatively short period of time? Or does it indicate a meaningful pattern?

Amanda Taub

This article had a fascinating trajectory online: widely shared at first, then disputed as people started digging through the data behind the ‘horror graph’, and finally defended by the author on Twitter with more graphs supporting his conclusions. While I haven’t looked at the data, the examples named in the article (Venezuela, Poland, the US) seem to support the theory in question. The truth is democracy is just as unstable as other systems of government, undermined from within by false propaganda and fearmongering used to manipulate voters. The majority of the current generation in Western democracies don’t know any other form of government; it’s easy to see the flaws in the democratic process and to push for change when you haven’t experienced any of the alternatives.

BBC Capital: “Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators”

The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others, she adds.

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Non-native speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. Because of that, they understand one another at face value. Jenkins found, for instance, that international students at a British university understood each other well in English and swiftly adapted to helping the least fluent members in any group.

Lennox Morrison

Working in a multinational, I am very familiar with the overuse of abbreviations, more often than not with obscure meaning. On top of that, each multinational develops its own set of abbreviations for similar concepts, further clouding communication. Another practice that annoys me is how Americans like to quote movie dialog as if anyone would automatically know the context.

SFist: “Wildly Inaccurate Muni Wait Time Predictions will continue for weeks in Major Glitch”

Muni officials wrote to the SFMTA blog to explain the problem: NextMuni, which is a customized name for the third-party vehicle tracking system NextBus, relies on infrastructure installed in 2002 that only has 2G wireless network capacity. That outdated technology is being replaced nationwide by AT&T, Muni’s provider. The issue, according to Muni, is that The deactivation work that affects our vehicles started sooner than expected and outpaced our ongoing upgrade of all Muni vehicles to a new communications and monitoring system.

Put another way, Muni vehicles that aren’t yet upgraded aren’t transmitting data to NextMuni to predict their arrival. As SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose tells SFBay, as many as 40 percent of Muni’s fleet of vehicles, trains included, don’t have the new, 3G communications systems in place.

Caleb Pershan

Such a ‘first world problem’! I was starting to feel bad because something like this is years – if not decades – from being installed in Bucharest, where I live, but it turns out only a couple of cities around the world have similar real-time systems for predicting bus arrival times, and most are installed on trains and subways.

Nieman Journalism Lab: “Another survey finds users aren’t that engaged with online video”

News organizations have been producing loads of video content to fill social media feeds and attract higher ad rates, but a new report from the social analytics firm Parse.ly finds that users engage with video much less than other content types.

Parse.ly examined the performance of four types of posts within its network of 700 sites: long-form, short-form, video, and slideshows. Video posts received 30 percent less engaged time than the average post, the study found. (Parse.ly defines engaged time as being actively engaged with content — when [users] not only have a page open, but they have also recently interacted with it [via scrolling or clicking, for example]. Visitors are also considered actively engaged if they are watching a video.)

Joseph Lichterman

I’ve always found it inconvenient to consume information through video compared to text. I tend to read faster than average and with text you can always scan ahead for the important sections and skip less crucial information or stuff you already know. That’s next to impossible with video: you can fast-forward, but there’s no way to tell where you’ll land, so you’ll likely end up wasting more time tracking down the relevant sections. Video does have it’s uses, but it leans more towards entertainment, with anything from short funny clips to computer game let’s plays, and training and sharing knowledge, where the combination of sound, image and human voice can create a better environment for transmitting information than a written course.

Triggertrap Playbook: “Triggertrap Going out of Business FAQ”

Triggertrap, like any startup, had some big highs and lows. At one point, we employed 15 staff; a team of photographers, coders, support, marketing, logistics, and operations. Ever since we announced that our Triggertrap Ada Kickstarter project failed, we’ve been in a downward spiral. For the past 18 months, we’ve been operating with just a few team members, who have been working their asses off to keep the lights on. But ultimately, we weren’t able to claw our way out of the hole, and the company now owes the company’s founders around $60k. With no realistic hope of ever paying that money back, and after ten months in a row of struggling to make payroll for our remaining staff members, we decided it was time to give up.

Haje Jan Kamps

I was close to buying one of their products a couple of years ago, but in the end I decided to go with a more traditional trigger. For people not familiar with DSLR accessories, Triggertrap offered mobile apps and physical cables to connect smartphones with cameras so that people could use the smartphone app to trigger the camera in a variety of ways (timelapse, facial recognition, vibration and sound triggers to name a few). Despite innovative ideas, their failure looks like an example of how difficult it is to build a successful hardware startup these days.