The battle between headsets you strap to your heads is being brought to a rolling boil this week, as Microsoft’s HoloLens Dev Kit and Oculus Rift both start shipping to customers. Being a lover of cutting-edge tech, you’d expect I’d be in lust with both technologies, but no. HoloLens did something to me that Oculus never managed: It made me think I was leaping into the… Read More
Microsoft announced in February its plans to acquire the cross-platform development platform Xamarin; the deal closed about two weeks ago. Even though the ink on the contracts has barely dried, Microsoft already made Xamarin the center of attention at its annual Build developer conference today by announcing its plans to roll Xamarin into every Visual Studio tier, including the free… Read More
Following yesterday’s news about bringing bots to the Skype platform, Microsoft today unveiled two more SDKs for its Skype platform which will allow businesses and application developers a way to integrate Skype’s capabilities into their own applications. On stage at its annual Build conference, the company took the wraps off two new toolkits for developers: the Skype Web SDK and… Read More
At the Build Developer conference in San Francisco today, Microsoft announced a series of new Office 365 developer tools designed to enhance how they interact with Office 365 platform. Microsoft outlined three new ways for developers to work with Office 365 including Graph APIs to provide intelligent integration inside third party applications using content from the Microsoft Graph,… Read More
Are you fluent in MongoDB? Well today is your lucky day. Microsoft’s NoSQL document database service DocumentDB now supports drivers for MongoDB. So if you were using existing MongoDB tools and libraries, now you can use them with DocumentDB and take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud architecture. Read More
Power BI is Microsoft’s tool for analyzing data and building interactive data-based dashboards and reports. At its Build developer conference in San Francisco, the company today announced the preview of Power BI Embedded. With this, developers will be able to integrate Power BI and its interactive dashboards right into their own apps. Power BI already allowed developers to push data… Read More
Microsoft today removed the “preview” label from Azure Service Fabric, its service for building and running both stateful and stateless Docker-based microservices in the cloud and on-premises. Service Fabric, which is the same service Microsoft uses to power much of the core infrastructure of Azure itself, allows developers to build highly scalable services on what is… Read More
Sitting through all the keynotes at Microsoft’s Build, there’s one giant gaping hole in the coverage: Windows Phone was barely mentioned. In fact, it seems like the keynote speakers were actively avoiding the platform in most of the sessions, showing that Microsoft have basically thrown in the towel altogether. Read More
Microsoft announced it was previewing a new service today at its annual Build Developer conference that lets programmers create event-driven triggers without deploying any underlying infrastructure. If it sounds familiar, it’s because AWS introduced a similar service called Lambda last year at re:Invent and in the tit for tat world of public cloud computing, Microsoft had to respond.… Read More
Microsoft acquired the cross-platform iOS, Android and OS X development service Xamarin last month and the new acquisition is already at the center of attention at Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference this week. As the company announced during today’s keynote, the core Xamarin tools are now available for free as part of the free Visual Studio Community edition and… Read More
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are growing at an increasing clip, and at the company’s Build conference today, it showed off some of the numbers it for the past year. At last year’s conference, Microsoft celebrated that it had 100k new Azure customer subscriptions per month, but it today revealed that the rate of growth has accelerated further, now topping 120k new… Read More
We’ve been at Microsoft’s Build conference all day, getting up close and personal with the latest and greatest from Microsoft. With announcements about Xbox, Cortana, Windows 10, new developer tools, the introduction of a Bash shell to Windows (!), cool new API tools for developers to use and much more, it has been a big day for Microsoft fans. The event wasn’t quite… Read More
Microsoft is holding its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco this week and after focusing on Windows, Xbox, HoloLens, and Cortana yesterday, the company will shine the spotlight on its cloud and developer tools today. You can watch the live stream right here. Read More
Amazon this morning announced an expansion of its Dash Buttons product line – those Wi-Fi connected, push-button devices that let you buy products from its site with just a press. One year after the buttons went live, and apparently not the April Fool’s joke people once imagined, Amazon says it now has over 100 buttons available, and orders have increased by more than 75 percent in… Read More
The letter to the co-op board sounds likely enough. The tenant is up in arms because air fresheners and other common household odors are seeping into the writer's apartment, giving him severe migraines. What to do about this chemical onslaught?
There's no doubt that these odors are giving the letter writer a debilitating headache, but also little doubt that there isn't a likely double-blind, testable, organic chemistry cause to the headache only in this setting.
The migraine in this case, like many things that bother us, is caused by a nocebo.
A nocebo is a placebo that makes things worse.
In this case, the lack of control over his home, the unwelcome and unasked for odors, are making him feel trapped, and thus annoyed, and angry, and so they lead to a headache. It's pretty clear to most of us that if that very same bundle of molecules wafted in the door when the clever and happy grandson came to visit, there would be no problem.
Of course the nocebo is real. And eliminating it is a great way to improve your life or the lives of your customers.
The TSA intentionally brings a nocebo to the airport, stressing out innocent travelers. And schools know precisely how to raise the blood pressure of stressed out students. In many situations, loud noises, uncomfortable seats, moments of lost control... these create actual physical discomfort.
We can use the nocebo to give you a headache, a backache, or even a chronic degenerative disease...
But you don't remove the nocebo with medical tests. You remove it with a better story, with a situation that makes us feel powerful and in control, with a setting and a narrative that gives us agency and dignity.
The Xbox One is about to become a far more interesting (and accessible) platform for indie game developers — and regular users will soon be able to use their console to chat with Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant, too. Ever since Microsoft launched its Xbox One console, the company promised it would allow any developer to develop apps for it — but until now, you… Read More
Being able to log in to an app with the help of the fingerprint scanner is quickly becoming a standard feature on mobile. But while Windows PCs and laptops have long had fingerprint scanners to allow you to securely log in to your machine, that protection didn’t extend any further than the login screen. Now Microsoft is bringing to Windows apps (and even the web) some of… Read More
Microsoft’s recently launched, A.I.-powered bot Tay may have embarrassed the company when Twitter users taught the machine how to be racist, but Microsoft hasn’t given up on the future of bot development. It’s just getting started. At Microsoft’s annual Build conference in San Francisco today, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company’s plans to bring the world of… Read More
Here is an announcement from Microsoft Build you probably didn’t see coming: Microsoft today announced that it is bringing the GNU project’s Bash shell to Windows. Bash (Bourne Again SHell) has long been a standard on OS X and many Linux distribution systems, while the default terminal for developers on Windows is Microsoft’s own PowerShell. More importantly than bringing… Read More
Microsoft today announced the next major update of Windows 10 at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. The “Windows 10 Anniversary Update” is scheduled to arrive — you guessed it — on the one-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch: later this summer. Windows 10 launched on July 29, so that’s probably the date. Many of the new feature will, of… Read More
The power of the cloud is a bit fuzzy to most of us, but Microsoft wants to improve that by giving developers a series of API tools it has dubbed Cognitive Services to make their software far smarter, including tools for trainable speech-to-text processing and a whole new grade of object recognition. Read More
In an announcement met by hoots and hollers from the developers at Build, Microsoft introduced the ‘Centennial’ desktop app converter. With this, developers can convert their Win32 and .NET apps into the AppX app format for use in the Windows store, turning legacy apps into current-gen applications. Read More
Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant competes against the likes of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the unnamed mystery voice behind Google Now. It’s part of a new wave of services that are slowly making talking to computers mainstream, but because of Microsoft’s weak position on mobile, it hasn’t quite had the same impact as some of its competitors. Read More Windows 10 and early versions of Windows have long supported pen input. For the most part, though, that support was relegated to specific apps. As the company announced at its Build developers conference in San Francisco today, it’s now expanding pen support across its operating system — all developers have to do to implement this is add two lines of code to their apps. The… Read More
Following from the unmitigated disaster that was Windows 8, Windows 10 has been doing rather well for Microsoft. After announcing that its flagship operating system ran on 200 million monthly active devices in January, the company today used its Build keynote to announce that this number is now up to 270 million monthly active devices. Read More
Microsoft is holding its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco this week and the company is kicking off the event with its first of two major keynotes this morning. You can watch the live stream of the event right here. The keynote is scheduled to start at 8:30am Pacific, 11:30am Eastern, and 17:30 Central European Time. Unlike last year, where the focus was squarely on the… Read MoreHuman beings are prediction machines. Successful humans skate to where the puck is going to be, predict what's going to happen next, have an inkling of what's to come.
We do this by creating models. A really good model is a theory, a testable method for asserting what's going to happen next under certain conditions--and being right.
The pundits have models, of course. In writing about this one, the Times admits that they've been consistently wrong--in both directions--with their predictions. But rather than acknowledging that they have a broken model, they persist.
The thing is, when your model doesn't match reality (when you have trouble predicting how your investments will do, whether a sales call will resonate, whether a presentation will work, whether a new hire will work out) it's tempting to blame reality.
Consider that it might be much more effective to get a better model instead.
Near a week after being silenced because the internet taught her to be racist, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence bot “Tay” briefly returned to Twitter today, whereon she went on a spam tirade and then quickly fell silent again. Read More
There’s good news in the fight against rogue USB-C cables, some of which have caused major problems with smartphones and laptops, after Amazon tightened the regulations around the type of cables that it sells. Read More
With Strata + Hadoop World kicking off, it’s always fascinating to step back and look at the contents of the sessions as a way of understanding what’s happening in the world of Big Data. For those of you who have attended this conference for the more than five years that the event’s been kicking, you’ve likely seen it transform from an arena for software developers… Read More
With Strata + Hadoop World kicking off, it’s always fascinating to step back and look at the contents of the sessions as a way of understanding what’s happening in the world of Big Data. For those of you who have attended this conference for the more than five years that the event’s been kicking, you’ve likely seen it transform from an arena for software developers… Read More
The lesson is this: we shouldn’t be focusing on hardware anymore. Perhaps instead we need to focus on what happens when hardware and software come together. Read More
Technology can and will solve the majority of shortcomings associated with wearables today. To use a baseball analogy, we are only in the third inning, and there is still a lot of ballgame to be played. Read MoreDon't finalize the logo before you come up with a business plan that works.
Don't spend a lot of time thinking about your vacation policy before you have a product that people actually want to buy.
There are endless small details to get right before you have something that you're truly proud of. No doubt about it. But there are frightening and huge holes in any bridge to the future, and until you figure out how to get across, I'm not sure it matters if you have a typo on page 4.
Hiding takes many forms. Inappropriate attention to detail is a big one, because it feels like a responsible thing to do.
By all means, get it right. Get it right the first time. Successful makers of change embrace the hierarchy of importance, though, and refuse to engage with a fight about right when it's vitally important to focus on important instead.
