for W3c validation

Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

How NFTs are building the internet of the future

Anne says: Do you remember the baby that bit his brother’s finger in the back of the car? Charlie bit my finger – a YouTube sensation since 2007 with nearly 900 million views was sold recently for US$760,000 – as an NFT or a nonfungible token. Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) sold his first tweet for US$2.9 million. Nyan Cat, an animated cat with a rainbow trail sold for US$580,000. But what is an NFT and why are people selling things for what appears to be crazy amounts of money.

I’ve struggled a bit to explain this to friends, so I was relieved to watch this TED Talk from Kayvon Tehranian – from now on, I’m going to share the link: Here, watch this! So, if you want a straightforward explanation, plus some future vision about the implications – watch it!!

And while you’re watching it, let your imagination consider the future of digital assets. Will NFTs become the norm? Will we accept this fundamental change in content ownership? And how will this release us from the ownership of our assets from the big platforms?

Watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/kayvon_tehranian_how_nfts_are_building_the_internet_of_the_future

How (and why) to train your brain to be more curious at work

Source

Jakkii says: Curiosity is essential in our work as researchers and human-centred designers, and it’s also a critical skill for empathy. It takes curiosity, openness and willingness to develop understanding of others, their views, their motivations, their pain points and their struggles. Like any skill, it’s something you can cultivate in yourself and learn to be better at.

This article talks about the whys of curiosity (from a work perspective, it’s largely so we can problem-solve, ideate, improve and innovate), before going into some suggestions of habits and approaches we can take to train ourselves to be more curious. These are:

• Work in your ‘curiosity zone’

• Manage uncertainty

• Surround yourself with curious people

• Embrace a collaborative approach

• Avoid the “advice trap”

• Stick with it

As always, you can review the article for more detail on each, but the suggestion (aside from ‘stick with it’!) that stood out most for me to be honest was to avoid the “advice trap”. Essentially this is about resisting the temptation to give advice when you’re asking questions and listening to someone – you’re trying to learn from their perspectives and understand people including their motivations and issues, not to solve problems or give advice. It can be hard to resist, especially if you’re trying to learn more about your team, such as in the example the author provides of trying to work out what each team member needs in order to perform their best.

I’d love to hear from you on curiosity, whether it’s something you already practice and your experience of it, or if you don’t already practice curiosity, how it goes if (or when!) you put some of these approaches into practice in your workplace. Let me know in the comments or on social media!

Read: https://www.fastcompany.com/90683974/how-and-why-to-train-your-brain-to-be-more-curious-at-work

At home

Hulu execs: “We’ll call it Huluween! It fits, it flows, everyone gets what it is right away.”

Meanwhile, at Peacock: http://pic.twitter.com/nw90extB7w

— rachel kiley (@rachelkiley) October 11, 2021

Jakkii says: Can you believe it’s already the middle of October? Time has moved at the weirdest pace this year – I suppose really since the pandemic kicked off. In some ways, it’s gone lightning-quick, while in other ways it’s absolutely dragged. Things that happened 6 months ago feel like 2 years ago. It’s so odd. But while you’re pondering existence and the passage of time, here’s a few things you can watch, listen, read and do at home this week.

• Check out the world’s largest model railway in Germany via this short video celebrating their 20th anniversary

• Find new tracks to listen to with Forgotify, which unearths ‘forgotten’ songs on Spotify

• Need some eyebleach? Watch this otter living his best life, juggling a rock

• Read the fascinating and strange true story of John Williams and Charles Pennock

• Marvel at the amazing images captured in the Drone Photo of the Year competition

• Get your trivia on with Isolation Trivia (Fridays, 6.30pm QLD/7.30pm NSW) and Townie Music Trivia (Thursdays, 7pm QLD/8pm NSW).

Friday Fives

Source

Hybrid workplace and the future of work

• What does a ‘Covid-normal’ workplace look like?

• 12 questions about hybrid work, answered

• Canva’s global head of L&D on key skills for leaders in a hybrid workforce

• ‘The reality of hybrid working is pretty complex’

• Hybrid work is not great for you but even worse for the planet

Remote work and the digital workplace

• What Slack does for women and Slackers of the world, unite!

• Working from home: A guide to creating a healthy and productive workspace at home

• Asynchronous videos: Can the TikTok generation save us from meeting overload?

• The curse of off-hours email

• Why leaders resist empowering virtual teams

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• Facebook-backed group launches misinformation adjudication panel in Australia

• How Peloton builds a community around health and wellness to craft its brand

• TikTok: Our continued fight against hate and harassment

• Facebook has banned nearly 1,000 ‘militarised social movements,’ documents reveal

• This tech millionaire went from covid trial funder to misinformation superspreader

Privacy, data and security

• If social media can be unsafe for kids, what happens in VR?

• Don’t know how your data is used, or how to protect it? You’re not alone – but you can improve your data literacy

• Clearview AI has new tools to identify you in photos

• School laptops are being used to surveil students

• Twitch says ‘server configuration change’ led to massive data leak

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• Australia urges US to follow its lead in regulating social media giants

• Silenced no more: A new era of tech whistleblowing?

• Teachers union in the US urges TikTok, Facebook, other big tech to stop spread of viral challenges

• Lawmakers’ latest idea to fix Facebook: Regulate the algorithm

• Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads

Facebook

• Facebook’s fall from grace looks a lot like Ford’s

• Facebook’s own internal documents offer a blueprint for making social media safer for teens

• Facebook and Instagram say issues now fixed after second outage in a week

• How to fix Facebook

• Facebook to ‘nudge’ teens away from harmful content, add ‘take a break’ function to Instagram

Social media

• The problem with underestimating TikTok

• CGI influencers: when the ‘people’ we follow on social media aren’t human

• Sit this one out: Twitter tests warnings about ‘heated or intense’ threads

• Bodies are cancelled

• Edelman and LinkedIn study: market oversaturated with ‘poor quality’ thought leadership

Extras

why are all the available alarm sounds on a phone either “circus music played by children” or “what if enya was the cops”

— localghost:5984 (@mountain_ghosts) October 8, 2021

This is interesting: How fonts affect learning and memory

Things that make you go hmmm: The status games we all play

Space: Australian-made rover to help establish a human base on the moon

Podcast: Randomness: a need for chaos

Friday playlist: 60s rock anthems