Articles Written By:

Tony Scida

How Taxing: HodgePodge for Apr. 15

👀 Apparently I can’t resist a story about emojis. Here, from NPR, is a report on a new study on how well the pictograms work for communication: “Not so fast, say a group of researchers who found that different people had vastly different interpretations of some popular emojis. The researchers published their findings for GroupLens, a research lab based out of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.” Is the chicken local? Maybe you heard this on All…

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Madness: HodgePodge for Mar. 18

Stand if you want to Using a standing desk can be a good change of pace from sitting all day (and might even be your preferred way to work all the time), but the science is far from settled. “I’ve been itching to get a standing desk. After all, America’s sitting itself into an early grave. Sitting is the new smoking. Clearly, a standing desk would stop me from sitting, and standing is just so much better for you than sitting, right?” “Contrary to popular…

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Meno Mosso: HodgePodge for Mar. 11

Musically speaking Interesting, long and subtly interactive, this New York Times piece looks at where popular music is heading. “One of the great tricks of pop music is that no matter how much we like to imagine it’s about musicians expressing themselves, it tends to be more useful as a way for listeners to figure out their own identities: Each song lets us try on a new way of being in the world. For a long while, the idea was that young people could use…

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Snap Decision: HodgePodge for Mar. 4

Work it In New York Times Magazine’s The Work Issue, they featured articles on work-life balance, hiring practices, lunch breaks and this interesting long piece on how to build a team: “Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ­— a practice known as ‘employee performance optimization’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last…

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Science!: HodgePodge for Feb. 12

ObLIGOtory space item You may have heard this week that a laboratory named LIGO proved Einstein right about gravitational waves. The New York Times has a video illustrating the waves and how they were detected and The Atlantic called it “the dawn of a new era in science”: “More than a billion years ago, in a galaxy that sits more than a billion light-years away, two black holes spiraled together and collided. We can’t see this collision, but we know it happened because, as Albert Einstein predicted a century ago, gravitational…

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Snow Thank You: HodgePodge for Jan. 22

Pizzaology You could slice your pizza the regular way, or you could use the power of math to slice it into 40 identically shaped pieces: “Mathematicians already knew from previous research that they can divide the six congruent slices of the pizza, cut through the center of the pie (below, left) by dividing each slice across its middle. The result is twelve three-sided slices, six on the inside with very little crust, and six on the outside with the most of the crust…” “But the…

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I’m Back!: HodgePodge for Jan. 8

For the new year, I’m trying something a little different with the format of HodgePodge. I’ll still bring you five (or so) interesting stories each week, but now I’ll include an interesting excerpt as well. Digital Dominion A huge portion of the “cloud” runs on Amazon Web Services, which means much of your daily internet activity runs through Northern Virgina. The Atlantic took a tour of AWS’s data center: “Once in a while—not quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to…

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Bits and Bites: HodgePodge for Dec. 11

Luke, use the data Bloomberg Business applies some data journalism to The Force, tracking screen time the mysterious power was used for good vs. evil, which powers were used by which characters and more. Where’s Dr. Beckett? WSJ.D reports on Google’s latest experiments with quantum computing. TL;DR version: We at least know it’s not completely useless. That’s so money Reclusive Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is probably this Australian guy. Except, probably not. (Trigger warning: highly technical content.) Ashton will fix it The Verge traces the…

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How Tweet It Isn’t: Hodgers Read Mean Tweets from Reporters

One of the great new tools for public relations professionals is the ability to follow journalists on Twitter.  It not only helps us get a clearer understanding of the kinds of things that certain reporters cover, but it also gives us insight into their personal interests, likes and dislikes. But Twitter also exposes us to the raw, spontaneous invective that reporters tweet our way – some of it deserved (okay, LOTS of it deserved) and some of it a less-than-kind, far-from-subtle way of keeping us…

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Ew: HodgePodge for Nov. 13

Gum springs eternal Seattle’s famed gum wall is in the process of being de-gummed. Read about it on NPR. Happy little challenge PBS NewsHour invited viewers to take the #BobRossChallenge and paint along to old Joy of Painting episodes on YouTube. The results are far-superior to 12-year-old Tony’s own attempts many years ago. Stressed for success “[W]hile family structure seems to have permanently changed, public policy, workplace structure and mores have not seemed to adjust to a norm in which both parents work.” NYT’s TheUpshot…

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Boo!: HodgePodge for Oct. 30

Seriously Nobody cares how hard you work. Read another day In a Longread about Bond movie title tracks, Adrian Daub & Charles Kronengold look at what makes them wonderfully awful and awfully wonderful at the same time. (Or as the authors put it, “most Bond songs are gangly, glorious homunculi.”) Greek mythology As we lead up to the Richmond Marathon in a couple weeks, here’s the New Yorker on how the marathon, which had previously varied in length, came to become fixed at 26.2 miles….

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Hodgetober Fest: HodgePodge for Oct. 16

Puzzle me this You know what you think and what your friends think, but can you predict what the majority thinks? Don’t call her calculated Taylor Swift is having more fun being Taylor Swift than tabloids are tisk-tisking Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. Removed Here’s some pictures of people with their smartphones photoshopped out. They have me rethinking some things. Double plus upvoted Reddit launched a new editorial site that highlights interesting content from the site. It’s called Upvoted, and this is my favorite story so…

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