Narrative News Archive - Page 3 of 10

14 Jul

On the night of January 27, the Chicago forecast called for subzero temperatures the next day, with such high winds that it could feel like 30 below at the time when most students would be coming home from school. In light of that, Chicago Public Schools decided to close, saying “subzero temperatures and high winds will make it dangerous for children…

04 Jul

61-year-old Cliff Young showed up to the 1983 Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon in his first-ever pair of running shoes and windbreaker pants with hand-cut holes for ventilation. He picked up his number, popped out his false teeth (they rattled when he ran) and stepped into line with a group of young, nylon-clad super athletes waiting to start the 544-mile race.…

27 Jun

In 2011, Scott Guthrie was tasked with leading Microsoft’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. He went out into the field to get customer’s feedback, and one thing became very clear. The Azure technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure wouldn’t be able to meet its growth targets until it was much more customer-friendly. So what did…

19 Jun

In 1991, a first-year PhD student named Amy Edmondson began visiting hospital wards, intending to show that good teamwork and good medicine went hand in hand. But the data kept saying she was wrong. Edmondson was studying organizational behavior at Harvard. A professor had asked her to help with a study of medical mistakes, and so Edmondson, on the prowl for a…

12 Jun

In 1990, Jerry Sternin was sent by Save the Children to fight severe malnutrition in rural communities of Vietnam. The Vietnamese foreign minister, having seen many such “do-gooder” missions in the past, gave him just six months to make a difference. Sternin was well-versed in the academic literature on the complex systemic causes of malnutrition – poor sanitation, poverty, lack of education,…

30 May

When a troll called comedian Sarah Silverman the C-word on Twitter, she responded with level-headed kindness, finding out he was in a lot of pain and eventually helping him pay for his medical bills. On Dec. 28, Twitter user Jeremy Jamrozy responded rudely to one of Silverman’s tweets. Instead of ignoring him or responding angrily, she went in a completely different direction,…

23 May

Every big data study LEGO commissioned drew the exact same conclusions: future generations would lose interest in LEGO. LEGOs would go the way of jackstraws, stickball, blindman’s bluff. So-called Digital Natives – men and women born after 1980, who’d come of age in the Information Era – lacked the time, and the patience, for LEGOs, and would quickly run out of ideas…

13 May

Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former chief body-guard was captured and put in a Yemini prison post 9/11. All attempts to get Abu Jandal to reveal information about Al Qaeda’s leadership had failed. However whilst the interrogation was going on, the interrogators noticed that Abu Jandal didn’t touch any of the cookies offered to him with tea.They later learned that he was…

News

Rhiannon Broschat

Cliff Young

Scott Guthrie

Amy Edmondson

Jerry Sternin

Sarah Silverman

LEGO and Big Data Insights

Abu Jandal