Alternative thinking on management fees, Brexit reactions and Bill Ackman's blues

Alternative Thinking on Management Fees, Brexit Reactions, and Bill Ackman's Blues

“…a Bermuda-based reinsurer whose investment portfolio is run by Loeb, is cutting its management fee to 1.5% per year from 2%...”

It continues…

An urban agriculturalist says farming needs a rebrand

Caleb Haper discusses his work building "Food Computers" and more

Accessibility Matters: Meet Our New Book, “Inclusive Design Patterns” (Pre-Release)

Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would "add" accessibility on top of the finished product.

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Today we're privileged to announce our brand new book on inclusive design patterns, written by Heydon Pickering, with dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you'll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code.

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Microsoft kills Xbox Fitness, will yank access to previously purchased content

Microsoft is killing Xbox Fitness -- without refunding any of the money people spent on the application, or providing any compensation for the loss of purchased content.

Children's Wish Foundation steps it up with #DoTheLivi

Mosaic offers pro bono services to help make a nine-year-old famous

Microsoft confirms Surface 3 production will end this year, has no public plans for a follow-up

Microsoft's Surface 3 was the best of the company's three lower-end tablet devices, but Microsoft appears to be canceling the hardware with no plans to create a replacement. Intel's decision to cancel its tablet and smartphone products may be behind the move.

Alternative thinking on Brexit gains, Brexit losses and CNBC's booking schedule

“What a day.”

That's Crispen Odey, London-based hedge fund manager and the founding partner of Odey Asset Management, talking about the Brexit.

As The Wall Street Journal explains, Odey publicly backed Britain's departure from the European Union and that he “set up his $10 billion firm accordingly.”

Gravitational waves can reveal how black holes are 'born'

By: Victoria Woollaston

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Cannes 2016: Just 12 Lions equals tough year for Canada

After a stellar 2015, Canada's medal count dips in 2016. Judy John's suggestion to be better in 2017

Epsilon Theory: Waiting for Humpty Dumpty

Brexit is a Bear Stearns moment, not a Lehman moment. That's not to diminish what's happening (markets felt like death in March, 2008), but this isn't the event to make you run for the hills.

Web Development Reading List #142: Contextual Identities, Form Hints, And ApplePay.js

Today will be a day in history regardless of what happens over the next weeks. The majority of people in the UK voted to leave the EU, and this made clear once again that many people in our society think the current situation is no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, we think blaming those people is the solution, but, as we see, it isn't. Instead, we should focus on teaching people about the root causes of problems, and we should retain from posting everything right away.

In other news, I'm back from vacation to bring you new articles to read. And I realized one thing: While mountaineering holds real risks and dangers, working on websites mostly does not. Of course, the security of our websites should be a top priority, but even if we fail, if a website is down for a few minutes, if we screwed up the layout on some devices, you won't be dead. We have the opportunity to improve our work by making mistakes and fixing them.

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Oculus silently reverses course on its DRM strategy, removes lockouts from Oculus Store

Oculus has reversed course on its previous VR DRM and removed the software from the Oculus Store. The company has also pledged not to adopt DRM again to lock out other headsets.

Alternative Thinking on Hedge Fund Rankings, Bill Ackman's Blues and Facebook Tyranny

The top 100 hedge funds averaged a return north of 10.5% in 2015, and the three-year average is a tad below 17%. Meanwhile, there are a lot of equity-long-short funds, indicating that good stock pickers are still around.

PG&E to Close Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

Rick Laezman

• Your Business

The nuclear power industry suffered another setback in California on Tuesday when PG&E announced that it will close the Diablo Canyon power plant in San Luis Obispo County. It is the second such closure in California in the last three years.

Bud Light psychs out EDM fans with social experiments

Millennial test subjects were given a chance to win tickets to Tomorrowland

How To Harness The Machines: Being Productive With Task Runners

Task runners are the heroes (or villains, depending on your point of view) that quietly toil behind most web and mobile applications. Task runners provide value through the automation of numerous development tasks such as concatenating files, spinning up development servers and compiling code.

In this article, we'll cover Grunt, Gulp, Webpack and npm scripts. We'll also provide some examples of each one to get you started. Near the end, I'll throw out some easy wins and tips for integrating ideas from this post into your application.

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Improving UX For Color-Blind Users

According to Colour Blind Awareness 4.5% of the population are color-blind. If your audience is mostly male this increases to 8%. Designing for color-blind people can be easily forgotten because most designers aren't color-blind. In this article I provide 13 tips to improve the experience for color-blind people – something which can often benefit people with normal vision too.

There are many types of color blindness but it comes down to not seeing color clearly, getting colors mixed up, or not being able to differentiate between certain colors.

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No more codes: How to authenticate your Google sign-in with just a tap

Multi-factor authentication is an important part of keeping your online accounts secure, but the process is notoriously cumbersome. Google is attempting to streamline the task by allowing you to authenticate with a tap on your smartphone.

Birds can grasp the basics of human grammar

Researchers have found that budgerigars and zebra finches can understand the abstract relation between sounds

By: Matthew Reynolds

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Cannes 2016: FCB/Six offers an unofficial festival app

Cannes Meow focuses on catty comments, gossip and 'humanizing' data

Is it time to dump gold and buy platinum?

For a relatively safe investment, the market says investors should be selling gold and buying platinum. That can be done either by buying a platinum exchange-traded fund and selling a similar amount of a gold ETF or simply by trading gold coins for a greater number of platinum coins.

In search of Finding Dory's brand storytelling secrets

Pixar offers some object lessons that creatives everywhere should appreciate

Scientists invent machine that can (sort of) read your mind

Machines can now read your brain, they're just not very good at it yet.

Cannes 2016: LG2 lone Canadian shop on Print & Publishing list

Agency's Quebec office shortlisted five times for two clients

The Fed giveth and the bullion banks taketh away

Janet Yellen just blew all remaining semblances of credibility believed to be still present at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board.

Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text

Sublime Text is, no doubt, one of the most powerful text editors out there. The number of satisfied users attests to that. If you explore it, you will eventually see how beautifully its powerful features are hidden behind a simple and elegant interface.

If you have been using Sublime Text for some time, now is the time to upgrade your arsenal with new ammunition. I'll be taking you through some of my favorite tips and tricks. Knowing them might just unleash your hidden powers as a programmer to the world.

The post Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Asus, MSI are shipping overclocked GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs to reviewers, but not customers

Asus and MSI have been caught shipping cards to reviewers with slightly higher clocks by default than they're shipping to retail customers. While the gap is minor, it's not something we approve of on principle.

The Art Of Layout Testing With Galen Framework

When designing a graphical user interface, there is always an open question: How do we automate testing for it? And how do we make sure the website layout stays responsive and displays correctly on all kinds of devices with various resolutions? Add to this the complications arising from dynamic content, requirements for internationalization and localization, and it becomes a real challenge.

In this article, I will guide you through an interesting new layout testing technique. Using Galen Framework, I will provide a detailed tutorial for writing meaningful generalized layout tests, which can be executed in any browser and on any device and at the same time used as a single source of truth in your design documentation.

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New Bluetooth 5 spec will double speeds and quadruple range

The new Bluetooth 5 standard is expected to be released this year, with vastly improved range, performance, and total broadcast capability.

Designing Modular UI Systems Via Style Guide-Driven Development

Using a style guide to drive development is a practice that is gaining a lot of traction in front-end development - and for good reason. Developers will start in the style guide by adding new code or updating existing code, thereby contributing to a modular UI system that is later integrated in the application. But in order to implement a modular UI system, we must approach design in a modular way.

Modular design encourages us to think and design a UI and UX in patterns. For example, instead of designing a series of pages or views to enable a user to accomplish a task, we would start the design process by understanding how the UI system is structured and how its components can be used to create the user flow.

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Competitive Advantages Are Key

William Atkinson

• Systems

Since its humble beginnings in 1981, Metropolitan Electrical Construction in San Francisco has grown to a staff of almost 300 (250 field staff and 40 office employees) by ensuring that it can offer a number of competitive advantages to the marketplace.

Throughout the 1980s, the company focused almost exclusively on electrical projects. That changed in the next decade.

“In the early 1990s, management saw the way that the market was going and brought some people on board to start handling low-voltage projects,” said Steve Borghello, division manager, voice/data/wireless communications.


Google evangelist: 'Say no to data pukes'

Avinash Kaushik tells Art of Marketing Toronto that information needs to be better managed

The Story Behind The Ekaterinburg Metro Map

A large metropolitan underground train network might as well be a teleportation device: People don't care how it gets them from A to B, just that it does. In London, Paris and Moscow, the map of the metro does not show surface geography, because there is not much empty space on the sheet.

Designing a city's metro map is quite a challenging task, even when there is just one line. Last year, my colleague Pasha Omelekhin and I were thrilled to work on the redesign of the metro map for Ekaterinburg, Russia. We had fun (he designed, I directed). In this article, we'll cover our design process. It's going to be detailed, so, depending on your interests, this might be very boring or very exciting. Still, we've left out so much. We hope this helps in case you have to work on a similar project.

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