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A scary report from the New York Times:

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are growing at an accelerating pace this year, researchers said Wednesday, putting the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected.

From the New Yorker:

Many of the angriest complaints, however, were due to problems rooted in what Sumit Rana, a senior vice-president at Epic, called “the Revenge of the Ancillaries.” In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. The doctors were used to having all the votes. But Epic had arranged meetings to try to adjudicate these differences. Now the staff had a say (and sometimes the doctors didn’t even show), and they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with “field required” alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.

An interesting analysis from An Xiao Mina in an article on Fast Company:

I read the following scary tidbit from CNBC:

Just 96 people across the country have been released from their debt, thanks to public service loan forgiveness. Last year was the first year of eligiblity, since the program was signed into law in 2007 and it requires at least 10 years of payments to qualify. Nearly 30,000 borrowers have applied for the forgiveness, according to the Education Department’s data.

When I was working on the Youth Jobs project at MAPC one of the core principles we based our work on was that a good user interface developed with user research could reduce or eliminate the need for training and helping employees use software. Good design could make it easier for young people to apply for jobs, but it also could help the staff view and select youth without learning complex software. This is easy to do when you do user research and your users only need to use a subset of functionality, or the software has little functionality to begin with. However many software packages are used in different ways by different people. The old approach to this was to let the user customize the user interface in a configuration screen or file. Today software companies are deploying artificial intelligence to create customized user interfaces for every user.