9 Awesome YouTube Accounts for Tech Enthusiasts

Whether it’s the latest tech industry innovations, what’s next in space travel, or the most obscure gadgets out there, there’s a lot happening in tech. How to keep up with the trends?

A lot of tech innovators and enthusiasts have launched YouTube channels to talk about tech news, provide product reviews and how-tos, and explore new experiments in tech that are just starting to make a splash. Here are nine of our favorite YouTube channels on a wide variety of tech-related topics.

CNET. 1.4M subscribers.

CNET has one of the best and most established tech-focused YouTube channels. They’ve got tutorials, interviews (hi, Mark Zuckerberg), advice for finding and using new devices, exclusive coverage of big conferences and tech events, and first looks at new releases including cars, home appliances, computers, smartphones and watches, and more. You’re bound to find all sorts of tidbits on anything you’re searching for (or didn’t even know you were searching for).

Mashable. 526K subscribers.

Mashable covers robots, jetpacks, VR, and other toys of the future, but also your present-day gadgets and gizmos. Mashable’s short, digestible videos can help you fix your current tech problems and also stay on the cutting edge.

MKBHD. 5M subscribers.

Marques “MKBHD” Brownlee is one of the most popular tech-focused YouTubers out there, and for good reason. His videos have good camera work and high-quality production value, and often a nice dash of humor. The content includes first impressions as Marques unboxes new gadgets, as well as explanations, features of his favorite hot tech, and answers to subscribers’ questions.

Tech Insider. 922K subscribers.

A spinoff of Business Insider, Tech Insider dives into big issues in tech. Sometimes there’s a business side to the inside scoop (a Tesla road trip, features on top-selling devices), but there are lots of videos that show the fun side to digital culture and tech innovations, too (inflatable obstacle courses, how deep the ocean is, scary VR games). For learning about how tech works and weird inventions that aren’t mainstream (yet), Tech Insider is a great hub.

Techquickie. 1.6M subscribers.

If you want tech, and you want it quick, Techquickie has got you covered. The videos are usually about five minutes and peppered with humorous asides. They generally fall into three categories: first, answering those questions you never knew you had (why do you have to use airplane mode? What’s a safe temperature for your computer? What are URLs, really?); second, fixes for your malfunctioning gadgets; and third, DIY projects for the technologically ambitious.

TechCrunch. 295K subscribers.

TechCrunch is like a bag of assorted candies where you can’t decide your favorite, so you just keep eating and eating. The formats range from interviews to news reports to talk shows (ish), and the topics include startups, space travel, transportation, gaming, Apple-focused news, robotics, and of course, gadget reviews. As far as range and depth of coverage, TechCrunch is one to beat.

Unbox Therapy. 8.6M subscribers.

It’s hard to imagine taking gadgets out of boxes as therapeutic until you’ve seen Unbox Therapy get into it. It’s no listening to the ocean, but it sure is entertaining. These videos, usually five to ten minutes, get into the nitty-gritty of a wide range of brand new tech. Some devices only show up once (how many $5,000 massage chairs can be there be?), but Lewis gets in-depth with video series that focus on different categories of products, like headphones, phone cases, speakers, and keyboards. Seriously, there’s a lot of variety in keyboards. Yes, there’s one made out of wood.

The Verge. 1.5M subscribers.

The Verge is another one with a lot of content and a ton of variety. They’ve got handy reviews and how-tos for the devices you’re likely to have, as well as series on things like space travel, consumer electronics events, and the latest experiments in technology, involving everything from airplanes to human emotions.

Grammarly. 100K subscribers.

Need a break from exploring tech’s latest and greatest, or maybe desperate to know whether you need an “affect” or an “effect” in your work report? Well, we’ve got you covered.

Need a break from exploring tech’s latest and greatest, or maybe desperate to know whether you need an “affect” or an “effect” in your work report? Well, we’ve got you covered. Grammarly’s YouTube channel explores the intersection of tech, writing right, and communication for business. Had to sneak that one in there.

This list scratches the surface, but there are tons of great tech-focused YouTube channels out there. What are your favorites? Join the brainstorm by sharing your picks in the comments section.

How Helpful Was Your Grammar and Writing Education?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.

Yes, Illiteracy Is Still a Human Rights Issue

Today marks the fifty-first anniversary of International Literacy Day, a holiday that recognizes literacy as “a foundation to build a more sustainable future for all.” Started in 1966 by UNESCO as a day to recognize literacy programs worldwide, this day continues to remind world leaders that universal literacy has not been accomplished. Far from it, in fact: in 2013, the adult (25 or older) literacy rate was 85 percent worldwide, and the population of illiterate adults was 757 million. But why does this number seem so high?

Reading Your Rights

Before we look at the current data, let’s take a look at how literacy has been defined in the past and what it looks like today. According to Merriam-Webster, literacy carries two definitions: “the ability to read and write” and “knowledge that relates to a specified subject.” The second definition is generally used in specific technical or academic settings. The first, however, maps back to the traditional requirements for literacy, the “three Rs” of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, education in these areas was reserved for members of the upper classes. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that discussion of universal literacy began.

When UNESCO held its first summit on literacy in 1966, the “three R” approach was held as the standard. They also focused on “eradicating” illiteracy in certain regions, which led to some forced non-native language learning in populations where written language for a certain dialect wasn’t accepted by national governments.

However, in 1970, a change began to take hold of the literacy community. Instead of viewing illiteracy as an evil that needed to be conquered, educational leaders focused on “functional literacy,” which emphasizes the ways literacy leads to economic growth for individuals and entire communities.

Today, UNESCO and others focus on literacy as a way to empower people and allow them to attain better employment, wages, and other economic benefits. Reading isn’t just for fun, it’s a vital measure of a person’s or community’s ability to tap into the global economy.

Literacy Is a Life-or-Death Issue

Since literacy is now seen in the context of economic and social prosperity, let’s contextualize some literacy statistics. As mentioned before, around 15 percent of the worldwide population is considered illiterate by UNESCO standards, and this percentage represents 757 million individuals. According to an international literacy test administered from 2012 to 2014, the worldwide average of adults who scored at or below the lowest reading level is 16 percent of those surveyed. In the US, this number is 18 percent, a full two percentage points over the international average.

But what does this mean to the lives of those in the 16 percent?

According to a recent analysis, life expectancy and literacy have a positive relationship, meaning that populations with high literacy rates also tend to live longer. The relationship between reading and lifespan is supported by other studies, but it also makes logical sense because literacy is tied to economic development, which has been shown to increase life expectancy as well. Perhaps it’s time for us to consider literacy as important a human right as clean water, healthcare access, and nutrition. It clearly has serious effects.

Literacy in the Digital Age

Today’s digital landscape means that literacy is more important than ever to upward economic mobility. In a world where 87 percent of people in the US and 45 percent of people worldwide report owning a smartphone, it’s important to give every person the ability to fully connect to and benefit from the Internet. To learn more about the state of literacy education and research today, check out UNESCO.org to learn more about International Literacy Day.

9 Tips for Effective Communication in the Workplace

Workplace communication shouldn’t be this difficult.

Your team is mere days out from releasing the project you’ve all been agonizing over for weeks. There have been flurries of emails and messages, presentations, a legal review, and an afternoon of confusing discussions leading to charts drawn on whiteboards with markers that turned out not to be dry-erase. Oops.

Above all, there have been meetings—so many meetings. There was the quick daily kind where people said what they were working on, or more often sidetracked by. Then there was a punishingly long session involving dozens of slides about user metrics; by the end of that one you were quietly daydreaming about taking up kickboxing lessons.

Still, all those rambling discussions and endless email threads somehow failed to avert a looming fiasco. Now no one seems to be on the same page, and your deadline is ticking relentlessly closer. What you have here is an abject lesson about communication in the workplace—or lack thereof.

How effectively you and your colleagues communicate says a lot about how well work is going more generally. It’s hard to get things done efficiently when no one has a clear plan. People can flounder when they don’t see a good way to discuss fresh opportunities—let alone unforeseen challenges.

That’s why we’re here with a few tips to improve your communication skills in the workplace.

Select the right tool for the job

There are many ways to connect—and misconnect. Choose wisely.

Emails may be de rigueur, but they’re also easily buried. Video conferences add a humanizing touch if someone’s working remotely, but they can be unwieldy. Basic phone calls are sometimes underrated, but you’ll often want to schedule in advance, or at least start by asking whoever you’re calling if it’s an okay time to talk.

The advantage of real-time conversation is how much it can clarify in a short amount of time while saving both parties a huge amount of typing back and forth. Be judicious about lining up meetings with multiple parties; this can easily become a chore, so you have to expect a worthwhile return to justify the effort.

Make your meetings count

As with work, which Parkinson’s Law states will expand to fill as much time as is allotted for it, so too with meetings. Set a time limit and an agenda. Budget how long you’ll spend on each item before moving on. The idea here is to respect your participants’ time, so communicate transparently about this; doing so will help you avoid seeming overly brusque as you shepherd things along.

For one-on-ones, take it offline

Potential rabbit holes abound in any discussion—and some might be worth following up on, at least among a subset of participants. For instance, if your designer realizes a new template that’s getting the go-ahead will soon require updated text, then she and her trusty copywriter can discuss those details after the meeting—not while the dev crew looks on and tries not to yawn. A handy turn of phrase for situations like this: “Let’s take it offline.”

It’s okay to repeat yourself sometimes

If something matters, it’s usually worth repeating.

Sometimes when dealing with complex subjects or ongoing processes, it’s helpful to remind people of the basics. You don’t have to belabor it. Consider this quick example:

“All right, this conference call is to update key players on prototyping. We’re trying to manufacture a better dog bed by fall, ahead of holiday sales, so we have a lot of work to do in terms of optimizing drool resistance. On the call last week, Susan informed us the supplier anticipates an eight-week turnaround. That means we need to settle on dimensions this month. Let’s talk about next steps. Who’s first?”

This quick recap falls well short of a lecture while still accomplishing a lot:

• Establishes the focus of the call, so speakers know to keep things on track and take other subjects offline as they pop up
• Also gives a sense of what to expect to anyone who hasn’t tuned in before
• Reprises Susan’s important takeaway from the last call in case anyone missed it
• Lays out a key priority and upcoming deadline

That last part will bear repeating later, but in the meantime, if your preamble has saved someone an awkward question or confused email, it’s done its job. And if you’re worried about spending too much time retracing your footsteps, just ask if you should skip ahead; your colleagues might surprise you by saying no.

Try stating key points a few different ways

It can also help to devise new ways to spell out key ideas—using different words or possibly different channels of communication, like a follow-up email that crystallizes the main takeaways from a meeting and who’s in charge of key action items going forward.

Alex Blumberg, the radio journalist-turned-entrepreneur who founded Gimlet Media, told Tape that despite his many years as a professional communicator, it took awhile to recognize the significance of helping coworkers understand:

When people say the same thing, it has different resonance, comes from a different place or means different things to different people… A big part of my job now is saying the same thing a bunch of different ways just so people understand where it’s coming from. If you just say it once, there’s no guarantee that people heard it the way you said it.

In other words, if something is important enough to bear repeating, it’s likely also worth rephrasing.

Run it back

Especially with technical matters, restating key ideas can also help you make sure you properly understand something new. If there’s time, try asking the person explaining it if you can restate their point in your own words, and ask if you’re getting it right. If there’s an important detail you missed, this is a good opportunity to get help grasping it.

Mind your body language

Intentionally or not, how you comport your body communicates a lot. For instance, do you appear closed off with your arms folded, or actively engaged, say by talking with your hands? It’s worth considering, lest you send the wrong message with your posture or facial expression.

Maybe as a colleague concludes a presentation and looks around the room, you seem to glower—not because the presentation was bad, but because you’re lost in thought. In moments like this, it’s sometimes worthwhile to explain yourself: “That wasn’t bad at all, I just need a moment to process. Let’s circle back in a moment.”

Summarize the highlights

It’s not unheard of for people to meet for an hour, raise a series of worthwhile questions, ponder potential answers, resolve nothing, and then realize it’s time to leave for another meeting. This is where follow-up notes can help ensure whatever headway you might’ve been making doesn’t just vanish out the door.

If you can avoid sending lengthy emails to long strings of recipients, it’s probably for the better. But if you must, you might also include a tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”) that briefly encapsulates the highlights. Put it at the top so that guy in logistics who only seems to skim will at least lay eyes on the essentials.

Be kind

A quick word of thanks or a well-timed smile can go a long way toward helping your officemates feel appreciated and understood.

If that makes people want to talk with you more, well, isn’t that what better workplace communication is all about?

All the Coffee Words

At your local coffee shop, do you ever see words that you don’t understand? For instance, what is java? Why is a cup of coffee called a cup of joe? Ordering a cup of coffee can feel like speaking another language! No worries, here are the meanings behind all the coffee words.

Synonyms of Coffee

Let’s start with the words that just refer to a simple cup of coffee. The first and most puzzling is joe. No one really knows how that got started, but some think that joe may derive from java. Java, besides referring to coffee, is also an island in Indonesia where coffee is grown. Decaf is decaffeinated coffee. An espresso is a dark roast coffee brewed with hot water and pressure.

Types of Coffee Drinks

Do you add something to your coffee? Doing so might result in a name change! Let’s start with milk. If you only put a small to moderate amount of steamed milk in your espresso, you are drinking a macchiato. A cappuccino has a lot of frothy steamed milk. If the proportion of hot milk to coffee is two to one, it’s cafe au lait. If the proportion is three to one, it’s a cafe latte. Add a little boiling water instead of milk and it’s a cafe americano. The addition of chocolate makes the drink a mocha. You can even serve coffee with ice cubes, but that one is easy—iced coffee. It usually includes cream and sugar.

Coffee Sizes

Rather than small, medium, and large, some coffee shops use their own units of measurement. For example, at one popular chain the smallest drinks are called short and tall. Rather than being the largest, grande is overshadowed by the venti and trenta, which contain as much as 31 ounces of liquid.

With all the different coffee drinks, no wonder there’s a special name for the talented ones who serve it—baristas. They speak the language. Now, what kind of coffee will you order next?

Figurative Language: 5 Tools to Spice Up Your Writing

A cardinal axiom of good writing, “show, don’t tell” reminds authors that language is infinitely more vivid and poignant when it appeals to the senses. Writing that does this has an amnesic effect on readers, ensconcing them so deeply in the story that they forget they’re reading a story at all. Perhaps the most apt tool to cast this spell on readers is figurative language, which employs various devices that imply meaning rather than plainly stating it. Here are five figurative devices that will breathe new life into your writing by compelling the reader to look beyond the obvious.

The Double Epithet

An epithet is an adjective or phrase that expresses attributes of a person or thing, such as “Alexander the Great.” Considered a device of poetic diction, epithets abound in famous poetry, especially Homer’s. For example, he coined phrases like “the rosy-fingered dawn” and “the wine-dark sea.” Epithets have even more figurative force in pairs, known as double epithets. Shakespeare was especially fond of this tool, penning classics like “mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms,” “beslubbering swag-bellied ratsbane,” and “roguish tickle-brained fustilarian.”

Anaphora

Used as both a rhetorical and poetic device, anaphora refers to parallelism created by successive lines or phrases beginning with the same words. Poetically, the recurring sounds produce a driving rhythm that can intensify the language’s emotionality. Rhetorically, anaphora lends emphasis to concepts. Anaphora appears frequently in the work of Charles Dickens (e.g., “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) and also figures prominently in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (King repeats the phrase “I have a dream” eight times in the closing paragraphs of the address).

Alliteration

This literary device repeats consonant sounds in a sentence or verse, typically, but not always, at the beginning of a word. Alliteration can give writing character and add an element of whimsy. Strategically, alliterative devices draw the reader’s attention to a particular passage, set a mood and rhythm, and can suggest certain connotations. For instance, a recurring “S” sound connotes a serpent-like quality, suggesting treachery and peril. Poe’s line “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” from The Raven uses alliteration, as does Beowulf‘s “Hot-hearted Beowulf was bent upon battle.”

Onomatopoeia

Appealing to the aural senses, onomatopoeia uses words imitative of sounds, such as quack, boom, whoosh, whir, hiss, crunch, crack, and swish. Paradoxically, onomatopoeia can add both frivolity and reality to writing, as it quirkily yet accurately mimics common sounds. The Alka Seltzer slogan “pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is” uses this device, as does Poe’s line from the poem The Bells “How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night!”

Hyperbole

When authors intentionally overstate for effect, they employ hyperbole. These exaggerations can be ludicrous or funny and help the author make a salient point. An excerpt from Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen rel=”nofollow”” skit illustrates this device perfectly as used for comedic effect. In describing how poor he was, one of the characters says, “I had to get up in the morning at 10 o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing ‘Hallelujah’.”

If variety is the spice of life, figurative language is the cayenne pepper of prose, figuratively speaking. So what are your most clever or creative uses of figurative language?

How to Turn Your New Year’s Resolutions Into Habits

So you’ve decided to write more. That’s your goal, your resolution.

You’re there; the keyboard is there. Maybe in your head you’re repeating “you can do it, you can do it,” getting pumped for the outpouring of productivity, the astronomical wordcount that will no doubt ensue at any moment now.

Yep, at any second, we’re going to kick into high gear and—Hang on, let’s put on some coffee first. And while that’s warming up, we might as well start a load of laundry. Oops, we’ll get back to the keyboard in one second, and we’ll really rip into this writing thing as soon as—Actually, I just got some email, I should check this…

Getting into the discipline of writing isn’t easy. Even people who do it for a living sometimes dread it, and often procrastinate. But if writing is what calls to you, we’ve put together some thoughts on how to cement it as a new habit.

Read a lot

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others; read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Stephen King, the author of On Writing as well as dozens of novels, urges writers to constantly have a book on hand. (He’s also far from the only wordsmith to lay into the distraction of television. The late David Foster Wallace counselled writers not to mistake watching shows for observing actual humans in the wild: “The dots are coming out of our furniture, all we’re spying on is our own furniture,” Wallace wrote.)

In the smartphone era, doing away with all manner of distraction in order to lug around a three-pound book may sound like unwieldy, curmudgeonly advice. The key here is knowing it’s easier to replace an existing habit with a new one than to erase an old habit altogether.

For instance, you might wonder when you’re supposed to have the time to read more, while also hemorrhaging precious hours over the course of each week perusing mundane social media. But if you want to take King’s advice, your phone doesn’t have to be an enemy; thanks to a variety of apps, it can be a library, both for reading and for listening to audiobooks. So rather than looking at your old classmates’ depressing vacation photos, you can open a book on your phone and begin enriching yourself as a reader.

And reading, King continues, can inform how you write, even if what you’re reading this week happens to be dreck:

I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

In other words, while you may want to write brilliantly, you’re under no obligation to choose strictly brilliant books to read.

Write a lot

If you were to take up running for the first time (as Haruki Murakami did when he first became a novelist), you probably wouldn’t expect to finish a marathon your first day, or even in your first month.

The work of writing is similar. It’s easy to forget, when you’re reading neatly assembled words on a page or a screen, that a human sat somewhere and labored to organize each thought. Writer Harlan Ellison used to remind people of this fact by demonstrating it in public; he would sit in bookstore windows and mash out page after page. “By doing it in public, I show people it’s a job,” he said, “like being a plumber or an electrician.”

Some people set out a goal of drafting their entire book in one month, but it’s a tall ask. King’s goal for himself is about two thousand words daily, including holidays; he suggests neophytes start by aiming for a thousand daily, six days a week.

Specifically, he recommends you find a room with a door on it, close that door, and stay there until you hit your goal. But in an era when people publish novels composed entirely via mobile phone and articles drafted using speech recognition while walking around New York, you’re not necessarily confined to King’s strict regimen of solitude and dad-rock. (The dude loves AC/DC.)

Indeed, no matter how you write or who you are, “writing is hard for every last one of us” as author Cheryl Strayed noted in her seminal pep talk on the subject, continuing: “Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.

You’ve got this

If this all sounds daunting, take heart; journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the very task of writing “an act of physical courage.”

Much of writing can be a battle with an inner editor—a voice reading each word as you write it, declaring “no, that’s not good enough. Rework this. Strike all of that. Do it better.” Managing to shut this voice up is no small feat, but doing so is crucial, explains Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, among others.

Calling perfectionism “the voice of the oppressor,” she argues that perfect can be the enemy of the good, or perhaps the hey-at-least-it’s-finally-done first draft, continuing:

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

Lamott also warns that while writing is essential, “publication is not all that it is cracked up to be,” suggesting it’s perhaps better to see your new writing goal as its own reward than as a career path. On this point, she is echoed by King:

If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer.

As you cement your writing goals into habits, don’t forget to have fun. We believe in your victory.