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Six Links Worthy of Your Attention #439

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, Pandemonio, and ResolveTO, Author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

Scientists Track “Social Jet Lag” Sleeping Habits With Twitter Data – Nova. “Social media and sleep? Not so much. This study of ‘every publicly available, geographically-tagged tweet from the beginning of 2012 to the end of 2013—two years of data from about 246,000 Twitter users in 1,521 counties across the entire United States’ says we’re living in digital jetlag.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology – SingularityHub. “If the blast don’t get you, then the fallout will. Tech changes us in ways that are really hard to anticipate—highways altered our genetics; the printing press changed politics; smartphones modify the size and structure of our brains. Now, there’s a conference for that. Here are some of the first years’ takeaways.” (Alistair for Mitch).
Who Gains From Growth? Let’s Get a Better Answer – Bloomberg. “Does wealth distribution matter in society? If so how? Has it changed in the past 20 years? 50 years? Does it matter that the bottom 50% of society has seen wealth growth of about 1% since 1980, while the top 0.1% have seen a 300% increase (.01% saw increases of 425%, while the top 0.001% saw increases of 600%). Why does the government track and publish GDP figures but not wealth distribution figures? Seems like we should talk about it.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020 – Bloomberg. “Soon in China, you’ll be assigned a social behaviour score, with positive points for ‘good behaviour’ (such as paying your taxes on time) and negative points for ‘bad behaviour’ (such as, say, criticizing the government in an online chat room). A good score will give you benefits, such as discounts in online shopping; a bad score might mean, for instance, you are blocked from buying a bus ticket, or hotel room. Since just about every transaction is moving online (and away from cash), the designers of the system hope that ‘those deemed untrustworthy will be ‘unable to move even a single step.’ Everything is fine.” (Hugh for Mitch).
YouTube Lets California Fire Conspiracy Theories Run Wild – Motherboard. “It’s not just the tragic fires that should be drawing our attention to this issue. It’s a whole lot of content on YouTube that no algorithm or artificial intelligence can capably catch and clean (at this moment in time). The problem, of course, is that with no editorial oversight, what seems like ’news’ or a ‘documentary’ slips under the radar… and we’re not even talking about deep fakes (a whole other massive problem). Who is going to be the buffer between the content creators and the general public? Facts are facts, right? If we allow subjectivity to play its game (or lies and conspiracies), I have a fear for the future of society and a healthy civilization.” (Mitch for Alistair).
Your child and Facebook are not a good match – Mashable. “This is the perfect example of how clueless the vast majority of our population is in relation to privacy and what’s happening online. For decades (literally), I have complained about this. People scream bloody murder about their privacy and data, and yet they post pictures of their kids (and others) online without regard. The question that this article poses (and one I will keep asking): Should we normalize that fact that our kids (from birth to present day) are being fully documented (in text, audio, images and video) by their parents on places like Facebook and Instagram? What rights do they have to this data and to privacy? Should they consent? Can they? I don’t think we should normalize this behavior… but we have. I wonder what it will take for us to wake up?” (Mitch for Hugh).