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 (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), 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:
- Swedish Pop Mafia – Pacific Standard. "Normally I’d route musical stuff to Mitch, but Hugh, I think you’ll like the unintended-consequences feel of this. It’s about why Sweden drives modern pop music. Sweden, you say? ‘What Hollywood is to movies and what Silicon Valley is to computing, Stockholm is to the production of pop.’ And all because the country’s elders, in the 1940s, tried to put baby in a corner." (Alistair for Hugh).
- Our Comrade The Electron. "This is the annotated transcript of an amazing talk given in February at Webstock, a conference in New Zealand. It’s an epic talk about Communism, the Theremin, and how electricity concentrates power in more than just technical ways. I only wish I’d seen the talk live. Since you’ve been talking about Big Data, Mitch, this seems like a fitting anecdote." (Alistair for Mitch).
- Why UPS Trucks Don’t Turn Left – Priceonomics. "Data should drive your decisions, as Alistair (co-author of Lean Analytics – aka the ‘Measure-It Bible’) will tell you – if you give him half a chance. In the case of UPS, data drove the company to make an edict for all drivers: never, ever turn left, no matter what." (Hugh for Alistair).
- Carpets For Airports. "Mitch logs more hours in the air than anyone else I know. And, I wonder, does Mitch sometimes ask himself, before he gets on a plane, ‘What will the carpets look like at O’Hare?’ Now he can find out, so he isn’t surprised when he arrives. This, dear readers, is what the Internet was built for." (Hugh for Mitch).
- Why 40% of us think we’re in the top 5% – Smart Planet. "Here’s the thing about data: the more we get of it and the more we’re able to take these disparate data sets and meld them into a bigger bucket, we start seeing some truisms. These are the types of truisms that most of us are (presently and sadly) ignoring. Little things like: our gut decisions are often wrong, how we can’t truly identify genius and, probably most disturbing, how dumb we actually are. Data rules, you morons! ;)" (Mitch for Alistair).
- French say ‘non’ to work email after 6 p.m. – cNet. "Ahh, who doesn’t want to spend their entire childhood and teenage years studying in an old school education institution that is making young people miserable, feeling inadequate and, ultimately, forcing them into a regiment of memorization of things they should never need to remember? I see this often when you look at more traditional European countries and their non-progressive school curriculums The good news? You get to graduate and become a ‘fonctionnaires,’ (if you live in France). A place that makes insane rules like this. I have a better idea: why stop at email? Just shut down the electricity for all fonctionnaires so nobody has to do anything? Alternately, you could just say, ‘hey, what if we let these adults make their own rules and attempt to find their own balance? Wow, what decade are we living in? How stupid do we think that people are?" (Mitch for Hugh).
Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.