Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #229

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:

The dwindling stock of antibiotics, and what to do about it – Science Daily. “It’s easy to get worried about Ebola. While it’s horrible and deadly, as a species it’s the big, slow changes that will do us in. For the last half-century, we’ve been carefully training bacteria to resist our strongest medicines, through a blend of bad science, agricultural use, and consumer misunderstanding. A world without antibiotics means that any cut could kill you. Here’s what we (perhaps) can do about it.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Data Looks Dope – Lifetime. “This visualization is deceptively simple. It’s 79 rows of emoticons, 365 columns wide. It’s also a map of every day the average woman in the United states will live. From the moment we’re born, we can start crossing off those little faces. It’s both sobering, and energizing to look at that simple grid and think, ‘this is all I am. What will I do today?'” (Alistair for Mitch).
Education study finds in favour of traditional teaching styles – The Guardian. “One of the oddities of modern life (especially relevant if you are a parent) is the seemingly endless changes to ‘approaches to learning’ in the classroom. I’ve always thought these were strange kinds of experiments with people’s lives: someone has a theory about a better way to teach, somehow that comes into favour in education ministries and school boards, and then all of a sudden we scrap the ‘old way of doing things’ with a newfangled approach to teaching. The thing is, there never seems to be much evidence that ’new ways’ are better for kids. Here’s a study that says the opposite: that the old ways are better. Now, you kids, get off my lawn!” (Hugh for Alistair).
Serial Spoiler Special – Slate. “Truly, we are in a time of great audio delights. The radio show/podcast, This American Life, revolutionized audio storytelling, and has spawned a few offshoots and a legion of (often excellent) imitators. When I first became conscious of podcasts, I salivated over the (imagined) new forms audio storytelling we would be treated to. It’s taken a while for the medium to mature however, and ten years later, we are starting to hear so much amazing new and independent audio. Which brings us to two new podcasts indicative of the ’ ext level’ of audio. The first is Serial, what appears to be something totally new in audio: a 12(?)-part investigative journalism/storytelling endeavour, wherein former TAL producer, Sarah Koenig, dives into the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 1999 of murdering his high school girlfriend, Have Min Lee. It is an amazing piece of work, not yet completed. I am addicted. My link this week is not to Serial itself, but rather to something even more extraordinary: the new Slate podcast, The Serial Spoiler Special, in which several Slate editors and writers sit down each week to discuss the latest Serial episode. So, this is the first, that I know of, podcast about a podcast. If Serial hooks you, then you are going to be lapping up the Serial Spoiler Podcast — because you just won’t be able to get enough.” (Hugh for Mitch).
2013: The Year in Interactive Storytelling – The New York Times. “I often tell audiences (or anyone that will listen), that traditional magazine and newspaper publishers are struggling online, because the vast majority of what they’re doing is simply a cut and paste job. Of course, the problem with that is that the Internet is not paper, but I digress. In an attempt to figure out what, exactly, publishing could be in this digital age, publishers like The New York Times have invested in a new way to get stories told online. Well, here is all of their attempts. And, they’re all very interesting…” (Mitch for Alistair).
After ‘Fifty Shades,’ Could This Be The Next Big Online Hit? – NPR Books. “I had no idea who Anna Todd was. My nineteen year old niece was pretty pumped to meet her, in person, at the Indigo bookstore at the Eaton Center in Toronto. I took a picture of them and didn’t think much of it, until my niece gushed about how she read her book (over 600 pages long) in one day and couldn’t put it down. That’s not even half of the story. Todd was a fan-fiction writer using Wattpad to write about her favourite band, One Direction. Well, things got a little crazy. Her first book, After (the 600-plus page one) had already been read over one billion times online (not a typo). It’s become a huge bestseller and even optioned for a movie. Yes, the Internet creates another literary sensation.” (Mitch for Hugh).