Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #264

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:

Brazilian Data Visualization Platform Brings Numbers To Life, Aims To Make Traditional Reports ‘Obsolete’ – Huffington Post. “My friend Alex Howard has some of the best tech coverage out there; here, he looks at a collaboration between MIT and Brazil, which lets users visualize 500GB of data in myriad ways. I can’t help but think that if Greece, and Europe, had access to this kind of information, things would be different in the EU right now.” (Alistair for Hugh).
The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats – The Guardian. “Ben Goldacre is a smart scientist and good debunker. Here, he explains Benford’s Law, which is a statistical trick that can expose made-up numbers. It’s an old article, but particularly topical since, as he says, ’ reece – whose economy has tanked – showed the largest and most suspicious deviation from Benford’s law of any country in the euro.'” (Alistair for Mitch).
Slavoj Žižek on Greece: This is a chance for Europe to awaken – New Statesman. “The Greek/EU mess just keeps going. My understanding is that the anti-austerity government held a referendum to see whether the Greek people wished to accept the terms of the EU and creditors for more bailout money, which were: more austerity. The Greek people overwhelmingly voted against. Then, the Greek government proposed more austerity. I don’t understand it. But: here’s the always challenging Zizek on Greece and the Euro and the technocrats that seem to run the ’ emocratic’ project that is the EU.” (Hugh for Alistair).
Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer – New Scientist. “We have now successfully got three monkey brains hooked up together and working as one to perform tasks. Parallel processing using actual, biological brains. Long way to go before complete mind melds, but… the underpinnings are there.” (Hugh for Mitch).
Fire Your Boss: Holacracy’s Founder On The Flatter Future of Work – Fast Company. “Every few years, someone comes up with a new management style that shakes the foundation of business. When Zappos announced that they would move towards a new method known as Holacracy, they lost a whole bunch of people who felt like this would hurt both the company, and their individual ability to advance in the organization. I’ve done my fair share of reading about Holacracy. It sounds great, but it requires two things: people who feel like they can really lead themselves, and a leader who believes that they have the right people in place to make the right decisions. That seems simple enough, but how often do we see these types of environments? I say this, after just reading a piece on Business Insider about why people think Facebook is not a great place to work, and was baffled by the majority of the reasons. They just didn’t seem to make much sense in a world where finding great work to do is tough enough.” (Mitch for Alistair).
Everything Science Knows About Reading On Screens – FastCoDesign. “I have been reading on screens since the 80s. Literally. I can switch between paper and screen and be fine with it. I have been reading books on tiny screens long before they had the ability to make a phone call (Hugh, you’ve been doing it too). Now, with all that, I’ve been wearing glasses since elementary school and I have real idea about what it’s doing to my brain… until now.” (Mitch for Hugh).