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:
- One Angry Bird – Periscopic. “I’m at Strata this week, so my mind is on big data. Here are a couple of amazing visualizations. First up: There are many algorithms that can infer emotion from faces. Periscopic took videos of every inaugural address since Reagan, and created a visualization of happy and sad expressions over the course of each, resulting in a red/green feather. Whatever your political stripe, this is a great example of how visualizations and algorithms can reveal hidden information in a video.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Film Money – A Data Story – DataMake. “… and just in time for the debates over Oscars, here’s an incredible exploration of the money in the film industry, done as a superb interactive website. Spoiler alert: Avatar is huge.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- A Modern Greek Tragedy – The New York Review of Books. “Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s motorcycle-riding ex-finance minister gives the inside scoop on the Greek financial crisis and the machinations of the European power brokers that kept Greece under their thumb.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Emperor Xi’s China Is Done Biding Its Time – Bloomberg View. “The inexorable rise of China is one of the themes I keep coming back to in these links. In this Q&A, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is doing a PhD in Chinese Politics(!) talks about the latest developments in China, and whether or not war is inevitable.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- ‘We’re not really interested’: Quebec throws cold water on Bitcoin miners seeking cheap power – Financial Post. “A homegrown story. The province that we live in (Quebec) is interested in innovation, technology and building a future hub for work (who isn’t?). We also have energy resources that would make other regions envious. Our provincial government expressed to the tech world that we are, in fact, ‘open for business’. With that the cryptocurrency miners came a knocking (in droves). Off the record, I was told that it was staggering how many foreign miners wanted to set up shop in Quebec. What looked like a win-win now seems to be changing. If someone wants to set up shop in the province of Quebec, the government wants to ensure that they are adding value to society, and not just plugging computers into a socket and draining the local resources because it’s cheaper. I kind of like that stance. You?” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Band on the Run: Connecting neighborhoods through live music – Topos – Medium. “Technology (like many other things) has unintended consequences. It’s doubtful that a young college dropout who built a social network so that he (and some friends) could meet a mate (or two), would wind up being such a powerful force in the world today. Those are the bigs ones. There are small instances of how technology changes us… as people… as a society… as a community. This is a pretty fascinating look at how music connects us, builds our communities, enables cultures to be established and to blossom. How was this discovered? Technology. Machine learning. Sometimes, the unintended consequence of technology is something deeply powerful and beautiful.” (Mitch for Hugh).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.