Six Links Worthy of Your Attention #714

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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, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) 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:

    • Once Melting Glaciers Shut Down The Gulf Stream, We Will See Extreme Climate Change Within Decades, Study Shows – Phys.org“I am not a prepper. I am not a prepper. I am not a prepper. Spent the week talking with government folks on all sides of the political aisles, as well as consultants and people in civic tech and academia, in both London and Dublin. Everyone is so consumed with popularity and framing themselves against their opposition that nobody seems worried about the big things. I have to confess, I’m kind of at a loss right now.” (Alistair for Hugh).
    • Stickers To Manage Replies By – Dan Hon – flickr. “The always-interesting Dan Hon has this flickr gallery of images you can use to manage reply threads. From DO NOT REPLY TO DENY MY LIVED EXPERIENCE to THIS IS AN OBSERVATION DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HELP to DO NOT REPLY TO TELL ME A THING I LIKE IS BAD. Signs for the modern world.” (Alistair for Mitch).
    • Decoding The Communication Of Whales With Advanced Machine Learning And State-Of-The-Art Robotics – Project CETI – The Audacious Project. “Using AI to decode whale communication.” (Hugh for Alistair).
    • A State Supreme Court Just Issued Another Devastating Rebuke Of The U.S. Supreme Court – Slate. “We try to avoid politics in these links but… well… interesting: If you aren’t from the USA (or even if you are) one of the strangest things about US law is the doctrine of ‘originalism’, which claims that all legal cases at the Supreme Court should refer to ‘what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution.’ They were smart guys, but it seems weird that we aren’t allowed to update our opinions a couple of hundred years later. Well the Hawaii Supreme Court is challenging this doctrine saying, not only is it weird but judges aren’t even historians.” (Hugh for Mitch).
    • Isolated For Six Months, Scientists In Antarctica Began To Develop Their Own Accent – BBC. “In all of the current chaos of the day, let’s not forget that humans still remain a magical being that do wondrous things. Have you ever travelled somewhere and felt yourself suddenly adapting to the words and accents of the region? Well, this might be one of the more interesting turn of events in language and linguistics. Spend enough time with people and a new accent will emerge? ‘The Antarctic experiment offered a snapshot of something that has happened innumerable times throughout human history, as groups of people have become cut off from others, leading their accents, dialects and even languages to diverge from each other. On a grand scale, the researchers say it can provide insights into why American and British English has diverged in the way it has.’ Fascinating…” (Mitch for Alistair).
    • Vice Surrenders – Cory Doctorow – Medium. “There has been a lot of news about what happened to Vice Media. The story hits a little harder for me, and is much more personal. Back in the late 80s into the 90s and beyond, I was both a music journalist and publisher of music magazines. I worked for the alternative weekly, here in Montreal, called Hour. I was ‘in the local scene’ when Vice started in the mid-nineties. First, it was very much a local street paper. Irreverent, edgy and more. Then they moved into a magazine format, and things got even crazier. I consider myself fortunate enough to have hung out with the founders (mostly Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi) during those early days (I even did some writing for them). So, Vice’s ascent into a global media powerhouse was an amazing thing to witness. Years ago, I ran into Shane at a Google event and it felt like a High School reunion. Is the current state of Vice an indication that their content wasn’t needed? I don’t think so. Is this another instance where a lot of money got funneled in with hype and more to create what was thought to be the next big media thing? That seems more probable. In the end, I’m not sure if this acts as a cautionary tale, because if you spend any time with the archive of content, it was a format (and voice) that pushed other media formats to rethink how news and information and more can be created, curated, and discussed (especially to a younger audience). You can learn more about this in the book, Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor. In this article from Cory, he links to a podcast that some of the better/last standing journalists recorded as the past week unfolded and the Vice empire collapsed. That link no longer works, but I’m sure with some searching you can find it. In the end, the story of Vice could be more salacious and shocking than the actual stories that the media company put out into the world.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on XFacebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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