Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #339

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:

25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites – Mental Floss. “One of the challenges that AI developers face, is giving an algorithm enough context to understand the data. This applies in medicine (as my friend, Dr. Jon Kanevsky, pointed out, saying someone has elevated temperature, blood pressure, and heartrate may mean they’re sick — or jogging.) This is an entertaining list that rather proves the point.” (Alistair for Hugh).
The 2016 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog – Adequate Man. “A perennial favorite to get you ready for the holiday season. ‘I hope you like tartan, because it is the IN pattern this Christmas. Everything must be tartan this year: the cookware, the table linens, the ribbons, THE CHILDREN.'” (Alistair for Mitch).
The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model – Rand. “I promise (ha!) these will be my last election-related links for a while. I hope. Anyway: The Rand Corporation takes a stab at analyzing what looks like a pretty complicated propaganda universe (this is a PDF download).” (Hugh for Alistair).
2016 Post-Election Sanity Guide – Scott Berkun. “If you feel like the world has been turned upside down, Scott Berkun has some ideas of things you ought to start doing to ground yourself, and the world around you.” (Hugh for Mitch).
The Great A.I. Awakening – The New York Times Magazine. “Google did something huge. It’s dramatic. Not enough people are talking about it. For years, the company always claimed that they were a ‘mobile-first’ organization. Well, just this year, they changed their mind. Now, they’re saying that they are an ‘AI-first’ organization. Many are sitting on the sidelines, when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. They’re looking at it, much in the same way they think about ‘big data’. Well, this is a huge deal. Read this. Ruminate on it. Now, what is your business going to do about it?” (Mitch for Alistair).
16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016 – Brain Pickings. “A couple of week’s back, I posted my list of the best business books of 2016 (you can check it out here: The 15 Best Business Books Of 2016). I consider myself fairly well-read in the non-fiction genre. Still Brain Pickings just released their top picks for 2016 and… well… I have not read one single book on their list. It both depressed and inspired me. Apparently, there is some serious and deep learning to be done over the holiday season, and Brain Pickings just provided me with a super wishlist of reads. How many of these did you read?” (Mitch for Hugh).

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

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.