The New Science of Building Great Teams →
With remarkable consistency, the data confirmed that communication indeed plays a critical role in building successful teams. In fact, we've found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team's success. Not only that, but they are as significant as all the other factors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.
The Stunning Scale of AWS and What it Means for the Future of the Cloud →
Amazon has designed and built their own power substations. It only saves a little money, but they can build them much faster. Utility companies are not used to dealing with the rate AWS is growing at, so they had to build their own.
There are only a few things that have recently surprised me about the scale of datacenter development and operations these days. The fact that Amazon turned into a power company in order to feed its datacenters did.
You Are a Musical Expert →
When we acknowledge how, just by living and listening, we have all acquired deep musical knowledge, we must also recognise that music is not the special purview of professionals. Rather, music professionals owe their existence to the fact that we, too, are musical.
We are not Charlie, in other words, because we risk so little for what we claim to value so much.
— Philip Gourevitch, The Life-Giving Defiance of the Charlie Hebdo Cartoonists
Our NBC News Group Standards team has sent guidance to NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC not to show headlines or cartoons that could be viewed as insensitive or offensive.
— "An NBC News spokesperson", Many Outlets Are Censoring Charlie Hebdo's Satirical Cartoons After Attack
A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep →
Most Internet companies would build better things and create more value if they paid more attention to depth than breadth.
Ev Williams of Medium takes the page view and monthly user metrics camps to town. Your service frequently cares about less qualitative things.
Amazing visualization of code base sizes. Interesting that Windows 7 has significantly fewer lines of code than Windows Vista did.
The police, the people who are angry at the police, the people who support us but want us to be better, even a madman who assassinated two men because all he could see was two uniforms, even though they were so much more. We don't see each other. If we can learn to see each other, to see that our cops are people like Officer Ramos and Officer Liu, to see that our communities are filled with people just like them, too. If we can learn to see each other, then when we see each other, we'll heal. We'll heal as a department. We'll heal as a city. We'll heal as a country.
— NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, Police Respect Squandered in Attacks on de Blasio
The Wal-Mart Hippies →
The best thing I've ever seen written that explains the Tea Party.
The Messy Media Ethics Behind The Sony Hacks →
The answers to these questions, and the way these documents are handled and discussed in the weeks and years to come, aren't limited to the journalism ethics classroom. [...] When it comes to future handling of such information, the gray area in which they reside — between public and private, between prurient and illuminating — might not be the exception, but the new normal. The stance that journalists and academics take on these documents has the potential to guide our nation's understanding of how we treat the compromise of the 21st century's most valuable commodity, for both individuals and corporations: privacy.
The new reality is that journalists simply do not own the news cycle. [...] The new role of journalists, for better or for worse, isn't as gatekeepers, but interpreters: If they don't parse it, others without the experience, credentials, or mindfulness toward protecting personal information certainly will.