In the past I was never one to read online. My only real feed was LinkedIn, which I am bored with – too many stores about the same things over and over – and this week, I branched out (or maybe twigged out). Here are some stories that fascinated me online:

On Language

Read these three together; they make an interesting chord:

Why Do Humans Talk to Animals if They Can’t Understand (The Atlantic)

What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist about Language  (Wired)

Scientists Have Found Groups Of Neurons That Listen For Changes In Someone’s Speaking Tone—And Turn It Into Meaning. (Wired)

Tech Outside the Box

A New Way for Doctors to Share their Medical Mysteries (Wired) Crowd-sourcing medical mysteries

Blood-Carrying, Life Saving Drones Take Off for Tanzania (Wired) Finally, a reason not to fear drones!

From Katrina To Harvey: How Disaster Relief Is Evolving With Technology (Fast Company)

Beyond the Five Senses (The Atlantic)

Oops-Tech

Machines Taught by Photos Learn A Sexist View Of Women (Wired) This looked at genders; should it also have looked at race?

These Women Entrepreneurs Created a Fake Male Cofounder to Dodge Startup Sexism (FastCompany) Surprising.

At Work

Switching Careers Doesn’t Have to Be Hard: Charting Jobs that are Similar to Yours (no, really, this has an interesting take on this) (NY Times)

How Friends Become Closer (The Atlantic) Applicable to networking.

Why Women Bully Each Other at Work (The Atlantic) This one was all over the place, but it had some interesting points. I don’t feel like I got the answer to my question, though, and I do feel it over-generalizes.

Power Causes Brain Damage (The Atlantic) My friend, Mark Lipton’s, new book Mean Men comes out next week. It will be interesting to read that in the context of this article.

On Reading

Here at the End of All Things (WordPress LongReads) – a great essay about the power of maps to evoke mystery in books

Squirrels

And, finally, if I could purge these topics from my incoming stream, I would:

• Amazon and Whole Foods (panic ensues amongst retailers)
• Retail apocalypse (ditto)
• AI and Robots are stealing all our jobs and taking over the world (ditto)
• Solitary Confinement VR used to influence congress-people (Ok, one story, cool. So many stories, a press release.)
• Nest’s new $169 thermostat (ditto)
• Autonomous cars and safety (ditto)
• The new iPhone doesn’t have a Home button (“human sacrifice, dogs living with cats”)
• Floating Fire Ants (ditto)
• The Uber soap opera (yawn)
• Books that successful/powerful men are reading and you should, too (double yawn)

I need some new places for news – ideas anyone?