Image credit: VGrigas, CC-SA-3.0

The Wikimedian of the Year is an African woman. Her project is to build an Arabic Wikipedia. But there’s more to it than that.

Women make better leaders than men. They out-perform men on most measures of leadership performance.

It’s time to ban facial recognition technology. Eminent digital researcher Kate Crawford: “These tools are dangerous when they fail and harmful when they work.”

Immanuel Wallerstein, the inventor of World Systems Theory, died last weekend. His intellectual biography is a good starting point. The best obituary I found is here.

Hayes Brown is thinking about the end of the world. But he’s wandering the aisles of the American store Target. (Thanks to Peter Curry).

Project Ocean is a submerged art installation. 24 portraits of multiple generations, on plastic, off Florida Keys. Write your own metaphors.

Re-imagining the 20th century. The English writer John Higgs is working through a series of books that tell a hidden history. Ezra Klein asks the questions. 90 minutes is way long for a podcast, but this is full of intriguing things.

If you see an article worth sharing on Sixes and Sevens, please add it to the Comments. 

“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

* How to build a 10,000 year organisation? Actually, we don’t know, because the oldest organisations are only 1,000 years old. The Long Now Foundation’s Executive Director extrapolates from first principles.

* Tourism is killing the places it loves. As the Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie discovered on Everest. And cruise ships are polluting their favoured destinations more than cars do.

* The chances are, there will be a recession in 2020. Nouriel Roubini, who called the 2008 crash, says that nine of the ten risks he identified last year are still risks. And the trade war between China and America could be the trigger.

* China won’t be democratised any time soon. If anything, it is going the other way–moving from ‘networked authoritarianism’ to ‘networked totalitarianism’. It’s worth clicking through the link to read Tyler Cowen’s article as well.

* There’s a backlash against facial recognition technology. It reinforces the bias about race and gender, and it destroys the balance of power between individuals and the state.

* The best way to tell a story about the future is to set it in the past. Ian McEwan’s latest novel is set in a ’80s Britain where the computer pioneer Alan Turing hasn’t committed suicide and robots and AI are commonplace. Registration may be required.

That moment in his Charleston eulogy where Obama sang ‘Amazing Grace’ was improvised. He thought he had lost the audience–as he explained to the DJ Questlove. Something I learnt from the storytelling podcast Anecdotally Speaking. (23 minutes) For reference, Obama’s eulogy is here(38 mins).

Image of the Clock of the Long Now by Scott Beale, of The Long Now Foundation. Some rights reserved.

If you see an article worth sharing on Sixes and Sevens, please add it to the Comments.

“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)