(by way of @scienceporn)

The news story of the week is the Greek elections that put the left wing anti-austerity Syriza into power. The Economist has a useful article on the implications for the broader Euro-zone. As Paul Krugman explains, the austerity measures Greece has imposed at the behest of the institutions that bailed it out have been ruinous for the Greek people. The best overall article I’ve read on what happens next is from the New Yorker’s John Cassidy.

SoundCloud has released a new, open source timeseries database and monitoring system called Prometheus. It’s an interesting amalgam of Graphite, Statsd, Nagios, Grafana, LogStash, and probably other things as well. It will be interesting to see if such a comprehensive tool will catch on.

For the record, poor people taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford were not responsible for the housing crisis.

Judging from what I’ve seen on Twitter, the McSweeney’s bit Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated To Gender is resonating for a depressingly large but not unsuprisingly large number of women.

Article I wish someone would write – a think piece on weather forecasting, hype, and cynical reactions to missed forecasts. This blog post by Washington Post weather editor Jason Samenow gets pretty close, just ignore the inflammatory headline.

I have a couple of long posts in the works. The first is some thoughts on Peter Seibel’s essay on feedback from a manager’s perspective. The other is a post that I started writing on Martin Luther King Day but didn’t finish.

Today I caught Jason Kottke’s post on link blogging, and it got me thinking about links as well. While I don’t publish as many posts as I once did, for a number of reasons, I do still churn through a lot of interesting links every day, and there a variety of places you can go to see them.

I have a link blog of sorts in the right sidebar, which just republishes my shared items from NewsBlur, my newsreader of choice. (They’re also published at rafeco.newsblur.com.) I also share a fair number of links on Twitter, and on Pinboard as well. To make things more confusing, Pinboard also scrapes all the links I publish on Twitter, and all the stories I save on Readability as well.

Maybe it’s time for me to get back to republishing those links here on the main blog.

Everybody is talking about the New York Times op-ed, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others, because everybody wants to talk about the fact that it says research shows that teams with more women perform better. My anecdotal experience aligns with the research, but I want to talk about another point that the article makes. Here’s a snippet:

Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills.

I think that the biggest mistake people make when hiring remote workers is in thinking that remote workers don’t need to be as social as people who work in the same office. The research seems to confirm what I already thought, which is that people working remotely need to be even more communicative than people in the office. In the office, there’s really no place to hide, even people who don’t communicate that much are still in the physical presence of their colleagues. If you’re remote, it’s much easier to disappear, so it is more important to find remote workers who strongly prefer to be present in whatever medium the team uses to communicate.