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Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Browser daily newsletter [16 Aug 2012]

16 August 2012
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 Best of the Moment

Extreme Weather

Peter Miller | National Geographic | 15 August 2012

Torrential rain, blistering heatwaves, violent tornadoes – our world is being shaken by the most severe weather in modern history. What's going on? Have we damaged our climate irreparably? Are natural weather cycles to blame? Both? Comments

Obama vs Poverty

Paul Tough | NYT | 15 August 2012

What are the most effective ways of reducing poverty in America? Paul Tough goes in search of answers in the decaying Roseland area of Chicago, where a young Barack Obama worked as a community organiser in the 1980s Comments

YouTube Re-Imagined: 505,347,842 Channels On Every Single Screen

Mat Honan | Wired | 15 August 2012

"YouTube doesn’t want you to watch videos anymore — not in the singular sense, at least. It wants you to stick around and see what comes next." How's it going to do that? By launching channels. Here are the challenges it faces Comments

The Astronaut Question

James Chiles | Air & Space | 15 August 2012

For how much longer will humans remain better than robots at exploration? Many processes are already automated, but “humans are cheap and fast to program, handling things that suddenly come up, where there’s no software” Comments

Last Morning In Al Hamra

Hilary Mantel | Spectator | 14 August 2012

"When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the complement of hating it." Essay on the home life of women in Saudi Arabia. Written in 1987, now published online Comments

Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy

Nicholas Reynolds | Studies In Intelligence | 8 August 2012

Writer was enthusiastic but useless, says CIA historian. He patrolled the Caribbean tooled up with weapons, looking for German U-boats to attack. In two years, the only one he spotted ignored him and sailed away on the surface (PDF) Comments

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