Photo by Cayusa

Large Scale Social Media Analysis with Hadoop – A great introduction to the power of MapReduce on massive social network data, courtesy of Jake Hofman

Junk Conferences – A guide to spotting bogus conferences and journals, aimed at the scientific world but equally applicable to startup scammers – via Felix Salmon

Honoring Cadavers – Growing up in a family of nurses I heard plenty of tales of doctors' lack of human empathy, so I love the idea of connecting them with the people behind the corpses they start with. I'd like to see every technical profession forced to deal meaningfully with the people at the receiving end of their work. At Apple, most Pro Apps engineers would volunteer to spend a shift demo-ing our software to users at the NAB show every year, and I got an amazing amount of insight and motivation from that experience.

Gary, Indiana's unbroken spirit – It seems like Gary is in even more dire straits than Detroit. I spent five years in Dundee just after the jute mills had closed, and it felt a lot like this. The European approach is to try to retain the residents and bring jobs to them, but during my time in Scotland that seemed to result in a middle class almost entirely employed by the government, and very few private companies.

The world is full of interesting things – A Google labs roundup of over a hundred cool sites on the internet, with Fan Page Analytics tucked away on page 86.