What we read this week (15 October)

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members.

How the Economist is opening the data behind it’s reporting and publishing more data on GitHub in the coming months
How BuzzFeed are using automation processes and using data to get content to the right audience. “So what we’ve built is this this state of the art collection pipeline and tech. We’ve really invested in the tech internally which helps us basically understand every piece of content that we publish anywhere on an off site: what is happening with it, how people are engaging with it, and how [consumption] is changing over time in different slices of whatever data is available”
Great title for a poster: Free-Range Spiderbots! Not sure the last time we looked at our robots.txt file…
Great reading list on academic work about journalism+news+media for @risj_oxford fellows. Is there anything similar for academic publishing?
An interview with Robert-Jan Smits about Plan S
Leaked Google research shows company grappling with censorship and free speech
This is cool, UpToDate is the first evidence-based clinical decision support system to be used in space as part of ISS Expedition

Greg Satell on how the best innovators hunt for problems, not ideas
How Amazon discovered their AI recruiting tool was biased against female candidates; primarily because the models were trained on CVs “submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.” (H/T: Azeem Azhar )

Amazon has recently been issued with a patent that can tell from your voice if you are physically or mentally ill, and potentially recommend medication. (H/T: Azeem Azhar)
Sometimes the simplest things can have the biggest impact – As many as 400,000 missed hospital appointments a year could be prevented simply by using well-worded warning texts, potentially saving the NHS £64 million according to research published in PLOS.

11 Scoops or 12? Coffee Wars Come to the Office contains some great coffee war stories. “Victor Olausson, an IT consultant in Gothenburg, Sweden, said coffee arguments break out daily in his office. In one recent skirmish two colleagues faced off over whether to use 11 or 12 scoops of coffee in the office machine. They argued for 20 minutes about this,” Mr. Olausson recalls. Victory went to the employee holding the scoop.”