LONG GAME
Google Maps's Moat
Twitter user @msquinn put it best: “This is a great look at how the Google Maps data strategy first conceived over a decade ago continues to unfold in the product you see today.” - Justin O’Beirne

TIME TO REFLECT
Deep Learning Achievements Over the Past Year
Carve out some time in your holiday schedule to explore 2017's most exciting developments in text, voice, and computer vision technologies. - Stats & Bots

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS
Directions of Ascent
What can individuals who work with data and code do to “fix the mess that tech has enabled”? - arg min blog

DOES IT PASS?
The Next Bechdel Test
This study pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance, built on top of original data collected by clipboard-armed FiveThirtyEight staffers. - FiveThirtyEight

SUBMIT IT
Myths and mistakes of PyCon proposals
Here are some tips for getting your proposal accepted from a bonafide member of the PyCon Program Committee. - Irina Truong

New from Mode

AWS re:Invent 2017: Freedom (and Frameworks) to Build
We reflect on the themes we noticed at AWS re:Invent 2017—and what they reveal about the future of the technology landscape.