Still working on the next installment of the Clone Wars, but in the meantime… some interesting things I’ve stumbled on the past few days.

AI Audio Challenge: Audio Restoration of 78rpm Records — The Internet Archive is looking for “a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records” in its 78rpm archive and clean them up. They have 1,600 examples of 78s that were cleaned up manually by humans, and are hoping that they can be used to train a program to do the work in an automated fashion.

See also: AI@IA — Extracting Words Sung on 100 year-old 78rpm records.I have a lot of concerns how AI* is and will be used overall, but automating restoration and preservation of materials seems like a really good use of these tools. (*Some folks are very pedantic about terms like AI. I am not one of them, so I’m just being lazy and saying “AI.” Sorry.)

Valuing undervalued superpowers: Being Glue — Great post on julia ferraioli’s blog about “Being Glue” by Tanya Reilly. Part of julia’s “Influential Articles” series, this one looks at the importance of “glue work” and how it gets overlooked or considered non-essential.

Instead, the argument here is that glue work skills are superpowers even though doing a lot of glue work means you’re less likely to succeed career-wise.If you’ve done any job interviewing lately you may recognize questions that ask you to highly your individual, personal accomplishments and not what you’ve done to help teams succeed. You can have 1,000 instances of how you’ve helped a project or organizations succeed but nobody cares. They want the big thing you launched, etc.

IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view — If you’re keeping up with the Clone Wars, this post by Jon “maddog” Hall is required reading. Yes, he addresses the “freeloader” question. Decided to make you read the full post to get there, though. It’s worth the time. I’ll just say this, no disagreement registered.

Markwhen for Markdown timelines: Happened to catch this on Hacker News, a Markdown-driven calendar and planning app. I’ve been looking for something to display timelines around the Clone Wars posts but hadn’t found anything great. This might fit the bill. Note that the site is geared towards the web service and editor, but you can install the CLI utility and generate your own timelines as HTML.