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The Atlantic magazine is doing a great set of features on startup companies in the Southern US. This Tuesday they came through Atlanta and Sarah Rich and Alexis Madrigal got to meet with a bunch of the movers and shakers of the Atlanta startup community. Here is the first of Alexis’s stories on the topic, titled “A Visual Guide to Atlanta’s Startup Scene”

He was also kind enough to tweet out the names of a few companies he got to talk to and who he’ll be profiling in the coming days for The Atlantic’s website. For those of you who want a sneak peak, you can go straight to the companies’ websites and get a feel for what it is they offer.

We&Co
N4MD (pronounced informed)
Leading Spaces
TripLingo (if you’re in Atlanta, care about startups, and HAVEN’T heard of this company, you may want to re-evaluate how you’re going about following the scene)
Scholr.ly
RappidApp
Wynsum Arts

I don’t know people at all these companies, hell I probably don’t know people at MOST of them, but they’re helping propagate the Atlanta startup culture and for that I applaud them.

Happy exploring!

A cool look at the perception that black people are just that much faster than white people. And not as “that’s racist!” as you’d expect.

Every winner of the 100m since the inaugural event in 1983 has been black, as has every finalist from the last 10 championships with the solitary exception of Matic Osovnikar of Slovenia, who finished seventh in 2007.

Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there is a rather obvious inference to make – black people are naturally better sprinters than white people. Indeed, it is an inference that seems obligatory, barring considerations of political correctness.

But here’s the thing. This inference is not merely false – it is logically flawed. And it has big implications not merely for athletics, but for the entire issue of race relations in the 21st Century.

…

The same analysis applies to the sprints, where success is focused on Jamaicans and African-Americans. Africa, as a continent, has almost no success at all. Not even West Africans win much.

The combined forces of Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Togo, Niger, Benin, Mali, the Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Gabon, Senegal, Congo and Angola have not won a single sprinting medal at the Olympics or World Championships.

The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it.

…

Imagine a similar argument using the Central African Bambuti, a black tribe more commonly known as Pygmies. With an average height of 4ft we could assert that the Bambuti are naturally better at walking under low doors. Would it be legitimate to extrapolate that black people in general have a natural advantage at walking under low doors?

Our tendency to generalise rests on a deeper fallacy – the idea that “black” refers to a genetic type. We put people of dark skin in a box labelled black and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all.

Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?