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Javier E

Messages Galore, but No Time to Think - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted,” said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on.”
  • To lessen the disruptive nature of e-mail and other messages, teams need to discuss how to alter their work process to allow blocks of time where they can disconnect entirely,
Javier E

A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • . In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz indicts a society that “sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.” On the contrary, he argues, “a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”
  • Psychologists who study relationships say that three ingredients generally determine the strength of commitment: overall satisfaction with the relationship; the investment one has put into it (time and effort, shared experiences and emotions, etc.); and the quality of perceived alternatives. Two of the three—satisfaction and quality of alternatives—could be directly affected by the larger mating pool that the Internet offers.
  • as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become “cognitively overwhelmed,” and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options,
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  • research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.
  • evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.
  • people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.
  • he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”
  • eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.
  • But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”
  • As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?
Javier E

A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?
  • the rise of online dating will mean an overall decrease in commitment.
  • I often wonder whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will become obsolete.”
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  • “Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, historically, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” Mate scarcity also plays an important role in people’s relationship decisions. “Look, if I lived in Iowa, I’d be married with four children by now,” says Blatt, a 40‑something bachelor in Manhattan. “That’s just how it is.”
  • “I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo, a meeting-and-dating app with about 25 million active users worldwide. “Think about the evolution of other kinds of content on the Web—stock quotes, news. The goal has always been to make it faster. The same thing will happen with meeting. It’s exhilarating to connect with new people, not to mention beneficial for reasons having nothing to do with romance. You network for a job. You find a flatmate. Over time you’ll expect that constant flow. People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people.”
  • “You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.”
  • Explaining the mentality of a typical dating-site executive, Justin Parfitt, a dating entrepreneur based in San Francisco, puts the matter bluntly: “They’re thinking, Let’s keep this fucker coming back to the site as often as we can.” For instance, long after their accounts become inactive on Match.com and some other sites, lapsed users receive notifications informing them that wonderful people are browsing their profiles and are eager to chat. “Most of our users are return customers,” says Match.com’s Blatt.
  • The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”
Javier E

Virtually Emotional « The Dish - 0 views

  • I don’t see online interaction as easily separable from real-life human interaction any more. We spend more and more time communicating with one another virtually rather than physically. But these communications are still between human beings, with all our foibles and needs and crushes and hatreds and, if we’re lucky, wit and humor. We do not cease being human online; but we do wear a kind of mask, concealing some things, revealing others – whether on a blog or a hook-up app or a list-serv or a Facebook wall. And if you spend more hours a day communicating that way, you haven’t stopped living. You’re actually slowly becoming another person on top of your regular self.
  • This is the current reality for a lot of us. We meet many more people virtually than on the street or in our physical daily lives. We also get to know them more. The anonymity of the web can allow people not just to trash talk in a way they wouldn’t in real life but to sext and love-talk with strangers they’ve only seen pictures of. Some of this may actually be more authentic an expression of ourselves than anything we have the courage to say to someone’s face.
  • the more time we live virtually, the more we will reproduce aspects of our pre-virtual life online. Including love. And this strange, amazing story was about love, not sex. It was about a panicked, conflicted young gay man knowing he would be rebuffed by his straight crush and setting up a fantasy where he could become a virtual woman to have a relationship with him.
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  • Increasingly, we seem to live parallel lives – as a person with a body and as an online avatar. Comedy and tragedy will doubtless ensue. That’s what masks can do.
Javier E

55555, or, How to Laugh Online in Other Languages - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • So, how do you laugh, on the Internet, in other languages?
Javier E

Coursera Plans to Announce University Partners for Online Classes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • John Doerr, a Kleiner investment partner, said via e-mail that he saw a clear business model: “Yes. Even with free courses. From a community of millions of learners some should ‘opt in’ for valuable, premium services. Those revenues should fund investment in tools, technology and royalties to faculty and universities.”
  • Previously he said he had been involved with Stanford’s effort to put academic lectures online for viewing. But he noted that there was evidence that the newer interactive systems provided much more effective learning experiences.
  • Coursera and Udacity are not alone in the rush to offer mostly free online educational alternatives. Start-up companies like Minerva and Udemy, and, separately, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have recently announced similar platforms.
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  • Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment.
  • Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants.
  • The Coursera system also offers an online feature that allows students to get support from a global student community. Dr. Ng said an early test of the system found that questions were typically answered within 22 minutes.
  • Dr. Koller said the educational approach was similar to that of the “flipped classroom,” pioneered by the Khan Academy, a creation of the educator Salman Khan. Students watch lectures at home and then work on problem-solving or “homework” in the classroom, either one-on-one with the teacher or in small groups.
Javier E

Couples and Dating | Men's Health - 0 views

  • in the world of online dating, frivolous similarities really do matter. When researchers at MIT tracked 65,000 online daters for a 2005 study, they observed "significant homophily." Translation: You're typically interested in someone just like you, who likes the same things you do.
  • Finding a decent signal amid all this noise takes work. This is one of the market failures of window-shopping for soul mates, writes behavioral economist Dan Ariely, Ph.D., author of The Upside of Irrationality. He cites this finding from University of Chicago research: A typical online dater spends an average of 12 hours a week screening but only 2 hours dating. Not a good return.
  • All my wife's likes and dislikes—the ones I've had to learn over time—are right there on the screen for some other guy to capitalize on. To make her short list, all he has to do is declare, "Me too!"
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  • Not surprisingly, the perception of financial security is a big deal for online Juliets. In one study, Ariely and his colleagues calculated that a man who's 5'9" must outearn a 5'10" suitor by at least $35,000 a year just to be seen as equally attractive.
Javier E

Deconstructing the Creepiness of the 'Girls Around Me' App-and What Facebook Could Do A... - 0 views

  • Cult of Mac had a fascinating, stomach-churning story about an application called Girls Around Me that scraped public Foursquare and Facebook checkins onto a map that showed people in your vicinity. Its branding was crass -- "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control!" -- but, as the developers of the app argued, they had technically done nothing wrong aside from being piggish and crude.
  • They took publicly available data and put it on a map. The sexysexy frame they put around it made it *seem* creepier, but in terms of the data they accessed and presented, everything was within the rules of the game. They had done nothing that couldn't be done by another app developer.
  • This is basically how app ecosystems working with data from Foursquare and Facebook and Twitter are supposed to work. Some people out there get an idea for something that the main services had never thought of and they build it out of whatever data is available.
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  • Using the traditional privacy idea that once something's public, it is public for any purpose, you're lead down a very narrow path of reasoning about this app's appropriateness and what the services it was built on could do about it.
  • using Nissenbaum's theory, the bad feelings that people have around the app make sense: People gave data to Foursquare or Facebook in one context and then it showed up in another context that they weren't expecting.
Javier E

Coursekit Raises $5 Million to Reinvent the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Coursekit is a new tool that lets teachers and educators create mini social networks around individual courses and lectures.
  • The goal of the service, said Joseph Cohen, its co-founder and chief executive, is to take some of the most successful elements of social networking — especially the fluid exchange of ideas that comes natural to online interactions — to revitalize the education experience. Students are already accustomed to interacting online and supplementing their daily lives with the Web and social media. Why should that stop when it comes to learning? “Our education experience is truly offline,” he said. “We want to build what Facebook has done for your personal life, but for your school.”
  • Using Coursekit’s software, teachers can upload homework assignments, answer questions, grade work and facilitate discussions with their students. In addition, students can use the software to chat with one another, collaborate on projects and share relevant materials with their classmates
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  • Coursekit is free to both the instructors and students that want to have access to it. The company says its main focus is attracting users, not making money
Javier E

Does Technology Affect Happiness? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?
  • The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls ages 8 to 12, is that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.
  • Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.
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  • on a basic, even primitive level, girls need to experience the full pantheon of communication that comes from face-to-face contact, such as learning to read body language, and subtle facial and verbal cues.
  • The fact that the study was based on an online survey gave pause to some academics. While they said the paper raised good questions, they also expressed concern about giving it too much weight, given that the researchers were not able to follow up with the survey subjects to get important context, including their family circumstances, income or ethnicity.
  • The researchers found that the average amount of media use by the girls surveyed was 6.9 hours per day, a figure that included reading as well as screen time. The average amount of time spent in face-to-face social settings was 2.1 hours, a figure that did not include classroom time.
  • Ms. Gray said, she worries that her daughter, who is using Facebook more, is playing out her social life online sometimes without the benefits of the full emotional range that comes from face-to-face interaction.
Javier E

Anti-vaccine activists, 9/11 deniers, and Google's social search. - Slate Magazine - 1 views

  • democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories
  • Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.
  • Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.
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  • The Vaccine article contains a number of important insights. First, the anti-vaccination cohort likes to move the goal posts: As scientists debunked the link between autism and mercury (once present in some childhood inoculations but now found mainly in certain flu vaccines), most activists dropped their mercury theory and point instead to aluminum or said that kids received “too many too soon.”
  • Second, it isn't clear whether scientists can "discredit" the movement's false claims at all: Its members are skeptical of what scientists have to say—not least because they suspect hidden connections between academia and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the vaccines.
  • mere exposure to the current state of the scientific consensus will not sway hard-core opponents of vaccination. They are too vested in upholding their contrarian theories; some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky
  • attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join them—the much-debated antidote of “cognitive infiltration” proposed by Cass Sunstein (who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House)—w
  • perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.
  • Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
  • One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence woul
  • The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
  • In more than a dozen countries Google already does something similar for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
Javier E

How The Internet Enables Lies - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 1 views

  • the ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertise—has given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost
  • She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.
Javier E

Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost | The New Republic - 0 views

  • Ultimately, the goal of creators of Ambient Intelligence and persuasive technologies and the Internet of Things is not merely to offer context-aware, adaptive, personalized responses in real time, but to divine future needs. As one contributor to The New Everyday noted, eventually these technologies will “anticipate your desires without conscious mediation.” 
  • The challenge for ethicists such as Verbeek is whether a society composed of “smart” cities like Songdo might also bring an increase in moral laziness and a decline in individual freedom. Freedom is a hollow promise in the absence of agency and choice. 
  • these technologies also undermine a crucial (albeit often maligned) human quality: self-deception. Self-deception is inefficient. It causes problems. It makes things messy—which is why our technologists would like us to replace it with the seemingly greater honesty of data that, once processed, promise to know us better than we know ourselves. But being human is a messy business; and exercising judgment and self-control, and learning the complicated social norms that signal acceptable behavior, are the very things that make us human.
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  • in a broader sense, as the case of genetic testing has shown, the right not to know some things (like the right to forget foolish, youthful behavior that is now permanently archived on the Internet) is as crucially important (if not more so) in our age as the voracious pursuit of information and transparency. 
  • Merely because something is possible, is it also desirable? And if it is possible, must we immediately accommodate ourselves to it? In The Forlorn Demon, Allen Tate noted, “We no longer ask, ‘Is it right?’ We ask: ‘Does it work?’” In our contemporary engagement with technology, we would do well to spend more time with the first question, even as we live ever more mediated lives relentlessly pursuing an answer to the second. 
Javier E

Online Medical Advice Can Be a Prescription for Fear - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the medical Web, which is dominated by an enormous and powerful site whose name — oh, what the hay, it’s WebMD — has become a panicky byword among laysurfers for “hypochondria time suck.” In more whistle-blowing quarters, WebMD is synonymous with Big Pharma Shilling.
  • A February 2010 investigation into WebMD’s relationship with drug maker Eli Lilly by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa confirmed the suspicions of longtime WebMD users. With the site’s (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.
  • WebMD is a corporation that started as an ad-supported health-alarmism site with revenues of $504 million in 2010
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  • It’s not only a waste of time, but it’s also a disorder in and of itself — one that preys on the fear and vulnerability of its users to sell them half-truths and, eventually, pills.
  • the Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit medical-practice-and-research group that started as a clinic. Mayo’s storied past as the country’s premier research hospital, in Rochester, Minn., and its storied present as one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” surface in the integrity of the site itself, which — though not ad-free — is spare and neatly organized, with the measured, learned voice of the best doctors
  • The integrity of the whole institution is on the line with this site, and the Mayo Clinic has every motivation to keep its information authoritative and up to date.
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