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katieb0305

Are You Successful? If So, You've Already Won the Lottery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-already-won-the-lottery.html

shared by katieb0305 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined.
  • But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as having been inevitable.
  • In the years since, the painting has come to represent Western culture itself. Yet had it never been stolen, most of us would know no more about it than we do of the two obscure Leonardo da Vinci canvases from the same period that hang in an adjacent gallery at the Louvre.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Inevitably, some of those initial steps will have been influenced by seemingly trivial random events. So it is reasonable to conclude that virtually all successful careers entail at least a modicum of luck.
  • One’s date of birth can matter enormously, for example. According to a 2008 study, most children born in the summer tend to be among the youngest members of their class at school, which appears to explain why they are significantly less likely to hold leadership positions during high school and thus, another study indicates, less likely to land premium jobs later in life. Similarly, according to research published in the journal Economics Letters in 2012, the number of American chief executives who were born in June and July is almost one-third lower than would be expected on the basis of chance alone.
  • To acknowledge the importance of random events is not to suggest that success is independent of talent and effort. In highly competitive arenas, those who do well are almost always extremely talented and hard-working.
  • Such expertise comes not from luck but from thousands of hours of assiduous effort.
  • Being born in a good environment is one of the few dimensions of luck we can control — that is, at least we can decide how lucky our children will be.
  • The unlucky population is growing, and its luck is getting worse.
  • Evidence from the social sciences demonstrates that beyond a certain income threshold, people’s sense of well-being depends much more on their relative purchasing power than on how much they spend in absolute terms. If top tax rates were a little higher, all homes would be a little smaller, all cars a little less expensive, all diamonds a little more modest and all celebrations a little less costly. The standards that define “special” would adjust accordingly, leaving most successful people quite satisfied.
  • Merely prompting people to reflect on their good fortune tends to make them more willing to contribute to the common good, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Emotion.
Javier E

Marie Kondo and the Ruthless War on Stuff - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-ruthless-war-on-stuff.html

clutter simplicity organization psychology

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • the method outlined in Kondo’s book. It includes something called a “once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon,” which means piling five categories of material possessions — clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items, including photos, in that order — one at a time, surveying how much of each you have, seeing that it’s way too much and then holding each item to see if it sparks joy in your body. The ones that spark joy get to stay. The ones that don’t get a heartfelt and generous goodbye, via actual verbal communication, and are then sent on their way to their next life.
  • She is often mistaken for someone who thinks you shouldn’t own anything, but that’s wrong. Rather, she thinks you can own as much or as little as you like, as long as every possession brings you true joy.
  • By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • A woman named Diana, who wore star-and-flower earrings, said that before she tidied, her life was out of control. Her job had been recently eliminated when she found the book. “It’s a powerful message for women that you should be surrounded by things that make you happy,”
  • “I found the opposite of happiness is not sadness,” Diana told us. “It’s chaos.”
  • Another woman said she KonMaried a bad boyfriend. Having tidied everything in her home and finding she still distinctly lacked happiness, she held her boyfriend in her hands, realized he no longer sparked joy and got rid of him.
  • She realized that the work she was doing as a tidying consultant was far more psychological than it was practical. Tidying wasn’t just a function of your physical space; it was a function of your soul.
  • . She wants you to override the instinct to keep a certain thing because an HGTV show or a home-design magazine or a Pinterest page said it would brighten up your room or make your life better. She wants you to possess your possessions on your own terms, not theirs
  • she would say to him what she said to me, that yes, America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.
  • She leaves room for something that people don’t often give her credit for: that the KonMari method might not be your speed. “I think it’s good to have different types of organizing methods,” she continued, “because my method might not spark joy with some people, but his method might.
  • Conference was different from the KonMari events that I attended. Whereas Kondo does not believe that you need to buy anything in order to organize and that storage systems provide only the illusion of tidiness, the women of Conference traded recon on timesaving apps, label makers, the best kind of Sharpie, the best tool they own (“supersticky notes,” “drawer dividers”)
  • They don’t like that you have to get rid of all of your papers, which is actually a misnomer: Kondo just says you should limit them because they’re incapable of sparking joy, and you should confine them to three folders: needs immediate attention, must be kept for now, must be kept forever.
  • each organizer I spoke with said that she had the same fundamental plan that Kondo did, that the client should purge (they cry “purge” for what Kondo gently calls “discarding”) what is no longer needed or wanted; somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them. This rage hides behind the notion that things are different here in America, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.
  • Ultimately, the women of NAPO said that Kondo’s methods were too draconian and that the clients they knew couldn’t live in Kondo’s world. They had jobs and children, and they needed baby steps and hand-holding and maintenance plans. They needed someone to do for them what they couldn’t naturally do for themselves.
  • the most potent difference between Kondo and the NAPO women is that the NAPO women seek to make a client’s life good by organizing their stuff; Kondo, on the other hand, leads with her spiritual mission, to change their lives through magic.
  • She went to work in finance, but she found the work empty and meaningless. She would come home and find herself overwhelmed by her stuff. So she began searching for “minimalism” on the internet almost constantly, happening on Pinterest pages of beautiful, empty bathrooms and kitchens, and she began to imagine that it was her stuff that was weighing her down. She read philosophy blogs about materialism and the accumulation of objects. “They just all talked about feeling lighter,”
  • “I never knew how to get here from there,” she said. Ning looked around her apartment, which is spare. She loves it here now, but that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago.
  • She found Kondo’s book, and she felt better immediately, just having read it. She began tidying, and immediately she lost three pounds. She had been trying to lose weight forever, and then suddenly, without effort, three pounds, just gone.
  • when it comes to stuff, we are all the same. Once we’ve divided all the drawers and eliminated that which does not bring us joy and categorized ourselves within an inch of our lives, we’ll find that the person lying beneath all the stuff was still just plain old us. We are all a mess, even when we’re done tidying.
sissij

Leave American Girls Alone - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...eave-american-girls-alone.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 21 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Though if you’re trying to gender neutralize, maybe don’t call your company American Girl.
  • To longtime fans, it feels more like girls are losing something that used to be theirs alone.
  • dolls that looked like girls.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the most offensive thing about Logan (besides the fact that his fanfared debut implies these spunky, self-sufficient girls needed a boy in their lives) is that, like the other rootless dolls in American Girl’s bland “contemporary” lines, he is marketed as interesting not because of his historical connections, but because he is available for purchase.
  • Narrative issues aside, Tenney is the more dynamic plaything simply because she comes with more: more hair, more accessories, more hardships to overcome when boys like her friend Logan grow up to earn one dollar for every 80 cents she earns, and then try to take away her reproductive rights.
  • Of course, there’s nothing to stop girls from interpreting Logan as Tenney’s short-haired friend who joined her Riot Grrrl band to rock against the patriarchy.
  • If Logan were being advertised as the company’s first transgender doll, his story would fit right in line with American Girl’s origins, imploring kids to consider sophisticated issues at a second-grade reading level.
  • Disappointing, then, that he seems to be a glorified background player getting all the attention because he’s a man.
  • sissij on 21 Feb 17
     
    I think this article goes a little bit over to this gender issue. I think the author might be too sensitive about it. When I first heard about this news, I felt nothing wrong. I even think it might be a good thing to have a boy doll so that dolls are not dominated by girls. However, this viewpoint in this article is kind of different from mine. The author thinks by having boy dolls, the children are being taught the stereotyping of both gender and it has a bad influence especially on little girls and their interpretation of women rights in the future. Although this viewpoint is very interesting to acknowledge, I still think the author is getting overly sensitive and idealistic. The American Girl is essentially a company, not some social organization. It cares about what the general public likes, not much about whether the action is right is wrong. Everything has two sides. In this case, I think having a boy doll can be an innovative move of the company. --Sissi (2/20/2017)
sissij

Liberals and Conservatives Read Different Science Books, Except for One Subject | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...e-books-except-for-one-subject

science research psychology

shared by sissij on 10 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • While scientists generally try to stay out politics, letting evidence-based research to speak for itself, the strong division in American society has spread to science.
  • By analyzing millions of online purchases, researchers from Cornell, Yale and University of Chicago found that there are clear partisan preferences in how we buy books on scientific topics.
  • The study’s authors think it’s likely that people who buy political books get science books to support their views rather than out of a general interest in science.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • One topic popular with both sides - books on dinosaurs. These were bought across the whole political spectrum.
  • Is there a way science could help heal the division in the country?
  • While the study is illuminating, it  has some limitations, with political scientist Toby Bolsen cautioning that this research did not draw on a random sample of books, relying instead on how the online sellers categorized them.
  • sissij on 10 Apr 17
     
    As we discussed in TOK, people selectively read about science due to confirmation bias. When reading about science, people tends to ignore the limitation and uncertainties in science, this is because of the source amnesia. It is not surprise that liberals and conservatives read different science book because the policies they make are so different that they need different scientific paper to support. Although science is trying to stay out of politics, but it cannot stop politicians from using science. However, it is totally a surprise for me to see that science books on dinosaurs are read by author throughout the political spectrum. It doesn't seem to fit in with my hypothesis earlier. --Sissi (4/10/2017)
Javier E

Our economy is a hellscape for consumers. The United flier is the latest victim. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ted-flier-is-the-latest-victim

oligopoly market fundamentalism consumers

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:
  • Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.
  • This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.
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  • It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.
  • Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.
  • If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.
  • Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies
  • The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service
  • Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy
  • Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”
  • traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.
  • We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.
julia rhodes

Why Seven African Nations Joined Anti-Monsanto Protests Last Weekend | ThinkProgress - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...es-join-anti-monsanto-protests

african nations protests technology science research education

shared by julia rhodes on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • One of the company’s most compelling arguments for its quest to spread GMOs is that Monsanto products are the solution to world hunger
  • The company’s defenders claim that opposing GMOs is a luxury of Western privilege that denies developing countries vital resources to feed impoverished communities
  • According to Food Sovereignty Ghana, seven African countries held anti-Monsanto rallies on Saturday
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “GMO will make Ghanaian farmers poor” and “Our Food Under Our Control!!!”
  • Monsanto is also part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a group of private corporations tasked by the G8 to invest in solutions to African hunger over the next decade.
  • Hating Monsanto is “a luxury when you’re surrounded by food 24/7,” writes one defender, who argues that spreading negative sentiment against the company actually “impedes global economic growth.” Even Britain’s Environmental Secretary, Owen Paterson, said organizations fighting the spread of GMOs are “absolutely wicked” and “cast a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world.”
  • But African farmers also have very legitimate concerns about Monsanto’s reputation for investigating, suing, and ruining farmers who try to save GM seeds.
  • ood Sovereignty Ghana warns against the “control of our resources by multinational corporations and other foreign entities,” and the “avaricious calculations behind the proposition that food is just another commodity or component for international agribusiness.”
  • they call for “collective control over our collective resources.”
  • ontroversial GM golden rice, which is supposed to pump up Vitamin A levels in regular rice to make it more nutritious, could well be a promising use of technology
  • However, golden rice is still mainly theoretical after a decade of research.
  • hunger is not caused by a food shortage but by “a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient.”
  • julia rhodes on 28 Oct 13
     
    Who has the right to decide liberties, farmers or NGOs?
Javier E

But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me? - James Hamblin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...361931

future AI forecasting apocalypse technology

shared by Javier E on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Tegmark is more worried about much more immediate threats, which he calls existential risks. That’s a term borrowed from physicist Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective modeling the potential range of human expansion into the cosmos
  • "I am finding it increasingly plausible that existential risk is the biggest moral issue in the world, even if it hasn’t gone mainstream yet,"
  • Existential risks, as Tegmark describes them, are things that are “not just a little bit bad, like a parking ticket, but really bad. Things that could really mess up or wipe out human civilization.”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The single existential risk that Tegmark worries about most is unfriendly artificial intelligence. That is, when computers are able to start improving themselves, there will be a rapid increase in their capacities, and then, Tegmark says, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen.
  • Tegmark told Lex Berko at Motherboard earlier this year, "I would guess there’s about a 60 percent chance that I’m not going to die of old age, but from some kind of human-caused calamity. Which would suggest that I should spend a significant portion of my time actually worrying about this. We should in society, too."
  • "Longer term—and this might mean 10 years, it might mean 50 or 100 years, depending on who you ask—when computers can do everything we can do," Tegmark said, “after that they will probably very rapidly get vastly better than us at everything, and we’ll face this question we talked about in the Huffington Post article: whether there’s really a place for us after that, or not.”
  • "This is very near-term stuff. Anyone who’s thinking about what their kids should study in high school or college should care a lot about this.”
  • Tegmark and his op-ed co-author Frank Wilczek, the Nobel laureate, draw examples of cold-war automated systems that assessed threats and resulted in false alarms and near misses. “In those instances some human intervened at the last moment and saved us from horrible consequences,” Wilczek told me earlier that day. “That might not happen in the future.”
  • there are still enough nuclear weapons in existence to incinerate all of Earth’s dense population centers, but that wouldn't kill everyone immediately. The smoldering cities would send sun-blocking soot into the stratosphere that would trigger a crop-killing climate shift, and that’s what would kill us all
  • “We are very reckless with this planet, with civilization,” Tegmark said. “We basically play Russian roulette.” The key is to think more long term, “not just about the next election cycle or the next Justin Bieber album.”
  • “There are several issues that arise, ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence to biological warfare to asteroids that might collide with the earth,” Wilczek said of the group’s launch. “They are very serious risks that don’t get much attention.
  • a widely perceived issue is when intelligent entities start to take on a life of their own. They revolutionized the way we understand chess, for instance. That’s pretty harmless. But one can imagine if they revolutionized the way we think about warfare or finance, either those entities themselves or the people that control them. It could pose some disquieting perturbations on the rest of our lives.”
  • Wilczek’s particularly concerned about a subset of artificial intelligence: drone warriors. “Not necessarily robots,” Wilczek told me, “although robot warriors could be a big issue, too. It could just be superintelligence that’s in a cloud. It doesn’t have to be embodied in the usual sense.”
  • it’s important not to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence. It's best to think of it as a primordial force of nature—strong and indifferent. In the case of chess, an A.I. models chess moves, predicts outcomes, and moves accordingly. If winning at chess meant destroying humanity, it might do that.
  • Even if programmers tried to program an A.I. to be benevolent, it could destroy us inadvertently. Andersen’s example in Aeon is that an A.I. designed to try and maximize human happiness might think that flooding your bloodstream with heroin is the best way to do that.
  • “It’s not clear how big the storm will be, or how long it’s going to take to get here. I don’t know. It might be 10 years before there’s a real problem. It might be 20, it might be 30. It might be five. But it’s certainly not too early to think about it, because the issues to address are only going to get more complex as the systems get more self-willed.”
  • Even within A.I. research, Tegmark admits, “There is absolutely not a consensus that we should be concerned about this.” But there is a lot of concern, and sense of lack of power. Because, concretely, what can you do? “The thing we should worry about is that we’re not worried.”
  • Tegmark brings it to Earth with a case-example about purchasing a stroller: If you could spend more for a good one or less for one that “sometimes collapses and crushes the baby, but nobody’s been able to prove that it is caused by any design flaw. But it’s 10 percent off! So which one are you going to buy?”
  • “There are seven billion of us on this little spinning ball in space. And we have so much opportunity," Tegmark said. "We have all the resources in this enormous cosmos. At the same time, we have the technology to wipe ourselves out.”
  • Ninety-nine percent of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct; why should we not? Seeing the biggest picture of humanity and the planet is the heart of this. It’s not meant to be about inspiring terror or doom. Sometimes that is what it takes to draw us out of the little things, where in the day-to-day we lose sight of enormous potentials.
Javier E

Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...peare-than-the-one-i-love.html

shakespeare language literature

shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.
  • There are many well-rehearsed reasons for the change: the rise of television followed by the triumph of digital technology, the sending of instant messages instead of letters, the ‘‘visual turn’’ in our culture, the pervasive use of social media. In their wake, the whole notion of a linguistic birthright could be called quaint, the artifact of particular circumstances that have now vanished
  • For my parents, born in Boston, the English language was a treasured sign of arrival and rootedness; for me, a mastery of Shakespeare, the supreme master of that language, was like a purchased coat of arms, a title of gentility tracing me back to Stratford-upon-Avon.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It is not that the English language has ceased to be a precious possession; on the contrary, it is far more important now than it ever was in my childhood. But its importance has little or nothing to do any longer with the dream of rootedness. English is the premier international language, the global medium of communication and exchange.
  • This does not mean that I should abandon the paper assignment; it is an important form of training for a range of very different challenges that lie in their future. But I see that their deep imaginative engagement with Shakespeare, their intoxication, lies elsewhere.
  • When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary.
  • as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views
  • The M.I.T. Global Shakespeare Project features an electronic archive that includes images of every page of the First Folio of 1623. In the Norton Shakespeare, which I edit, the texts of his plays are now available not only in the massive printed book with which I was initiated but also on a digital platform. One click and you can hear each song as it might have sounded on the Elizabethan stage; another click and you listen to key scenes read by a troupe of professional actors. It is a kind of magic unimagined even a few years ago or rather imaginable only as the book of a wizard like Prospero in ‘‘The Tempest.’
  • But it is not the new technology alone that attracts students to Shakespeare; it is still more his presence throughout the world as the common currency of humanity. In Taiwan, Tokyo and Nanjing, in a verdant corner of the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in an ancient garden in Kabul, in Berlin and Bangkok and Bangalore, his plays continue to find new and unexpected ways to enchant.
maddieireland334

What Your Pet Reveals about You - 0 views

diigo.com/07ocyt

research psychology

shared by maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15
     
    Is there a typical cat person or snake owner? Here's what research shows or THIS IS A PREVIEW. subscribe to access the full article.Already a subscriber or purchased this issue? Sign In Most of us think our pets say a lot about who we are.
Javier E

Mark Zuckerberg, Let Me Pay for Facebook - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-let-me-pay-for-facebook.html

social media micropayments ad-financed business model privacy facebook

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • 93 percent of the public believes that “being in control of who can get information about them is important,” and yet the amount of information we generate online has exploded and we seldom know where it all goes.
  • the pop-up and the ad-financed business model. The former is annoying but it’s the latter that is helping destroy the fabric of a rich, pluralistic Internet.
  • Facebook makes about 20 cents per user per month in profit. This is a pitiful sum, especially since the average user spends an impressive 20 hours on Facebook every month, according to the company. This paltry profit margin drives the business model: Internet ads are basically worthless unless they are hyper-targeted based on tracking and extensive profiling of users. This is a bad bargain, especially since two-thirds of American adults don’t want ads that target them based on that tracking and analysis of personal behavior.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • This way of doing business rewards huge Internet platforms, since ads that are worth so little can support only companies with hundreds of millions of users.
  • Ad-based businesses distort our online interactions. People flock to Internet platforms because they help us connect with one another or the world’s bounty of information — a crucial, valuable function. Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish.
  • Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post. It doesn’t. Facebook runs its billion-plus users’ newsfeed by a proprietary, ever-changing algorithm that decides what we see. If Facebook didn’t have to control the feed to keep us on the site longer and to inject ads into our stream, it could instead offer us control over this algorithm.
  • Many nonprofits and civic groups that were initially thrilled about their success in using Facebook to reach people are now despondent as their entries are less and less likely to reach people who “liked” their posts unless they pay Facebook to help boost their updates.
  • What to do? It’s simple: Internet sites should allow their users to be the customers. I would, as I bet many others would, happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did not track me, upgraded its encryption and treated me as a customer whose preferences and privacy matter.
  • Many people say that no significant number of users will ever pay directly for Internet services. But that is because we are misled by the mantra that these services are free. With growing awareness of the privacy cost of ads, this may well change. Millions of people pay for Netflix despite the fact that pirated copies of many movies are available free. We eventually pay for ads, anyway, as that cost is baked into products we purchase
  • A seamless, secure micropayment system that spreads a few pennies at a time as we browse a social network, up to a preset monthly limit, would alter the whole landscape for the better.
  • we’re not starting from scratch. Micropayment systems that would allow users to spend a few cents here and there, not be so easily tracked by all the Big Brothers, and even allow personalization were developed in the early days of the Internet. Big banks and large Internet platforms didn’t show much interest in this micropayment path, which would limit their surveillance abilities. We can revive it.
  • If even a quarter of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users were willing to pay $1 per month in return for not being tracked or targeted based on their data, that would yield more than $4 billion per year — surely a number worth considering.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg has reportedly spent more than $30 million to buy the homes around his in Palo Alto, Calif., and more than $100 million for a secluded parcel of land in Hawaii. He knows privacy is worth paying for. So he should let us pay a few dollars to protect ours.
Javier E

The Moral Ill Effects of Teaching Economics | Amitai Etzioni - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-ill-effects-of_b_6902158.html

economics morality self-interest market fundamentalism social science social context

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • the hypothesis that teaching economics is debasing people's morality
  • They designed a game where participants were given an allotment of tokens to divide between a private account and a public fund
  • the game was designed to promote free-riding: the socially optimal behavior would be to contribute to the public fund, but the personal advantage was in investing everything in the private fund (as long as the others did not catch on or make the same move).
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • most subjects divided their tokens nearly equally between the public and private accounts
  • Economics students, by contrast, invested only 20 percent of their tokens in the public fund, on average.
  • Three quarters of non-economists reported that a "fair" investment of tokens would necessitate putting at least half of their tokens in the public fund. A third of economists didn't answer the question or gave "complex, uncodable responses." The remaining economics students were much more likely than their non-economist peers to say that "little or no contribution was 'fair'."
  • Other studies have found economics students to exhibit a stronger tendency towards anti-social positions compared to their peers.
  • Carter and Irons had both economics students and non-economics students play the "ultimatum" game -- a two-player game where one player is given a sum of money to divide between the two. The other player is then given a chance to accept or reject the offer; if she accepts it, then each player receives the portion of money proposed by the offerer. If she declines, then neither player gets any money. Carter and Irons found that, relative to non-economics students, economics students were much more likely to offer their partners small sums, and, thus, deviate from a "fair" 50/50 spilt.
  • Finally, researchers had both economics and non-economics students fill out two "honesty surveys" -- one at the start of the semester and one at the conclusion -- regarding how likely they were to either report being undercharged for a purchase or return found money to its owner. The authors found that, after taking an economics class, students' responses to the end-of-the-semester survey were more likely to reflect a decline in honest behavior than students who studied astronomy.
  • Other studies supported these key findings. They found that economics students are less likely to consider a vendor who increases the price of bottled water on a hot day to be acting "unfairly." Economics students who played a lottery game were willing to commit less of their potential winnings to fund a consolation prize for losers than were their peers. And such students were significantly more willing to accept bribes than other students. Moreover, economics students valued personal achievement and power more than their peers while attributing less importance to social justice and equality.
  • results show that it is not just selection that is responsible for the reported increase in immoral attitudes
  • Later studies support this conclusion. They found ideological differences between lower-level economics students and upper-level economics students that are similar in kind to the measured differences between the ideology of economics students as a whole and their peers. He finds that upper-level students are even less likely to support egalitarian solutions to distribution problems than lower-level students, suggesting that time spent studying economics does have an indoctrination effect.
  • The problem is not only that students are exposed to such views, but that there are no "balancing" courses taught in typical American colleges, in which a different view of economics is presented. Moreover, while practically all economic classes are taught in the "neoclassical" (libertarian, self centered) viewpoint, in classes by non-economists -- e.g., in social philosophy, political science, and sociology -- a thousand flowers bloom such that a great variety of approaches are advanced, thereby leaving students with a cacophony of conflicting pro-social views. What is needed is a systematic pro-social economics, that combines appreciation for the common good and for others as well as for the service of self.
Javier E

What's a Metaphor For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...128079

metaphor communications understanding

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.
  • "Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."
  • many modern thinkers and scholars have agreed that all language is at root metaphorical.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Of all philosophical writers on metaphor, Nietzsche probably draws the strongest conclusions from this situation. ''Tropes,'' he writes, ''are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature.'' He argues that there is ''no real knowing apart from metaphor,'' by which he means that we experience reality through metaphors, and our notion of literal meaning simply reflects the ossification of language, as figures of speech lose their vitality. He emphasizes in The Genealogy of Morals how metaphor tends to extend its sway, to bring wider ranges of experience under its wing. He goes so far as to say that ''the drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive.'' For him, literal and figurative meaning are not stable categories, but historical ones determined by their social context.
  • the evolution of abstractions is always a case of going from the physical and sensible to the abstract.
Javier E

The Scoreboards Where You Can't See Your Score - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-you-cant-see-your-score.html

privacy data mining corporations profiling reputation transparency ranking

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The characters in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” inhabit a continuously surveilled and scored society.
  • Consider the protagonist, Lenny Abramov, age 39. A digital dossier about him accumulates his every health condition (high cholesterol, depression), liability (mortgage: $560,330), purchase (“bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifact”), tendency (“heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious”) and probability (“life span estimated at 83”). And that profile is available for perusal by employers, friends and even strangers in bars.
  • Even before the appearance of these books, a report called “The Scoring of America” by the World Privacy Forum showed how analytics companies now offer categorization services like “churn scores,” which aim to predict which customers are likely to forsake their mobile phone carrier or cable TV provider for another company; “job security scores,” which factor a person’s risk of unemployment into calculations of his or her ability to pay back a loan; “charitable donor scores,” which foundations use to identify the households likeliest to make large donations; and “frailty scores,” which are typically used to predict the risk of medical complications and death in elderly patients who have surgery.
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  • In two nonfiction books, scheduled to be published in January, technology experts examine similar consumer-ranking techniques already in widespread use.
  • While a federal law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires consumer reporting agencies to provide individuals with copies of their credit reports on request, many other companies are free to keep their proprietary consumer scores to themselves.
  • Befitting the founder of a firm that markets reputation management, Mr. Fertik contends that individuals have some power to influence commercial scoring systems.
  • “This will happen whether or not you want to participate, and these scores will be used by others to make major decisions about your life, such as whether to hire, insure, or even date you,”
  • “Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives,” he writes in “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard University Press), “while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence important decisions that we — and they — make.”
  • Data brokers amass dossiers with thousands of details about individual consumers, like age, religion, ethnicity, profession, mortgage size, social networks, estimated income and health concerns such as impotence and irritable bowel syndrome. Then analytics engines can compare patterns in those variables against computer forecasting models. Algorithms are used to assign consumers scores — and to recommend offering, or withholding, particular products, services or fees — based on predictions about their behavior.
  • It’s a fictional forecast of a data-deterministic culture in which computer algorithms constantly analyze consumers’ profiles, issuing individuals numeric rankings that may benefit or hinder them.
  • Think of this technique as reputation engine optimization. If an algorithm incorrectly pegs you as physically unfit, for instance, the book suggests that you can try to mitigate the wrong. You can buy a Fitbit fitness tracker, for instance, and upload the exercise data to a public profile — or even “snap that Fitbit to your dog” and “you’ll quickly be the fittest person in your town.”
  • Professor Pasquale offers a more downbeat reading. Companies, he says, are using such a wide variety of numerical rating systems that it would be impossible for average people to significantly influence their scores.
  • “Corporations depend on automated judgments that may be wrong, biased or destructive,” Professor Pasquale writes. “Faulty data, invalid assumptions and defective models can’t be corrected when they are hidden.”
  • Moreover, trying to influence scoring systems could backfire. If a person attached a fitness device to a dog and tried to claim the resulting exercise log, he suggests, an algorithm might be able to tell the difference and issue that person a high score for propensity toward fraudulent activity.
  • “People shouldn’t think they can outwit corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars,” Professor Pasquale said in a phone interview.Consumers would have more control, he argues, if Congress extended the right to see and correct credit reports to other kinds of rankings.
Javier E

The Disgust Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-disgust-election.html

election financing rich corruption supreme court oligarchy campaign politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I would like for the most influential swing voter on the Supreme Court to step away from his legal aerie, and wade through some of the muck that he and four fellow justices have given us with the 2014 campaign.
  • How did we lose our democracy? Slowly at first, and then all at once. This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades.
  • beyond disdain for this singular crop of do-nothings, the revulsion is generated by a sense that average people have lost control of one of the last things that citizens should be able to control — the election itself.
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  • You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.
  • Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
  • just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.
  • you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.
  • This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.
  • At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.
  • What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun
  • With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.
Javier E

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thood-in-american-culture.html

adult adolescence literature

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.
  • , the journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups “should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.”
  • In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • At sea or in the wilderness, these friends managed to escape both from the institutions of patriarchy and from the intimate authority of women, the mothers and wives who represent a check on male freedom.
  • What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable.
  • From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library.”
  • “The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”
  • What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world.
  • we’ve also witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used to be portrayed in the formerly tried-and-true genres of the urban cop show, the living-room or workplace sitcom and the prime-time soap opera. Instead, we are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters of Sex” (a prehistory of the end of patriarchy), “Bob’s Burgers” (a loopy post-"Simpsons” family cartoon) and a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based web videos.
  • we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction.
  • The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of semi-antiheroes
  • We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”
  • Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys and other readily available symbols of settled male authority?
  • That was only half the story, though. As before, the rebellious animus of the disaffected man-child was directed not just against male authority but also against women. I
  • their refusal of maturity also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of the studio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money.
  • The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths and reveling in its pleasures.
simoneveale

Why the Fed's inflation strategy will fail--commentary - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...tegy-will-fail-commentary.html

inflation economics

shared by simoneveale on 28 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • This is because the current doctrine adopted by global central bankers is that growth comes from inflation; and without inflation there can be no growth.
  • One of the new strategies deployed by central bankers to raise prices is to push interest rates into negative territory.
  • negative interest rates are mostly about keeping insolvent governments afloat by constantly reducing debt-service payments.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And achieving the Fed's 2-percent inflation target is exactly the type of thing that would the cause such a surge in borrowing costs.
  • Japan has been mired in an economic morass for decades.
  • Once inflation targets are reached, they will have to begin winding down purchases of sovereign debt or risk pushing prices out of control.
  • investors will rush to front-run the offer to sell sovereign debt and equities from central banks.
kushnerha

What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism, Obama and Calls for Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rorism-obama-restrictions.html

new york times gun control

shared by kushnerha on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • On Sunday, President Obama called for making it harder to buy assault weapons after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. On Monday, the stock prices of two top gun makers, Smith & Wesson and Ruger, soared.
  • “President Obama has actually been the best salesman for firearms,” said Brian W. Ruttenbur, an analyst with BB&T Capital Markets
  • Fear of gun-buying restrictions has been the main driver of spikes in gun sales, far surpassing the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks alone, according to federal background-check data
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
  • “It would be like you’ve never owned a toaster, you don’t really want a toaster, but the federal government says they’re going to ban toasters,” Mr. Ruttenbur said. “So you go out and buy a toaster.”
  • Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles. (Mr. Christie later vetoed one of the most stringent parts
  • Catch-22 for gun control proponents: Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.
  • Maryland approved one of the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in May 2013, gun sales jumped as buyers tried to beat the October deadline specified in the measure
  • after Hurricane Katrina, legally registered guns were confiscated from civilians. The confiscations outraged gun owners and prompted an increase in gun sales in the area. Conservatives responded by pushing for a federal law prohibiting the seizure of firearms from civilians during an emergency
  • Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country
  • These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check.
  • The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits.
  • When Missouri repealed a requirement that gun buyers obtain a permit to buy a handgun in 2007, estimated gun sales went up and stayed up, by roughly 9,000 additional guns per month. The influx shifted gun-trafficking patterns, reducing the number of guns used in crimes that had been brought in from neighboring states.
  • Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.
Javier E

Addicted to Distraction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...addicted-to-distraction.html

distraction internet social context addiction focus psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.
  • All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.
  • Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online,
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
  • Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life
  • By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addictio
  • According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email.
  • The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.
  • Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates.
  • Denial is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors
  • t we humans have a very limited reservoir of will and discipline. We’re far more likely to succeed by trying to change one behavior at a time, ideally at the same time each day, so that it becomes a habit, requiring less and less energy to sustain.
  • Now it was time to detox. I interpreted the traditional second step — belief that a higher power could help restore my sanity — in a more secular way. The higher power became my 30-year-old daughter, who disconnected my phone and laptop from both my email and the Web.
  • During those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that arose. But with each passing day offline, I felt more relaxed, less anxious, more able to focus and less hungry for the next shot of instant but short-lived stimulation. What happened to my brain is exactly what I hoped would happen: It began to quiet down.
  • I had brought more than a dozen books of varying difficulty and length on my vacation. I started with short nonfiction, and then moved to longer nonfiction as I began to feel calmer and my focus got stronger. I eventually worked my way up to “The Emperor of All Maladies
  • I am back at work now, and of course I am back online. The Internet isn’t going away, and it will continue to consume a lot of my attention. My aim now is to find the best possible balance between time online and time off
  • I also make it my business now to take on more fully absorbing activities as part of my days. Above all, I’ve kept up reading books, not just because I love them, but also as a continuing attention-building practice.
  • I’ve retained my longtime ritual of deciding the night before on the most important thing I can accomplish the next morning. That’s my first work activity most days, for 60 to 90 minutes without interruption. Afterward, I take a 10- to 15-minute break to quiet my mind and renew my energy.
  • If I have other work during the day that requires sustained focus, I go completely offline for designated periods, repeating my morning ritual. In the evening, when I go up to my bedroom, I nearly always leave my digital devices downstairs.
Javier E

Facebook's Other Critics: Its Viral Stars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-viral-stars.html

facebook criticism social media technology

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • In 2015, the social network began testing a revenue-sharing program with a limited group of creators, and last November, it rolled out Facebook Creator, a special app designed for professional users. Recently, the social network announced that it was testing some additional tools for creators, including a way for users to purchase monthly subscriptions to their favorite creators’ pages.But some of these features are still not widely available, and many influencers say that Facebook’s charm campaign amounts to too little, too late.
  • “It feels like they’ve pulled the biggest bait-and-switch of all time,” said Dan Shaba, a co-founder of The Pun Guys, a Facebook page with 1.2 million followers. “They’ve been promising monetization from the moment we got in.”Mr. Hamilton, he of the hot-pepper thong video, said, “I did 1.8 billion views last year. I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.”
  • While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In January, Facebook threw a wrench into that media economy by changing its branded content policy to prohibit creators from accepting money for such link-sharing deals, and re-engineering its News Feed algorithms. Traffic to many viral publishers plummeted overnight. LittleThings, a female-focused digital publisher that had amassed more than 12 million Facebook followers, announced that it was shutting down and blamed Facebook’s News Feed changes for cratering its organic traffic.
Javier E

What Does "Beauty" Look Like Around the World? - 5 views

www.flavorwire.com/...uty-look-like-around-the-world

beauty international comparison Internet research cultural aesthetics universal art

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Like most aspects of our lives, our web surfing habits suffer from naïve provincialism. Image Atlas, an online image search tool that categorizes results by country, offers at least one way to remedy this shortsightedness. 
  • Image Atlas allows you to customize your search by selecting different countries from their list and sorting them either alphabetically or by GDP.
  • We thought it might be interesting to put Image Atlas to the test by choosing a handful of countries and taking a look at the search results for the term “beauty.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • seeing them categorized by country does reveal some striking patterns, differences, and commonalities, the most obvious of which is the fact that the images consist overwhelmingly of women.
  • with few exceptions, they tend even in non-Western countries to be of fair-skinned, Western-looking women.
  • even in countries with very different cultural backgrounds, search engines appear to be saturated with a heavily biased, Westernized ideal of attractiveness.
  • There’s a staggering number of beauty products, makeup applicators, and spa treatments, all of which essentially suggest that beauty is something to be purchased and applied.
  • What are some other key search terms that you find particularly revealing?
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