Tag: Social Media

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News You Can Use: 3/7/2018

  • Fake news is not the real problem

    The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth. The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare. (I’m not pretending it was ever remotely universal; I’m just saying that there was enough of it, barely, for democracy to work more-or-less as intended.)

    No longer. The engineer’s mindset has been replaced by the lawyer’s mindset, wherein you pick a side in advance of getting any evidence, and then do absolutely everything you can to belittle, dismiss, and ignore any opposing data, while trumping up every scrap that might support your own side as if it were written on stone tables brought down from the mountain by Moses. I mean no disrespect to the legal profession: some of my favorite people are lawyers, including the one I married. The legal approach is an excellent means of getting to the truth of hard and confrontational matters —

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-not-the-real-problem/?ncid=rss

  • Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

    Preethi Kasireddy said she wasn’t surprised when she heard the news that Mr. Thiel is moving to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Ms. Kasireddy, a 27-year-old startup entrepreneur, said she made the same move last November because, like Mr. Thiel, she felt surrounded by people who shared identical beliefs, particularly about how to build a successful company.

    Sometimes Silicon Valley venture-capital investors and startup founders “have a certain way of thinking, and if you don’t fit into that way of thinking you’re not in the cool club,” said Ms. Kasireddy, who declined to state her political beliefs but said they didn’t influence her decision to move. She also said she realized many of the resources she needed to build her next project—a blockchain startup—didn’t require her to be in Silicon Valley.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-peter-thiel-others-feel-alienated-by-silicon-valley-groupthink-1518962400

  • It’s not you. Phones are designed to be addicting
  • Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

    The rise of China as an AI superpower isn’t a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-­collar work. It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we’re not ready for it.

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610298/tech-companies-should-stop-pretending-ai-wont-destroy-jobs/

  • Is Creating Your Own Podcast Actually Worth It?

    “You’re going to be terrible at a lot of things for years until you’re successful,” said Keith Kingbay, co-host of “New Player Has Joined,” a show where celebrities reminisce about the videogames they love. “People probably aren’t going to listen to your podcast initially. But if you like it and you keep putting it out, people will find it.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-creating-your-own-podcast-actually-worth-it-1519320018

Photo: Kleiton Silva

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News You Can Use: 2/28/2018

  • Report: Messenger Kids advocates were Facebook-funded

    Messenger Kids, Facebook said, had been designed to serve as a “fun, safer solution” for family communications. It would be available for children as young as 6, the company said. To forestall criticism, Facebook asserted that the app had been developed alongside thousands of parents and a dozen expert advisors.

    But it looks like many of those outside experts were funded with Facebook dollars. According to Wired, “At least seven members of Facebook 13-person advisory board have some kind of financial tie to the company.” Those advisors include the National PTA, Blue Star Families, Connect Safely, and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40530927/report-messenger-kids-advocates-were-facebook-funded

  • Fake news is an existential crisis for social media

    Elections don’t take place in a vacuum. And if people are angry and divided in their daily lives then that will naturally be reflected in the choices made at the ballot box, whenever there’s an election.

    Russia knows this. And that’s why the Kremlin has been playing such a long propaganda game. Why it’s not just targeting elections. Its targets are fault lines in the fabric of society — be it gun control vs gun owners or conservatives vs liberals or people of color vs white supremacists — whatever issues it can seize on to stir up trouble and rip away at the social fabric.

    That’s what makes digitally amplified disinformation an existential threat to democracy and to civilized societies. Nothing on this scale has been possible before.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-an-existential-crisis-for-social-media/?ncid=rss

  • Why Iceland is Perfect for Crypto Mining
  • Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

    The company faced a number of challenges in building out the system. The first challenge was that the installation could not disrupt transit customers. Bayne said, “We had to figure out how to deploy network and equipment while minimizing disruption of the transit system itself.” That meant working overnight when labor costs are higher, and also placed the company at the mercy of the MTA’s maintenance windows to install network equipment.

    Even more challenging was securing the right equipment. The NYC subway “is a 110-year-old system with low ceilings and lots of water, and it wasn’t designed to embrace a lot of electronics,” Bayne said. Wireless equipment “had to withstand all of these changes in environmental conditions: cold, heat, water, brake dust. Everything had to be passively cooled and fully-enclosed so it didn’t ingest any of the environment into the equipment.” That specialized, “mil-spec” equipment doesn’t come cheap.

    As with the story of any infrastructure, particularly in New York, rolling out wireless connectivity to 282 active underground stations was anything but cheap. The final cost of the rollout was north of $300 million for Transit Wireless, a dramatic increase from early estimates which said that the project would cost “up to $200 million.” As a private entity spending private dollars, the company obviously had enormous incentives to hold down costs.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/engineering-against-all-odds/?ncid=rss

  • How Should Your Company Prepare For Robot Coworkers?

    A December 2017 survey by insurance and risk management advisory firm Willis Towers Watson in Arlington, Virginia, found that U.S. companies will nearly double the amount of work done by automation (to 17%) within the next three years. Ninety-four percent of companies that are already using robotics and AI will expand their use of automation by 2020.

    But are companies ready for those changes? Maybe not, the survey found. Less than 5% of respondents say their HR functions are fully prepared for the changing requirements of these new ways of working.

    “So we’re getting beyond the hyperbole of, ‘Robots are going to replace humans,’ and thinking about this in a more nuanced and practical way,” says Renee Smith, who leads the Future of Work consulting activities at Willis Towers Watson. Instead, employees will need to integrate the work that’s done through automation or algorithmic technologies and learn how these tools can enhance performance. Organizations need to start thinking about how the workplace changes when people work side by side with technology, and how to get them ready to do so successfully, she says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40528265/how-should-your-company-prepare-for-robot-co-workers

Photo: Sean Thomas

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News You Can Use: 1/31/2018

  • Apple CEO becomes latest tech bigwig to warn of social media’s dangers

    Cook joins a multitude of tech personalities in recent years worrying about the negative impact of technology, and social media in particular, on our lives. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, admitted last year that he’d helped Mark Zuckerberg build “a monster,” stating: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

    Another former Facebook exec, Chamath Palihapitiya, told a group at Stanford Graduate School of Business that the social network could be “destroying how society works” through “short-term, dopamine-driven, feedback loops.”

    https://thenextweb.com/apple/2018/01/20/apple-ceo-becomes-latest-tech-bigwig-to-warn-of-social-medias-dangers/

  • Is Procurement Responsible If Suppliers Are Stupid and Bid Too Low?

    So during our discussion, my friend and I had a philosophical debate about whether it was in any sense “our problem” as buyers if a supplier put in a stupidly low bid. At what point should procurement worry that an offer is too low? Does procurement have a moral or ethical obligation to stop firms getting themselves into trouble?

    Our conclusion – after another beer – was no, we don’t. We must protect our own organisation, so we should think hard about the issues if, for instance, a firm was likely to go under because of the deal. Do we have contingency plans in place for that? (It’s rarely a positive for the buyer obviously if this happens to an important supplier).

    And we should build protection into the contract to make sure the supplier can’t just walk away from the deal if it becomes too onerous – or at least, to ensure we are very well compensated if they do. But it is not our role to protect suppliers from their own stupidity, particularly if it is a large firm with many customers and financial strength itself. Indeed, our role is to drive competitive advantage, which often means we are paying less than our competitors for a similar product or service.

    http://spendmatters.com/uk/procurement-responsible-suppliers-stupid-bid-low/

  • How faster computers gave us Meltdown and Spectre
  • Good-bye, Fluffy Office Perks, and 3 Other Tech Business Predictions for 2018

    Office perks are always a hot topic in the tech world. However, more companies realize that fluffy office culture doesn’t actually attract the best talent or cultivate the highest performing team. Those perks you think your employees want can actually be more distracting and detrimental to productivity. To really reap the benefits of the “perk” in the first place, find out what motivates employees. Ping-pong tables and nap rooms will move out and more meaningful perks will take their place. Companies that attract the most talented and passionate teams will do it with job descriptions and mission statements that inspire a deep sense of purpose.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/307509

  • On Second Thought, You Should Maybe Talk Less In Meetings

    Research on creativity suggests that the people who have the most ideas are also most likely to have the best ideas. So it’s a good idea to generate a lot of ideas while you’re in a meeting–at least inside your own head to start with. But before deciding to contribute your latest thought in the meeting, write it down. Take a look at it, and decide whether you think it’s one of the best you’ve come up with. If so, go on and share it! Then you can keep your others in reserve in case the group isn’t happy with the options they have so far.

    There are two benefits to writing your ideas down and looking them over before speaking. Obviously, one is that you can privately rank your own contributions rather than subjecting all of them to your team’s assessment (or risk even the good ones getting lost in the shuffle). This way you’re maximizing the chance that other people will actually rally to your point of view–and form a positive impression of you in the process.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40516098/on-second-thought-you-should-maybe-talk-less-in-meetings

Photo: Daniel Cheung