Does the ‘Like’ Mean Anything Anymore?

[ed. What a world.]

Laura Hajek, a musician and actor better known as Edith Pop to her nearly 20,000 Instagram followers, has tried everything to get more likes on her posts over the last four years. She’s re-timed her posts after reading about what hours are best to publish photos. She’s studied how filters affect likes. (The Mayfair filter seems to garner more.) She’s put popular hashtags on photos (#brooklyn and #music). At one point, she even paid for an app that encourages users to like one another’s images.

But in the past year or so, she’s found herself putting less effort into bolstering ‘likes,’ after seeing a major shift in what she calls the “‘like’ exchange rate.” Many users, especially younger fans of hers, scroll through their feeds liking nearly every post. With many people handing out likes indiscriminately, or in hopes of receiving likes back, she has seen more engagement but it doesn’t feel genuine. “The value of a ‘like’ is definitely decreasing — there is less thought involved,” she said. “Nowadays, a ‘like’ says more ‘information received’ or ‘I saw this’ than ‘I like this.’ I’ve been getting more likes on Instagram, but it just seems like the pool of people is larger and they are liking posts more, not that they actually like me or mywork.”

For years, the “like” (or, in some places, the “fav”) has been the basic unit of currency on social media: the easy, universal measure of a post or poster’s quality, popularity, and power. But its dominant position atop the default methods of engagement in social media is increasingly challenged, as Facebook expands its array of reactions and the market becomes flooded with spammers and scammers. The like doesn’t mean what it used to — not just to people looking for easy validation, but to brands and companies looking for popular, high-engagement accounts.

Look no further than the comments on the Instagram account of any member of the Kardashian clan, particularly the Jenner sisters, to witness rampant like inflation in action. There, hundreds of thousands of users — mostly teens — take part in a fast-paced trade system meant to increase the number of likes on their photos and videos. Countless “lb” (like back), “first,” and “row for row” comments outpace genuine feedback on the photos, marking social media contracts promising to like a user’s photo or first row of photos in exchange for likes on posts of their own. (...)

And if brands can no longer count on likes as indicators of true engagement, you can bet the metric has long fallen out of favor with the true arbiters of What Is Cool on the internet: teens. As a recent episode of This American Life chronicling the labyrinthian social norms of teen girls on Instagram showed, many young Instagram users mindlessly ‘like’ every post in their feed, giving no thought to whether they actually like it. With this in mind, according to my sister, a Very Cool Teen, teens are coming up with their own ways to determine what matters on Instagram.

“Likes aren’t dead yet, but it’s more about ratios now,” she told me. “The like-to-minute ratio is a big thing, like, if you posted a picture five minutes ago and you already have 60 likes people will comment ‘whoa, that ratio!’ Like-to-follower ratio is also huge. If you have 600 likes and only 1,000 followers it shows how many real followers you have.”

by Kari Paul, Select/All |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

In Proof We Trust

[ed. Wow, now I understand. Best explanation of  blockchain technology I've read so far. Be sure to read the entire article; it's not just about money but more about authentication, with wide-ranging, revolutionary implications.]

The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.

Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.

All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest. The collective power of all these computers is greater than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.

New information is added to the record every few minutes, but it can be added only when all the computers signal their approval, which they do as soon as they have satisfactory proof that the information to be added is correct. Everybody knows how the system works, but nobody can change how it works. It is fully automated. Human decision-making or behaviour doesn’t enter into it.

If a company or a government department were in charge of the record, it would be vulnerable – if the company went bust or the government department shut down, for example. But with a distributed record there is no single point of vulnerability. It is decentralised. At times, some computers might go awry, but that doesn’t matter. The copies on all the other computers and their unanimous approval for new information to be added will mean the record itself is safe.

This is possibly the most significant and detailed record in all history, an open-source structure of permanent memory, which grows organically. It is known as the blockchain. It is the breakthrough tech behind the digital cash system, Bitcoin, but its impact will soon be far wider than just alternative money.

Many struggle to understand what is so special about Bitcoin. We all have accounts online with pounds, dollars, euros or some other national currency. That money is completely digital, it doesn’t exist in the real world – it is just numbers in a digital ledger somewhere. Only about 3 per cent of national currency actually exists in physical form; the rest is digital. I have supermarket rewards points and air miles as well. These don’t exist physically either, but they are still tokens to be exchanged for some kind of good or service, albeit with a limited scope; so they’re money too. Why has the world got so excited about Bitcoin?

To understand this, it is important to distinguish between money and cash.

If I’m standing in a shop and I give the shopkeeper 50 pence for a bar of chocolate, that is a cash transaction. The money passes straight from me to him and it involves nobody else: it is direct and frictionless. But if I buy that bar of chocolate with a credit card, the transaction involves a payment processor of some kind (often more than one). There is, in other words, a middle man.

The same goes for those pounds, dollars or euros I have in the accounts online. I have to go through a middle man if I want to spend them – perhaps a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company. If I want to spend those supermarket rewards points or those airmiles, there is the supermarket or airline to go through.

Since the early 1980s, computer coders had been trying to find a way of digitally replicating the cash transaction – that direct, frictionless, A-to-B transaction – but nobody could find a way. The problem was known as the problem of ‘double-spending’. If I send you an email, a photo or a video – any form of computer code – you can, if you want, copy and paste that code and send it to one or a hundred or a million different people. But if you can do that with money, the money quickly becomes useless. Nobody could find a way around it without using a middle man of some kind to verify and process transactions, at which point it is no longer cash. By the mid 2000s, coders had all but given up on the idea. It was deemed unsolvable. Then, in late 2008, quietly announced on an out-of-the-way mailing list, along came Bitcoin.

By late 2009, coders were waking up to the fact that its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had cracked the problem of double spending. The solution was the blockchain, the automated record with nobody in charge. It replaces the middle man. Rather than a bank process a transaction, transactions are processed by those 8,000-9,000 computers distributed across the Bitcoin network in the collective tradition of open-source collaboration. When those computers have their cryptographic and mathematical proof (a process that takes very little time), they approve the transaction and it is then complete. The payment information – the time, the amount, the wallet addresses – is added to the database; or, to use correct terminology, another block of data is added to the chain of information – hence the name blockchain. It is, simply, a chain of information blocks.

Money requires trust – trust in central banks, commercial banks, other large institutions, trust in the paper itself. On a dollar bill you will see the words: ‘In God we trust.’ Bitcoin aficionados are fond of saying: ‘In proof we trust.’ The blockchain, which works transparently by automation and mathematical and cryptographic proof, has removed the need for that trust. It has enabled people to pay digital cash directly from one person to another, as easily as you might send a text or an email, with no need for a middle man.

So the best way to understand Bitcoin is, simply: cash for the internet. It is not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that, as some of the diehard advocates will tell you, but it does have many uses. And, on a practical level, it works.

Testament to this is the rise of the online black market. Perhaps £1 million-worth of illegal goods and services are traded through dark marketplaces every day and the means of payment is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has facilitated this rapid rise. (I should stress that even though every Bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is recorded on the blockchain, the identity of the person making that transaction can be hidden if desired – hence its appeal). In the financial grand scheme of things, £1 million a day is not very much, but the fact that ordinary people on the black market are using Bitcoin on a practical, day-to-day basis as a way of paying for goods and services demonstrates that the tech works. I’m not endorsing black markets, but it’s worth noting that they are often the first to embrace a new tech. They were the first to turn the internet to profit, for example. Without deep pools of debt or venture capital to fall back on, black markets have to make new tech work quickly and practically.

But Bitcoin’s potential use goes far beyond dark markets. Consider why we might want to use cash in the physical world. You use it for small payments – a bar of chocolate or a newspaper from your corner shop, for example. There is the same need online. I might want to read an article in The Times. I don’t want to take out an annual subscription – but I do want to read that article. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where I could make a micropayment to read that article? It is not worth a payment processor’s time to process a payment that small, but with internet cash, you don’t need a processor. You can pay cash and it costs nothing to process – it is direct. This potential use could usher in a new era of paid content. No longer will online content-providers have to be so squeezed, and give out so much material for nothing in the hope of somehow recouping later, now that the tech is there to make and receive payment for small amounts in exchange for content.

We also use cash for quick payments, direct payments and tipping. You are walking past a busker, for example, and you throw him a coin. Soon you will able to tip an online content-provider for his or her YouTube video, song or blog entry, again as easily and quickly as you click ‘like’ on the screen. Even if I pay my restaurant bill with a card, I’ll often tip the waiter in cash. That way I know the waiter will receive the money rather than some unscrupulous employer. I like to pay cash in markets, where a lot of small businesses start out because a cash payment goes directly to the business owner without middle men shaving off their percentages. The same principle of quick, cheap, direct payment will apply online. Cheap processing costs are essential for low-margin businesses. Internet cash will have a use there, too. It also has potential use in the remittance business, which is currently dominated by the likes of Western Union. For those working oversees who want to send money home, remittance and foreign exchange charges can often amount to as much as 20 per cent of the amount transferred. With Bitcoin that cost can be removed. (...)

Just as the blockchain records where a bitcoin is at any given moment, and thus who owns it, so can blockchain be used to record the ownership of any asset and then to trade ownership of that asset. This has huge implications for the way stocks, bonds and futures, indeed all financial assets, are registered and traded. Registrars, stock markets, investment banks – disruption lies ahead for all of them. Their monopolies are all under threat from blockchain technology.

Land and property ownership can also be recorded and traded on a blockchain.(...) The ownership of vehicles, tickets, diamonds, gold – just about anything – can be recorded and traded using blockchain technology – even the contents of your music and film libraries (though copyright law may inhibit that). Blockchain tokens will be as good as any deed of ownership – and will be significantly cheaper to provide.

Whether it is the initial agreement, the arbitration of a dispute or its execution, every stage of a contract has, historically, been evaluated and acted on by people. A smart contract automates the rules, checks the conditions and then acts on them, minimising human involvement – and thus cost. Even complicated business arrangements can be coded and packaged as a smart contract for a fraction of the cost of drafting, disputing or executing a traditional contract.

One of the criticisms of the current legal system is that only the very rich or those on legal aid can afford it: everyone else is excluded. Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt the legal profession and make it affordable to all, just as the internet has done with both music and publishing.

This all has enormous implications for the way we do business. It is possible that blockchain tech will do the work of bankers, lawyers, administrators and registrars to a much higher standard for a fraction of the price.

by Dominic Frisby, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty

David Bailey, Jerry Hall and Helmut Newton, Cannes 1983

via:

via:
[ed. Need proof? Click here.]

'Space Invaders' Among 6 Inducted Into Video Game Hall of Fame

A video game that had players zapping space aliens with lasers and another that put them in covered wagons in 1848 have been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, along with four other games recognized for their influence on gaming and pop culture.

via:

[ed. Who knew there was a World Video Game Hall of Fame? I dropped so many quarters on this game. Now you can play it for free:  HERE.]

The Police Officer ‘Nextdoor’

It was the ideal proof-of-concept and a PR coup: a New York Times article that described how the Seattle Police Department used Nextdoor, a community-based social-networking site—a mini-Facebook just for your neighborhood—to find the owner of a stolen camera that officers had recovered. One officer posted a photo of the camera on Nextdoor, and a local user realized it was the same one in a Craigslist lost-and-found post he’d recently clicked on. Soon, the camera and its owner, a photographer from Louisiana, were reunited.

Sean Whitcomb, the department’s public-affairs director, says the camera’s owner sent the department a king cake—the traditional Mardi Gras delicacy from New Orleans—as a thank you.

Launched in 2011, Nextdoor allows neighborhood residents to connect with one another online, sharing classified ads, notices about nearby events, and observations and warnings about crime trends. The platform has the potential to bring out the best and worst in communities—it brings neighbors closer together, but can amplify their worst fears—and its focus on neighborhoods makes it a particularly valuable tool for law-enforcement agencies that want to understand the concerns of particular areas in a city.

The Seattle Police Department’s foray into Nextdoor is a product of its broader attempt to reconnect with the community it serves after being placed under a Justice Department consent decree in 2012. A federal investigation the year before had uncovered a pattern of excessive violence among officers, and the resulting report expressed “serious concerns about biased policing.”

To be more transparent, the department took to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to push out information about crimes, events, and the agency itself. Twitter is the department’s primary communication tool, Whitcomb says—and indeed, its account has a disproportionate number of followers for Seattle’s relatively small population, trailing only Boston’s and New York City’s much bigger police departments.

But Nextdoor is more private and decentralized than Facebook or Twitter, and so when Nextdoor approached Seattle Police in 2014, the department saw an opportunity to engage with Seattleites in a different way. The department waited until there was a critical mass of Seattle residents on the platform—about 20,000—before diving in. “It’s not our place to promote platforms,” Whitcomb says. “It’s our place to go where people are having conversations.”

Public-agency accounts like the Seattle Police Department’s work a little differently than individual Nextdoor user accounts: Public employees can post to community pages, see replies to their posts, and message privately with individuals—but they can’t see the rest of the chatter on a community page, or read private messages that users have sent to one another. Seattle Police is one of the larger of the 1,400 public agencies—mostly police departments—on Nextdoor.

Seattle’s department encourages precinct officers to maintain a presence on the community pages for the neighborhoods they serve. The initiative is an example of what the department calls “micro-community policing”: an attempt to use hyper-local data to customize its approach to law enforcement. Officers can alert residents to crime trends, ask for feedback on policing initiatives, or simply introduce themselves and encourage neighbors to say hi to patrolling officers.

After a honeymoon period, however, Seattle’s relationship with Nextdoor hit a few bumps in the road.

This February, Nextdoor hosted Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole for the first-ever online “town hall” on the platform: Residents asked the police chief questions and had a chance to hear directly from her. But when local journalist Erica Barnett reported on the event, Nextdoor booted her from the site for violating its terms of service for publicly posting users’ questions. It wasn’t until after she wrote about the incident on her website that her account was reinstated.

Barnett’s reporting was fiercely critical of the echo-chamber effect of the local, private community pages, many of which have hyperactive “crime and safety” sections. Indeed, in a recent interview with Barnett, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray derided an atmosphere of “paranoid hysteria” he’d witnessed on the message boards of some of Seattle’s more upscale neighborhoods.

by Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren / AP

Gas Delivery Startups Want to Change the World – But Will They Blow It Up First?

It is hard to imagine a less hospitable niche for a startup to enter than gasoline – a combustible commodity that is (one hopes) being innovated into obsolescence.

And yet, over the past 18 months, at least six startups have launched some variation on the theme of “Uber for gas” – your car’s tank gets refilled while it is parked somewhere.

The gas delivery startup founders all share similar stories of discovering the wannabe entrepreneur’s holy grail: a point of friction that can be translated into an app.

“David, one of the co-founders, basically said, ‘I hate going to the gas station’,” said Nick Alexander, the other co-founder of Yoshi, of their company’s origins. “I think he had run out of gas recently, so he said, ‘What about an idea where someone comes and fills your car up?’”

For Ale Donzis, co-founder of WeFuel, the moment came when he was trying to get gas in the middle of winter in upstate New York and realized he had forgotten his gloves. For Frank Mycroft, founder and CEO of Booster Fuels, it was during his wife’s pregnancy when he started refueling her car as well as his own.

“It wore on me,” Mycroft said. “I didn’t like doing it.”

The tales of gas station woe are the kind of first-world problems that have inspired a thousand parodies of startup culture. (A customer testimonial on the website of Purple, another gas delivery service, reads: “I live across the street from a gas station, but I don’t always have time to make the stop.”)

But delivering large quantities of a toxic and flammable liquid is significantly more complicated – and regulated – than delivering sandwiches. The companies generally source their gasoline from the same distributors that supply 10,000-gallon tankers to retail gas stations. But the app companies put the fuel into the back of pickup trucks or specially designed mini-tankers. Booster Fuels only services cars in open air, corporate parking lots on private property, but other companies offer to refill your car wherever it’s parked.

And while ignoring outdated regulations is practically a virtue in this age of disruptive innovation, there are good reasons for the careful control of gasoline.

“Some of the [companies] are using 1,000-gallon tanks,” warned Greg Andersen, division chief of the California office of the state fire marshall. “If they’re going into the basement parking lot of a high rise, that actually is a large concern.”

Several of the startups treat their regulatory compliance as a selling point.

“You’re supposed to have a fire extinguisher,” said Chris Aubuchon, co-founder of Filld. “We have two.”

Yoshi’s Alexander said, “We’re using DOT-certified equipment. … We’ve had our trucks inspected by multiple parties, including the highway patrol.”

But it’s not clear that Filld and Yoshi actually are in compliance with the law.

by Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stephan Savoia/AP

Trump's open path to nomination causes agony for some in GOP.

Image: misplaced

George Carlin: The American Dream

[ed. I miss him.]

The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.

You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land.

They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

You know what they want? Obedient workers ­ people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.

This country is finished.

Video: YouTube

The Startup Zeitgeist

Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.

Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.

But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term..

So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.

There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.

by Jared Friedman,Y Combinator | Read more:
Image: Pricenomics

Ty Segall

[ed. Garage rock isn't dead yet.]

How Should We Live in a Diverse Society?

‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ So asked the American writer Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published a few years ago. It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency in recent years as the question of immigration, and in particular of Islamic immigration, has taken centre stage.

At the heart of this question lies the dilemma of how Western societies should respond to the influx of peoples with different traditions, backgrounds and beliefs. What should be the boundaries of tolerance in such societies? Should immigrants be made to assimilate to Western customs and norms or is integration a two-way street? Such questions have bedeviled politicians and policy-makers for the past half-century. They have also tied liberals in knots.

The conundrums about diversity have been exacerbated by the two issues that now dominate contemporary European political discourse – the migration crisis and the problem of terrorism. How we discuss these issues, and how we relate the one to the other, will shape the character of European societies over the net period.

by Kenan Malik, Pandemonium | Read more:
Image: Aman Badhwar, Connections

On the Heartbreaking Difficulty of Getting Rid of Books

[ed. When I decluttered a few years ago (over 90 percent of my stuff), books were the hardest things to let go... not clothes, or kitchenware, recreational equipment, art, cds, old ratty furniture... Books. 20+ boxes of them.] 

Like a lot of avid readers, I enjoyed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but bristled when it came to the section about books. The gist of her now-famous method is this: go through all your possessions by category, touch everything, keep only that which “sparks joy,” and watch as your world is transformed. It seems simple enough, but Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.

Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word “book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect. Still, as the weather gets warmer, many readers will tackle their spring cleaning with The Life-Changing Magic in hand.

I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try. (...)

The most interesting aspect of the KonMari Method is the way in which it acknowledges the emotional lives of things. Whether that life is inherent or something that we project doesn’t really matter. She bypasses New Age-y concepts like “good vibes” and “energy flow” and jumps right to the chase: the objects you possess have feelings, so deal with it. It may seem silly at first to thank an old sweater for a job well done before getting rid of it, but actually doing so can feel oddly poignant. Kondo’s background in Shintoism is important in this respect. In Shinto cosmology, our physical reality co-exists with an invisible world of animistic spirits. Her worldview is in line with the Japanese aesthetic known in the West as wabi sabi, which explores the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things versus the pleasure we get from the freedom from things.

The aim of KonMari is to more fully appreciate what you have by letting go of that which no longer serves you. The difficulty comes in telling which is which. Much of what we don’t need tends to blend in with its surroundings, like a camouflaging octopus on a reef, effectively invisible until we grab hold of it or get right up in its face. By handling everything, we cause this hidden dead weight to startle, blanche, and show itself. Kondo even recommends clapping one’s hands over the objects to “wake them up.”

I went through my books one by one. Kondo says you shouldn’t open the books, but I broke that rule—not to read them, but to see what I might have long-ago stashed inside.

There was a surprising amount of stuff between the pages—letters, tickets, photographs, receipts. I found my New Year’s Eve resolutions for 1998; a slip of paper acknowledging my plea of GUILTY to a speeding ticket and instructing me to pay $125 to the town of Athens, New York; a hospital bill for $564; a Xeroxed page from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself with the stanza circled that begins I have said that the soul is not more than the body; the muted floral wrapper for fig apricot soap, still fragrant; the boarding pass for a flight from New York to Stockholm; a yellow hall pass from my California high school.

It occurred to me that part of the reason why tackling the “books” stage of the Full Kondo seems so daunting is that to many of us our books don’t really belong in the category she has assigned. They are not impersonal units of knowledge, interchangeable and replaceable, but rather receptacles for the moments of our lives, whose pages have sopped up morning hopes and late-night sorrows, carried in honeymoon suitcases or clutched to broken hearts. They are mementos, which she cautions readers not to even attempt to contemplate getting rid of until the very last.

by Summer Brennan, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Secret Rules of the Internet

Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist.

It was a warm, sunny morning, and she was sitting at her desk in the company’s office, located above a pizza shop in San Mateo, an idyllic and affluent suburb of San Francisco. Mora-Blanco was one of 60-odd twenty-somethings who’d come to work at the still-unprofitable website.

Mora-Blanco’s team — 10 people in total — was dubbed The SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department). They worked in teams of four to six, some doing day shifts and some night, reviewing videos around the clock. Their job? To protect YouTube’s fledgling brand by scrubbing the site of offensive or malicious content that had been flagged by users, or, as Mora-Blanco puts it, "to keep us from becoming a shock site." The founders wanted YouTube to be something new, something better — "a place for everyone" — and not another eBaum’s World, which had already become a repository for explicit pornography and gratuitous violence.

Mora-Blanco sat next to Misty Ewing-Davis, who, having been on the job a few months, counted as an old hand. On the table before them was a single piece of paper, folded in half to show a bullet-point list of instructions: Remove videos of animal abuse. Remove videos showing blood. Remove visible nudity. Remove pornography. Mora-Blanco recalls her teammates were a "mish-mash" of men and women; gay and straight; slightly tipped toward white, but also Indian, African-American, and Filipino. Most of them were friends, friends of friends, or family. They talked and made jokes, trying to make sense of the rules. "You have to find humor," she remembers. "Otherwise it’s just painful."

Videos arrived on their screens in a never-ending queue. After watching a couple seconds apiece, SQUAD members clicked one of four buttons that appeared in the upper right hand corner of their screens: "Approve" — let the video stand; "Racy" — mark video as 18-plus; "Reject" — remove video without penalty; "Strike" — remove video with a penalty to the account. Click, click, click. But that day Mora-Blanco came across something that stopped her in her tracks.

"Oh, God," she said.

Mora-Blanco won’t describe what she saw that morning. For everyone’s sake, she says, she won’t conjure the staggeringly violent images which, she recalls, involved a toddler and a dimly lit hotel room.

Ewing-Davis calmly walked Mora-Blanco through her next steps: hit "Strike," suspend the user, and forward the person’s account details and the video to the SQUAD team’s supervisor. From there, the information would travel to the CyberTipline, a reporting system launched by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 1998. Footage of child exploitation was the only black-and-white zone of the job, with protocols outlined and explicitly enforced by law since the late 1990s.

The video disappeared from Mora-Blanco’s screen. The next one appeared.

Ewing-Davis said, "Let’s go for a walk."

Okay. This is what you’re doing, Mora-Blanco remembers thinking as they paced up and down the street. You’re going to be seeing bad stuff.

Almost a decade later, the video and the child in it still haunt her. "In the back of my head, of all the images, I still see that one," she said when we spoke recently. "I really didn’t have a job description to review or a full understanding of what I’d be doing. I was a young 25-year-old and just excited to be getting paid more money. I got to bring a computer home!" Mora-Blanco’s voice caught as she paused to collect herself. "I haven’t talked about this in a long time."

Mora-Blanco is one of more than a dozen current and former employees and contractors of major internet platforms from YouTube to Facebook who spoke to us candidly about the dawn of content moderation. Many of these individuals are going public with their experiences for the first time. Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have "more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president."

by Catherine Buni & Soraya Chemaly, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Eric Petersen

via:

IBM Is Now Letting Anyone Play With Its Quantum Computer

Quantum computing is computing at its most esoteric. It’s an experimental, enormously complex, sometimes downright confusing technology that’s typically the domain of hardcore academics and organizations like Google and NASA. But that might be changing.

Today, IBM unveiled an online service that lets anyone use the five-qubit quantum computer its researchers have erected at a research lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. You can access the machine over the Internet via a simple software interface—or at least it’s simple if you understand the basics of quantum computing. This new service is hardly something the everyday consumer will use, but it’s a big deal for the many researchers now working to build a practical quantum computer—a computer that moves beyond just 1s and 0s to become exponentially more powerful than today’s machines. In that sense, IBM is indeed striving to bring quantum computing to the world at large. (...)

Meet the Qubit

Today’s computers store data in extremely small transistors. Each transistor can hold a single “bit” of information: a 1 or a 0. But about thirty years ago, scientists proposed a machine that could go beyond that binary, a machine that could store data in a system that obeys the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics. Instead of just a 1 or a 0, a “qubit” could store both at the same time, thanks to what’s called the superposition principle.

By extension, two qubits could hold four values simultaneously: 00, 01, 10, and 11. And if you keep adding qubits, you could, in theory, build a machine far more powerful than any that exists today. “These are things you can’t explain with regular logic,” says Jerry Chow, the former Yale researcher who helps oversee IBM’s quantum computing work. “Quantum computing and quantum algorithms are all about: how do you harness that?”

But that kind of ultra-powerful machine doesn’t yet exist. Qubits, you see, are slippery things. If you try to observe the state of a quantum system, it “decoheres,” falling into one state or the other. It no longer holds both a 0 and a 1. It holds only a O or a 1, like the classical computers of today. To build a true quantum computer, researchers must harness the probability that a qubit will decohere into one state versus the other.
The Same Result Each Time

There are many ways of doing this, and though none has truly cracked the problem, some are quite promising. IBM has built a quantum computer that operates by dropping superconducting circuits into an enormous sub-zero refrigerator, and it spans five qubits. But now, in sharing this machine with the world at large, the company hopes to accelerate its progress, aiming to extend its power to 50 or possibly 100 qubits.

According to David Cory, a professor with the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, this sort of online quantum computer—a quantum cloud service, if you will—is pretty much unprecedented. Building such a service, he explains, is far more difficult than you might expect. “It’s not a simple thing to do,” he says. “Quantum systems are really quite delicate.”

by Cade Metz, Wired |  Read more:

Image: IBM

via:

Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in United States

Nightmare stories of nurses giving potent drugs meant for one patient to another and surgeons removing the wrong body parts have dominated recent headlines about medical care. Lest you assume those cases are the exceptions, a new study by patient safety researchers provides some context.

Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that "medical errors" in hospitals and other health care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third leading cause of death in the United States -- claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer's.

Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the research, said in an interview that the category includes everything from bad doctors to more systemic issues such as communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another.

"It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeing care," Makary said.

The issue of patient safety has been a hot topic in recent years, but it wasn't always that way. In 1999, an Institute of Medicine report calling preventable medical errors an "epidemic" shocked the medical establishment and led to significant debate about what could be done.

The IOM, based on one study, estimated deaths because of medical errors as high as 98,000 a year. Makary's research involves a more comprehensive analysis of four large studies, including ones by the Health and Human Services Department's Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that took place between 2000 to 2008. His calculation of 251,000 deaths equates to nearly 700 deaths a day -- about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States.

Makary said he and co-author Michael Daniel, also from Johns Hopkins, conducted the analysis to shed more light on a problem that many hospitals and health care facilities try to avoid talking about.

Though all providers extol patient safety and highlight the various safety committees and protocols they have in place, few provide the public with specifics on actual cases of harm due to mistakes. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't require reporting of errors in the data it collects about deaths through billing codes, making it hard to see what's going on at the national level.

The CDC should update its vital statistics reporting requirements so that physicians must report whether there was any error that led to a preventable death, Makary said.

"We all know how common it is," he said. "We also know how infrequently it’s openly discussed."

by Ariana Eunjung Cha, WP | Read more:
Image: iStock

Bosch Mania

[ed. Do check out this hi-res tool to explore The Garden of Earthly Delights.]

This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.

This extraordinary level of interest is generated by the simple fact that whosoever sees the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch does not soon, it is safe to say, forget them. That’s because they are fantastic works of art. There’s so much going on in a typical Bosch painting (more on that later) that the eye cannot but dart around, taking in the strange imagery. For that reason, Bosch’s work was popular from the very beginning—that beginning being the 15th century, when Bosch was alive and painting away in the lands of Northern Europe we now call The Netherlands. Throughout the ensuing years, Bosch’s star waxed and waned, but his work never passed out of public consciousness completely. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, he was “rediscovered” in full force. The 20th century public loved the outrageous scenarios to be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, artists especially. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington explicitly referenced Bosch in their own work, just to name a few.

A Hard Nut to Crack

But Bosch’s work has always caused trouble for interpreters and critics. Bosch painted weird things. Weird things are hard to interpret and understand. Critics and scholars like to understand. Ergo, Bosch is a problem. Most critics these days tend to agree that Bosch’s paintings were created primarily out of the religiously pious desire to illustrate biblical truths. Some interpreters reject even this basic assumption, as, for example, Ellen Handler Spitz did in her recent article for The New Republic, titled, tellingly, “The Impious Delights of Hieronymus Bosch.” For those (the majority) who do think of Bosch as more or less a religious painter, the specific imagery and symbolism in the paintings is still nearly impossible to pin down. Bosch’s piety was not like other men’s piety. It took on a unique expression.

Let’s take Bosch’s most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (The painting can be viewed in wonderful high-res detail here). The work was painted in oil on oak panels that were meant to be part of a church altar display (as were nearly all paintings painted at the time). The central panel is a flurry of activity, color, shape, form. A couple of pink structures (castles?) buttress a lake or river, in the center of which is a building composed of a sphere emerging from the water and a multi-pronged tower emanating from the sphere. This could be the landscape in a Dr. Seuss book.

The goings-on amongst the humans and animals thronging the areas beneath the castles are challenging to describe, let alone understand. One man is upside down in the water. His legs are sticking up and spread out. Between his legs can be found the stem and fruit of a huge, unidentifiable plant. The spindly branches of another, smaller plant sprout from the fruit of the larger plant. Out of that sprouting emerges a tropical bird. Perhaps it is an egret. What is the purpose of this water gymnastics with unusual fruit? Very hard to say. Much of the imagery and symbolism seems to be Bosch’s own. Why, for instance, is there a man carrying a huge mussel shell on his back, out of which poke the legs of a couple we can assume to be engaged in some sort of amorous pursuit? Probably, that specific image will never be definitively decoded. Perhaps it came to Bosch in a dream.

So queerly idiosyncratic are the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch that art critics and historians have been known to stretch long and hard for an explanation. For a period during the middle of the 20th century, it was en vogue to imply that Bosch was heavy into drugs. Other interpreters suggested that he was essentially mad, or at least caught up with the wild ideas of one late-medieval cult or another. (...)

The common theme to all these wildly divergent speculations is the feeling that the images in Bosch’s paintings were so unprecedented that they must come from the mind of someone who stood apart, a radical of sorts, an outsider for sure. This feeling is heightened by a glance at the work of Bosch’s contemporaries. It can be startling to realize that Hieronymus Bosch lived during almost exactly the same period as Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519). We’re smack in the midst of the High Renaissance here. And da Vinci, for all his unusual qualities, never painted anything like The Garden of Earthly Delights. Indeed, most of da Vinci’s paintings, for all their innovations in form and technique, take up orthodox and well-worn subject matter in orthodox and well-worn ways. The Last Supper, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne—even The Mona Lisa is a more or less straightforward portrait, due respect paid to her mysterious smile.

Not so with Bosch. Even when Bosch did paint more traditional scenes, like a crucifixion, he rarely played it straight. He painted one crucifixion scene that doesn’t even portray Christ. It shows a woman on the cross, probably Saint Julia of Corsica. The right and left panels of the triptych teem with typical Boschian imagery. There are howling demons, sunken ships, blighted hellscapes, odd creatures, ladders to nowhere, fantastical buildings.

by Morgan Meis, The Easel |  Read more:

Image: Hieronymus Bosch

The Life of a Blog Editor