When Instagram found out that users missed out on 70% of the posts on their feed, they announced a new algorithm. An algorithm that promised to let you see the posts that you care about the most. But the workings of the algorithm remained a burning question until recently when the Facebook-owned company revealed how does the Instagram algorithm work. When the Instagram feed was tweaked from chronological to algorithmic, people anticipated a drop in engagement levels. However, people have now started seeing 90% of their feed since the algorithm was instituted. Read on to find out everything you need to know about the Instagram feed algorithm.

Contrary to mainstream thinking that this new technology is unregulated, it’s really quite the opposite. These systems apply the strictest of rules under highly deterministic and predictable models that are regulated through mathematics. In the future, industry will be regulated not just by institutions and committees but by algorithms and mathematics. The new technology will gradually out-regulate the regulators and, in many cases, make them obsolete because the new system offers more certainty. Antonopoulos explains that “the opposite of authoritarianism is not chaos, but autonomy.”

how does misrepresentative information make it to the top of the search result pile—and what is missing in the current culture of software design and programming that got us here?

The new organs process this enormous amount of information to break you down into categories, which are sometimes innocuous like, “Listens to Spotify” or “Trendy Moms”, but can also be more sensitive, identifying ethnicity and religious affiliation, or invasively personal, like “Lives away from family”. More than this, the new organs are being integrated with increasingly sophisticated algorithms, so they can generate predictive portraits of you, which they then sell to advertisers who can target products that you don’t even know you want yet. 

Perelman says his Babel Generator also proves how easy it is to game the system. While students are not going to walk into a standardized test with a Babel Generator in their back pocket, he says, they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe. "For example, you will get a higher score just by [writing] "in conclusion,'" he says.

"The idea is bananas, as far as I'm concerned," says Kelly Henderson, an English teacher at Newton South High School just outside Boston. "An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous."

This fall, my colleagues and I released gobo.social, a customizable news aggregator. Gobo presents you with posts from your friends, but also gives you a set of sliders that govern what news you see and what’s hidden from you. Want more serious news, less humor? Move a slider. Need to hear more female voices? Adjust the gender slider, or press the “mute all men” button for a much quieter internet. Gobo currently includes half a dozen ways to tune your news feed, with more to come.

Distance from a point to a line segment

point: P
line_seg_start_point: P0
line_seg_end_point: P1

for not very large numbers

the Closest pair problem

Machine learning:

student-directed learning system

While there are assets that have not been assigned to a cluster If only one asset remaining then Add a new cluster Only member is the remaining asset Else Find the asset with the Highest Average Correlation (HC) to all assets not yet been assigned to a Cluster Find the asset with the Lowest Average Correlation (LC) to all assets not yet assigned to a Cluster If Correlation between HC and LC > Threshold Add a new Cluster made of HC and LC Add to Cluster all other assets that have yet been assigned to a Cluster and have an Average Correlation to HC and LC > Threshold Else Add a Cluster made of HC Add to Cluster all other assets that have yet been assigned to a Cluster and have a Correlation to HC > Threshold Add a Cluster made of LC Add to Cluster all other assets that have yet been assigned to a Cluster and have Correlation to LC > Threshold End if End if End While