Should Wikity follow the wiki tradition of supplying editable source to collaborators? Or the web syndication model of supplying encoded content. (Here, actually, I come down rather firmly on the source side of the equation — encoded content is a model suited for readers, not co-authors).

We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.

Reversing the trend toward privatization will thus require not just massive public mobilization and demand of elected officials, but also a hard turn away from efficiency as a primary value, a recognition that the building of relationships and the cultivation of care is slow and difficult and of necessity inefficient. In fact, that its value lies in its inefficiency — but making the case for such inefficiency as a necessary value requires a lot of effort, and a lot of caution.

That approach: build protocols, not platforms.

Schemas aren't neutral

and annotation can tell us why that alternative view matters..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Troy Hicks With this potential social function, we are reminded that annotation is not neutral as it helps those who add notes to texts produce new discourses and knowledge.

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

A second strand in the development of the American prosperity gospel was the valorization of the “Protestant work ethic.” Written in 1905, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traced what he saw as the specifically Protestant approach to labor as integral to the development of capitalism and industrialization. In Weber’s historical analysis, Protestant Calvinists — who generally believe in the idea of “predestination,” or that God has chosen some people to be saved and others damned — felt the need to justify their own sense of themselves as the saved. They looked both for outward signs of God’s favor (i.e., through material success) and for ways to express inward virtue (i.e., through hard work). While the accuracy of Weber’s analysis is still debated by scholars, it nevertheless tells us a lot about cultural attitudes at the time Weber wrote it.

According to a recent Dutch study, that point of view still holds true today: Protestants and citizens of predominately Protestant countries tend to conflate labor with personal satisfaction more than those of other religious traditions.

Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.

Twenty Stories Bookmobile, which left L.A. traffic for Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018

academia is built on the premise (IMHO) of getting a good idea, parlaying that into a job and tenure, and waiting for death. I’ve had a lot of colleagues and acquaintances ask why I would bother blogging. Ask why I share all of this content online. Ask why I’m not afraid that someone is going to steal my ideas.

How this phenomenon translates into absolute, rather than relative, risk, however, is a bit thorny. A large study published in 2018, for instance, found that among women who had children between 34 and 47, 2.2 percent developed breast cancer within three to seven years after they gave birth (among women who never had children, the rate was 1.9 percent). Over all, according to the American Cancer Society, women between 40 and 49 have a 1.5 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

Podcast listening can be harder to crack. There are so many shows! How do you find the ones you’ll like? And once you’ve found a show, where do you start: with the most recent episode? At the beginning? Some specific gem of an episode buried deep in the back catalog?

After all, Harry Potter wouldn’t have completed his Potions course were it not for an annotated version of the Advanced Potion-Making textbook.

Why, though, do we not romanticize our preservation? The same matter of chance, of the fleeting nature of fate exists on the other side of the coin. What would have happened if we were better rested, if our energy was better preserved, if we managed our time and said what we really mean? Rarely do we approach whether we get eight hours of sleep with the same guilt as we do whether or not we attended a party, even when, according to sleep expert Matthew Walker, sleep deprivation prevents the brain from remembering information, creating new memories, and sustaining emotional well-being.

As Celtis said, “it helps the memory a great deal, if someone knows the things of the world,”37 and Valentinus followed this advice when he refi lled the table of Celtis with meanings of his own.

It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.

their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.

The average number of coauthors on math papers has gone up since 1900. So has the number of working mathematicians in the world, which raises the odds of independent rediscoveries, separated in time or space. These two trends have opened the door to triple and even quadruple hyphen situations, as in the Albert-Brauer-Hasse-Noether Theorem and the Grothendieck-Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch Theorem.

The worst answer I can imagine is the one Pope Gregory VII gave for refusing to let the Holy Scripture be translated out of Latin: “... [I]f it were plainly apparent to all men, perchance it would be little esteemed and be subject to disrespect; or it might be falsely understood by those of mediocre learning, and lead to error.”

What was that about crowdfunding instances?  How much of an instance’s conversation was visible to the outside?  How much of this is Google-spidered?  What are those anti-abuse tools?  Why can’t governments “completely block” Mastodon (as a whole, or just instances?)? Can one join more than a single instance?

Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality.

Social scientist, on the other hand, have focused on what ties are more likely to bring in new information, which are primarily weak ties (Granovetter 1973), and on why weak ties bring new information (because they bridge structural holes (Burt 2001), (Burt 2005)).

That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.

Actavis Pharma was acquired by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in 2016, and a spokeswoman there said the company “cannot speak to any systems in place beforehand.”

A common complaint we heard from publishers at all levels is that it’s difficult to build partnerships with social media platforms. They seem to be holding all the cards. Even large publishers often feel in the dark during meetings with large platform companies.

Legacy publishers need to leverage distributed content to grow their audience and survive this wave.

We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by: Liking us on Facebook  Following us on Twitter  Following us on Instagram Chatting with us on Reddit Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters 

Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers. If you want to know why there’s so much remnant advertising on online news sites, it’s because you’re treating the stories like remnants already.

Chris Hayes, who anchors MSNBC’s 8 pm newscast and is among the most thoughtful, civic-minded journalists in the industry, referenced a Will Ferrell joke from Anchorman 2 on his podcast, saying, “What if instead of telling people the things they need to know, we tell them what they want to know?” That is, he says, “the creation story of cable news.”

But we don’t just want people to read our work. We want people to spread our work — to be so moved by what we wrote or said that they log on to Facebook and share it with their friends or head over to Reddit and try to tell the world. That’s how you get those dots to multiply. But people don’t share quiet voices. They share loud voices. They share work that moves them, that helps them express to their friends who they are and how they feel. Social platforms are about curating and expressing a public-facing identity. They’re about saying, “I’m a person who cares about this, likes that, and loathes this other thing.” They are about signaling the groups you belong to and, just as important, the groups you don’t belong to.

Update, 11:22 Eastern: Weiss has posted a letter of resignation addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her website. In it, she denounces the Times for fostering an atmosphere of stifling conformity and accuses her now-former colleagues of bullying:

The only way to insure your posts gain notice is to bombard the feed and hope that some stick, which risks comprising on quality and annoying people.

What if you could use AI to control the content in your feed? Dialing up or down whatever is most useful to you. If I’m on a budget, maybe I don’t want to see photos of friends on extravagant vacations. Or, if I’m trying to pay more attention to my health, encourage me with lots of salads and exercise photos. If I recently broke up with somebody, happy couple photos probably aren’t going to help in the healing process. Why can’t I have control over it all, without having to unfollow anyone. Or, opening endless accounts to separate feeds by topic. And if I want to risk seeing everything, or spend a week replacing my usual feed with images from a different culture, country, or belief system, couldn’t I do that, too? 

Many will tease the possibility of going private, posting announcements in their page bios like, “Going private in the next 24 hours,” to entice people to follow while they can.

This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single chicken, and then another chicken, and then another chicken, and so on. The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed.

Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

Well, in the past, because I constrained myself to only writing long posts, my blog would only show activity when I was feeling motivated to write something longer. And that motivation definitely ebbs and flows. But now, if I want to just throw up a note or post a quick picture, I can, as easily as I could post a status update to Facebook. And instead of just posting to my blog and hoping someone sees it, I can make that content visible on social networks like Twitter, which leads to engagements that, again, come back to my blog. The end result is that my blog, the space I’ve created for myself on the web, is much more dynamic and alive. And that’s pretty darn exciting!

At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

Fukuyama concedes that people need a sense of national identity, whether ethnic or creedal, but otherwise he remains an assimilationist and a universalist.

History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦

why encourage posting before you’ve even read the thing? Because, at least my hope is, it’ll prevent posting a link from becoming an endorsement for the content at the other end of that link. There’s a natural tendency to curate what we associate with our online profiles and I think that’s, in large part, because we’ve spent a lot of time equating a user’s profile page with a user’s identity and, consequently, their beliefs. But I consume a wealth of content that I don’t necessarily agree with, and that helps to inform me, to shape my opinions, as much as the content that I agree with wholeheartedly.

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? 2 Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? 5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6 But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!

Second, I have a not-very-well supported theory that’s paired with the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The behavior design implication of that book is that you need to speak to two systems of the brain. Speaking to the rational, Slow System is easy. Just lay out the facts.Speaking to the emotional Fast System is much harder, namely because it’s so hard to see or introspect on what’s going on in there. But if you accept that difficulty (and this is the part of my theory that feels like pop brain science), then you realize that you need to start looking for ways to rewire your emotional core.Then, having accepted that rewiring your emotions is part of most behavior design, I’ve started to notice things — like that most self-improvement advice is not very rational. That’s by design. A self-improvement book is mostly emotional rewiring. That is exactly why you need to read the entire book rather than cheating with a summarized version.

Criticality may be everywhere.

“DNA as Information” Theme issue compiled and edited by Cartwright, J.H.E., Giannerini, S., & Gonzalez, D.L. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 374 (2016).

balloons

This fall needs to be different. We need to ask students to be part of the solution of keeping learning flourishing in the fall. This includes asking them to help manage the class if it has a virtual component.

Textbook affordability is covered frequently by higher-education news media in the United States, part of the broader conversation about access to American colleges and universities. The National Survey of Student Engagement has reported that 31% of first year and 40% of senior undergraduates didn’t purchase required course materials because of the expense.

depressing the market for used books as they maintain their profits.

Why We Don't Live in a PPP World PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same. That's not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.  A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can't be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.  A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can't compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers. A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports.

We’ve certainly dabbled in the debate of “what is a tech company” but what we never addressed was why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company.

He doesn’t yet know why some places are opportunity bargains, but he considers the discovery of these neighborhoods to be a breakthrough.

Two of the most successful expositors of economic complexity were research partners, as least for a time:  Ricardo Hausmann, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and physicist César Hidalgo, of MIT’s Media Lab. They, too, worked with a gifted mathematician, Albert-László Barabási, of Northeastern University, to produce a highly technical paper; then,  with colleagues, assembled an Atlas of Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity (MIT, 2011), a data-visualization tool that continues to function online. Meanwhile, Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Basic, 2015) remains an especially lucid account of humankind’s escape (so far) from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but there is precious little economics in it. For the economics of international trade, see Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman.

Festa argues that this is why organic farming in the U.S. saw a 56 percent increase between 2011 and 2016.

Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north.

Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.

Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women’s rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Again, we only changed a few words, but that new frame engenders a completely different conversation. This is why designers love the phrase “How might we...”—because it opens up the conversation to solutions.

There are other mathematical models of institutionalized bias out there! Male-Female Differences: A Computer Simulation shows how a small gender bias compounds as you move up the corporate ladder. The Petrie Multiplier shows why an attack on sexism in tech is not an attack on men.

Thus could Ken Copeland write in his Laws of Prosperity, "Do you want a hundredfold return on your money? Give and let God multiply it back to you. No bank in the world offers this kind of return! Praise the Lord!” In this mentality, tithing is a financially responsible thing to do. It’s a show of faith and a shrewd investment alike, a wager on the idea that God acts in the here and now to reward those with both faith and a sufficiently developed work ethic.

Figures like Kenneth Hagin, his protégé Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, and, of course, Osteen himself built up individual followings: followings that often grew as a result of cross-promotion (something religious historian Kate Bowler points out in her excellent Blessed, a history of the prosperity gospel movement). One preacher might, for example, feature another at his conference, or hawk his cassette tapes.

Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”

These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during the Gilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

A final strand of the development of the prosperity gospel was the development of charismatic Pentecostal churches in America. An umbrella term for a decentralized group of churches — comprising over 700 denominations — Pentecostal churches are characterized by an emphasis on what is known as “spiritual gifts” (or charisms, from which the term “charismatic” is drawn). A worshipful Christian might experience, for example, the gift of healing, or might suddenly start speaking “in tongues.” This tradition of worship meant that, for a believer, the idea that God would manifest Himself to the faithful in concrete, miraculous ways in the here and now was more prevalent than it would be in, say, a mainline Episcopalian church. In addition, the decentralized nature of these churches also meant that individual leaders, many of whom practiced faith healing or similar practices, had a particularly strong effect on their congregations and could build up individual personal followings.

Thus, New Thought thinker Ralph Waldo Trine (not to be confused with Ralph Waldo Emerson) could exhort his readers to “See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition.”

The prosperity gospel is an umbrella term for a group of ideas — popular among charismatic preachers in the evangelical tradition — that equate Christian faith with material, and particularly financial, success. It has a long history in American culture, with figures like Osteen and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, glamorous, flashily-dressed televangelists whose Disneyland-meets-Bethlehem Christian theme park, Heritage USA, was once the third-most-visited site in America.

As Laura Turner notes in an excellent piece for BuzzFeed, no theological tradition is as rife for accusations of hypocrisy as the “prosperity gospel,” a distinctively American theological tradition. While it’s popular among many evangelical Protestants, it’s been condemned by many others. But to many of its critics, especially since the election of Donald Trump, this tradition has come to represent the worst of the conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and Republican party politics.

“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.” It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself.

As Austin Kleon notes, blogging is a great way to discover what you have to say. My microblog has given me a chance to have thoughts, and this longer blog has given me a space to figure out what it means–to discover what it is I have to say. In other words, my microblog is where I collect the raw materials; my blog is where I assemble them into questions and, perhaps, answers. It’s a place where I figure out what I really think.

I’ve enjoyed linkblogging. When I read something, I can share the link along with a quote or reflection on how it affected me. It’s a great space to think out loud.

This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.

Groups are great for brief bursts of humour or frustration, but, by their very nature, far less useful for supporting the circulation of public information. To understand why this is the case, we have to think about the way in which individuals can become swayed and influenced once they belong to a group.

But the business model that we now call surveillance capitalism put paid to that, which is why you should never post anything on Facebook without being prepared to face the algorithmic consequences.

Oh, and to be absolutely clear, every example that I know of a company trying to adopt the "pioneer - settler - town planner" structure without first getting their principles in a decent state has ... failed. Principles first. Org structure later. Culture, later still.

The only delegate who pounced on the three-fifths “compromise” was Massachusetts abo-litionist and future vice president Elbridge Gerry. “ Blacks are prop-erty, and are used [in the South] . . . as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of t he number of slaves, [rather] t han [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?”

Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “ They are at l east as brave, and more adven-turesome” than Whites, b ecause they lacked the forethought to s ee “danger t ill i t be present,” J efferson wrote. Africans f elt l ove more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That i s why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, J ef-ferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” I n Jefferson’s vivid imagination, l azy Blacks desiredto sleep more than Whites, but, as physical s avants, t hey required l ess sleep.

There are many psychological, social, and institutional reasons why people don’t reuse stuff. But they are all academic questions until we solve the simpler problem: our software sucks at reuse. Like, if you had an evil plan to stop reuse and remix you would build exactly the software we have now. If you wanted to really slow down remix, you would build the World Wide Web as we know it now.

When Casper filed its S-1 in January, analysts, investors, and business nerds descended on the document like vultures. Not only was it a precarious moment to take a startup public, it was the first time anyone could actually access the raw numbers under the hood of a DTC. “The economics work better if Casper sent you a mattress for free, stuffed with $300,” jabbed NYU Stern marketing professor and tech doomsayer Scott Galloway. “This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400. Sell at $1,000. Refund/return 20% of them. Keep $400, on avg. Then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT). Lose $160. Repeat.”

Months after achieving unicorn status by raising $100 million in funding at a $1.4 billion valuation, The Verge detailed allegations against the Instagrammy startup that its CEO Steph Korey had created a sweatshop culture within the company.

Perhaps the original mistake of the DTCs wasn’t in their vision, but in their decision to take the venture capital in the first place. Now under pressure to grow even faster and at greater scale than they otherwise would have had to naturally, they are being confronted with what happens when growth slows down, the cash starts running out, and investors are expecting their returns.

the past few months have exposed major cracks in the DTC business model, as several high-profile, venture-backed DTC startups have struggled and others have completely closed their doors. The investors bankrolling these companies are discovering one thing in common — that most of their money is going to expensive and ever-rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) via Google, Facebook, and Instagram. As one DTC investor has put it starkly before: “CAC is the new rent.”

Adam Smith, writing in 1790, said we can only expect real sympathy from real friends, not from mere acquaintances. More recently, in 1973, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter established as a bedrock of social network analysis the idea that we rely on “strong” ties (our inner circle) for support and weak ties (our acquaintances) for information.

The third reason is that in our moment of vulnerability, our need to talk is greater than our need to self-protect.

The second reason is that when we are dealing with something difficult, we commonly prefer to confide in people who have been through what we are going through rather than those who know us, seeking “cognitive empathy” over guaranteed warmth or closeness.

The first is that our closest relationships are our most complex ones.

Small says there are three reasons we might avoid those closest to us when we are grappling with problems about our health, relationships, work, or kids.

The biggest drawback of algorithmic feeds is that you might be looking at irrelevant content. When you see something on your timeline and want to comment, you will have to check the timestamp to see if your comment is still relevant or not.

Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power — and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive.

When we talk about political media, we tend to cut a sharp line between the political elites who create the media and the audience that consumes it. But that’s a mistake. No one consumes more political, and politicized, media than political elites. This is part of the reason political media has an enormous effect on politics, even though only a small fraction of the country regularly consumes it.

This is a damning result: The more political media you absorb, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

If you have never seen an ice-hockey stick (or experienced ice hockey) this shape is why we call these figures ‘hockey-stick curves’.

Of course, it’s even more absurd to expect Facebook or Twitter or Youtube to know and act on every word or image on their services than it was to expect bookseller Eleazer Smith to know the naughty bits in every book on his shelves.

"boomerspeak"

In 2010, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked two dozen scholars “What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?” I wrote that Facebook would end up having more users than the population of China, and that giant social networks, with their madding crowds, would provoke a reaction: Just as the global expansion of fast food begat the slow-food movement, the next decade will see a “slow information” counterrevolution focused on restoring individual thought and creativity. And here we are a decade later, and we’re still hoping for the same thing. Maybe next decade?

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Dewey argues against the longstanding Platonic bias of epistemology: “We tend to think of it [knowledge] after the model of a spectator viewing a finished picture rather than after that of the artist producing the painting.” It’s this spectator bias that explains why we don’t routinely recognize the knowledge embodied in our hands – sewing, cooking, caring for a baby or an elder, welding  – especially when that activity gets our hands dirty.5

of power, let’s consider another type of annotation, written by a single author, and in response to a very different though equally important social and political circumstance.PoetryMaha Bali2 weeks agoAt this point, a thought crossed my mind related to Audrey Watters feeling like she did not want annotation to happen on her own website (but is happy to have it done outside her website if people wanted). I wonder if there is any value in unpacking that one here? Perhaps. perhaps not.

I wonder why Dave doesn’t interact on micro.blog?

This is why annotation matters.

This is why annotation matters.

Building a new analytics dashboard to highlight social metrics in addition to traditional web traffic is a an option for those publishers with the technical staff to undertake such a project. This type of integrated dashboard can help get newsroom staff excited about embracing new platforms. It’s also valuable for editors to see that even though a video received 2,000 views within a web article, that same video reached over 2 million on Facebook.

Ah for a decent world wide blog posts search engine.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Path did indeed succeed in becoming the anti-Facebook: a network without enough users. Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be.

Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects. In essence, some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.

It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer.

The creation of a successful status game is so mysterious that it often smacks of alchemy. For that reason, entrepreneurs who succeed in this space are thought of us a sort of shaman, perhaps because most investors are middle-aged white men who are already so high status they haven't the first idea why people would seek virtual status

I can reliably predict when features get added and bugs squashed. I may not know that with WordPress.

Digital sociology needs more big theory as well as testable theory.

Digital sociology needs more big theory as well as testable theory.

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), a popular explanation of why violence has declined, relies heavily on Norbert Elias’s Undead Text The Civilizing Process (1939) for many of its key ideas. Elias himself, however, developed the ideas original to him in the way scholars do: He immersed himself in primary sources, familiarized himself with the scholarly literature, and forged a new narrative of cultural history.

Engelbart insisted that effective intellectual augmentation was always realized within a system, and that any intervention intended to accelerate intellectual augmentation must be understood as an intervention in a system. And while at many points the 1962 report emphasizes the individual knowledge worker, there is also the idea of sharing the context of one’s work (an idea Vannevar Bush had also described in “As We May Think”), the foundation of Engelbart’s lifelong view that a crucial way to accelerate intellectual augmentation was to think together more comprehensively and effectively. One might even rewrite Engelbart’s words above to say, “We do not speak of isolated clever individuals with knowledge of particular domains. We refer to a way of life in an integrated society where poets, musicians, dreamers, and visionaries usefully co-exist with engineers, scientists, executives, and governmental leaders.” Make your own list.

A prerequisite for war, as well as bigotry, is that one sees a people or a country as a stereotype, as something sub-human or non-human; this is why politicians spend so much time trying to create stereotypical images for those countries they want to go to war with.

I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”—like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carrying groceries or walking long distances—and their repertoire of pro-test, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.

enrolled

While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Then Facebook went on the offensive. Mr. Kaplan prevailed on Ms. Sandberg to promote Kevin Martin, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman and fellow Bush administration veteran, to lead the company’s American lobbying efforts. Facebook also expanded its work with Definers.

Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

Still, 43 percent approval leaves a majority of Americans disapproving. In political terms, 57 percent represents a winning issue. There is no question most Americans feel that there’s something wrong about porn; it’s barred at workplaces and unwelcome in polite company. In polls its acceptability registers lower than other hot-button culture issues like abortion, gay marriage and legal pot. So why won’t anyone in government go after it?

He believed that the reason why non-Arabs were accepted as part of Arab society was due to their mastery of the Arabic language.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

variability amongst males

I know why textbook companies are closed. They want to make money.

After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellery as well as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all of the pro-fascist movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army withered after the war.

For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.

And both books help explain so much more than Trump. #MeToo. White nationalism. Hindu nationalism. Black Lives Matter. Campus debates about privilege and appropriation. Syria. Islamism. The spread of populism and retreat of democracy worldwide. The rise of the far right in Europe. The rise of the far left in the United States. All these phenomena throb with questions of identity, of “Who am I?” and “To what do I belong?”

Disposable assignments are the ones students hate to do, faculty hate to grade and are quickly forgotten. Think ten-page term papers.

So with the question of Alex Jones or holocaust deniers, internet platforms (again) have every right to kick them off their platforms.

identity why do teens seem strange online?292privacy why do youth share so publicly?543addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media?774danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere?1005bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?1286inequality can social media resolve social divisions?1537literacy are today’s youth digital natives?1768searching for a public of their own199