How to catch a catfisher | Technology | The Guardian
When Max Benwell found out someone was using his photos to approach women online, he decided to track down the trickster – setting up a fake Instagram account and changing his gender on Tinder along the way
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge
Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing. Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor. The NDAs are also meant to prevent contractors from sharing Facebook users’ personal information with the outside world, at a time of intense scrutiny over data privacy issues. But the secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions, moderators told me. They are pressured not to discuss the emotional toll that their job takes on them, even with loved ones, leading to increased feelings of isolation and anxiety. No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do. And for the 1,000 people like Chloe moderating content for Facebook at the Phoenix site, and for 15,000 content reviewers around the world, today is just another day at the office.
Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.
You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook. - WSJ
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. FB 1.42% The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed. It is already known that many smartphone apps send information to Facebook about when users open them, and sometimes what they do inside. Previously unreported is how at least 11 popular apps, totaling tens of millions of downloads, have also been sharing sensitive data entered by users. The findings alarmed some privacy experts who reviewed the Journal’s testing.
[Essay] The Story of Storytelling | Harper's Magazine
What the hidden relationships of ancient folktales reveal about their evolution—and our own. In many ways, stories are uncannily similar to living organisms. They seem to have their own interests. They compel us to share them and, once told, they begin to grow and change, often becoming longer and more elaborate. They compete with one another for our attention—for the opportunity to reach as many minds as possible. They find each other, intermingle, and multiply.
New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators | Technology | The Guardian
The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.
Everyone from Kurt Vonnegut to Ernest Hemingway has shared his ideas on crafting solid narrative writing. One of the most recent sages to join the canon is Emma Coates, Pixar’s former story artist. Her list of the 22 Rules of Good Storytelling gleaned on the job has been gaining Internet traction since it was published last June.
How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else) » Nieman Journalism Lab
Freelancing is tough! It can be an unpredictable, unreliable grind, and sometimes things fall through even if you’ve done everything right. As Smarter Living editor at The New York Times, the bulk of my job is working with freelancers. On the slowest days, I’ll get around a dozen cold pitches in my inbox; on busy days, almost 200. (Lol sorry if I owe you an email, promise I’m working on it.) The thousands of pitches I’ve read over the last few years usually fall into one of three categories: great (very few), something we can work with (a small, but decent, amount) and bad (everything else).
Stop Trusting Viral Videos – The Atlantic – Medium
A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.
The Goldsmith's Daughter | Alchemy Game by Gossamer Games
You’re immersed in mid-17th century London. Evenings are spent meddling in society's secret; exploring the intersection of science, culture, & history. It's an Age of Alchemy.
Please join Data & Society for this talk by Shoshana Zuboff based on her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Surveillance capitalism arrived on the scene with democracy already on the ropes, its early life sheltered and nourished by neoliberalism’s claims to freedom that set it at a distance from the lives of people. Surveillance capitalists quickly learned to exploit the gathering momentum aimed at hollowing out democracy’s meaning and muscle. Despite the democratic promise of its rhetoric and capabilities, it contributed to a new Gilded Age of extreme wealth inequality, as well as to once-unimaginable new forms of economic exclusivity and new sources of social inequality that separate “the tuners” from “the tuned.” Among the many insults to democracy and democratic institutions imposed by this coup des gens, Zuboff counts the unauthorized expropriation of private human experience; the hijack of the division of learning in society; the structural independence from people; the top-down imposition of the hive collective; the rise of instrumentarian power and radical indifference that together sustain its extractive logic; the construction, ownership, and operation of the means of behavior modification that is Big Other; the abrogation of the natural right to the future tense and the natural right to sanctuary; the degradation of the self-determining individual as the crucible of democratic life; and the insistence on psychic numbing as the answer to its illegitimate quid pro quo.
Transforming the First Ten Minutes of Class – Heinemann Publishing – Medium
So what’s it been like? Does transformative sound like too strong of a word? I’ve been blown away by how reading for the first ten minutes of class has quickly become the norm in our routine. Most days I don’t even need to remind them. One skeptical colleague worried, “Ten minutes is a lot of class time,” but I’ve swapped those ten minutes for the small talk (How about those Red Sox? What’d you do this weekend?) and nagging reminders to put phones away or stop talking or take your homework out. They come in, they take their books out, and they read.
My phone has more friends than me. It talks to more peers (computers) than the number of human beings I talk on an average. In this age of smartphones and mobile apps for A-Z things, we are dependent on these technologies. However, at the same time, we don’t know much of what is going on in the computers equipped with powerful cameras, GPS device, microphone we are carrying all the time. All these apps are talking to their respective servers (or can we call them masters?), but, there is no easy way to track them. These questions bothered me for a long time: I wanted to see the servers my phone is connecting to, and I want to block those connections as I wish. However, I never managed to work on this. A few weeks ago, I finally sat down to start working to build up a system by reusing already available open source projects and tools to create the system, which will allow me to track what my phone is doing. Maybe not in full details, but, at least shed some light on the network traffic from the phone.
Best practices for community engagement – Raph's Website
I’ve written endless words on this in the past, but sometimes you just need a cheat sheet. Particularly these days when people who aren’t community professionals find themselves on the front lines out of business necessity or just because of the nature of social media. So here’s just a quick set of advice for those who find themselves speaking to members of their user community.
The Power of Not Retweeting – Douglas Rushkoff – Medium
If anything, we’re living in a media landscape where whoever can most convincingly put words to the picture, wins this sick and mutually destructive game. Are those refugees? No, they’re terrorists. No, actually, they’re rapists. Whoever names the meme, wins the meme. And the winner is most often determined by who can come up with the most emotionally resonant frame — which may have nothing to do with reality. That’s why we can’t respond intelligently or compassionately to photos on a news feed. We can only react — impulsively and usually prejudicially. This is raw footage. We were not there. It may be compelling to look at — particularly if it triggers our knowledge of real racism, oppression, and violence. But this is also why we have real journalists, on the ground, skilled at investigating a story and determining what happened — so we don’t have to rush to judgment. So what if I don’t find out about what happened until an hour later? Tweeting one’s outrage is not real activism, anyway. It’s really just a form of social signaling. Doing so without even knowing anything about the scene we’re commenting on is just adding noise. Worse, it becomes good evidence that whatever side you’re on is just as guilty of disinformation and rushing to judgment as the trolls.
Terms And Conditions May Apply examines the cost of so-called 'free' services and the continuing disappearance of online privacy. People may think they know what they give up when they click 'I Agree' on companies like Facebook and Google. They're wrong.
Marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s seminal work, Frankenstein AI: a monster made by many reimagines the Frankenstein narrative, recasting Shelley's creature as a naive, emotionally aware, and highly intelligent “life form” - an artificial intelligence.A multi-year research project, Frankenstein AI challenges commonly dystopian narratives around artificial intelligence, and seeks to provoke and broaden conversation around the trajectory of this rapidly emerging technology.Beginning with the Sundance Film Festival this past January and over the course of next two years, we’ll invite the public into our process as collaborators through an evolving series of activations and experiences both online and off, that will traverse immersive theatre, browser-based interactions, community design, and other performative and experiential media.
Technology and Distracted Students: A Modest Proposal – The Tattooed Professor
Who can be against students learning more effectively, by which I mean scoring higher on exams delivered in contrived studies, if we have the means to facilitate doing so? Whose side are you on: order or anarchy? Since previous generations of students were all raptly attentive and appropriately docile in our lecture halls, and Kids These Days™ aren’t, we should ask ourselves what’s changed, knowing full well the answer is the internet. If we remove this contagion, the disease of distracted students, staring zombie-like at their screens instead of staring zombie-like at the professor on the stage thirty rows away, will be cured. The only question is why should we stop there? The potential student-distractors in our classrooms are legion. If, in the service of better learning for all, we are going to eliminate distraction, let’s do it right.
Shoshana Zuboff's new book on “surveillance capitalism” emphasizes the former at the expense of the latter. IN A SERIES of remarkably prescient articles, the first of which was published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the summer of 2013, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to an alarming phenomenon: the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models turned data into gold, favoring further expansion. Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its problems. The general public, seduced by the tech world’s youthful, hoodie-wearing ambassadors and lobotomized by TED Talks, was clueless. Zuboff saw a logic to this digital mess; tech firms were following rational—and terrifying—imperatives. To attack them for privacy violations was to miss the scale of the transformation—a tragic miscalculation that has plagued much of the current activism against Big Tech.
How much do you love online content? So much you pay for everything you can? Or do you, like the overwhelming majority of internet users, accept advertising and tracking as a way of life? The adage goes “if you’re not paying you’re the product,” and in the internet services and media era, this is truer than ever. Finding out who and what is tracking you isn’t easy, but there are a number of sites and browser extensions that give you a little more clarity. Here are some of the best.
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of the PDP-11/70. Introduced in 1975, the 11/70 was top of the line in the famed PDP-11 range, and the very last system with a proper front panel. Tragically, DEC field service often removed the front panel in a later upgrade, leaving us staring at dull blank panels ever since.. The PiDP-11 wants to bring back the experience of PDP-11 Blinkenlights, with its pretty 1970s Rose & Magenta color scheme. On a more modest (living room compatible) scale 6:10, with faithfully reproduced case and switches.
Teaching Our Way to Digital Equity - Educational Leadership
How can educators ensure that technology-rich learning experiences aren't restricted to the most privileged students? Two major findings stand out from the past 50 years of research on educational technology. First, when teachers get access to new technologies, they typically use them to extend existing practices. Tablet computers replace notebooks, smartboards function like overhead projectors, learning management systems are used to distribute digital worksheets. Attewell's cautions from 2001 ring true today: "[There is a] real possibility that computing for already-disadvantaged children may be dominated by games at home and unsupervised drill-and-practice or games at school, while affluent children enjoy educationally richer fare with more adult involvement."
Responsive Iframes with One Great CSS Trick - Theodo
Nowadays, more and more people use their phones to navigate the web. It is therefore even more important now for websites to be responsive. Most websites use YouTube videos, Google maps or other external website elements embedded in them. These functions are most commonly incorporated in a web page using the html iframe element and is one of the trickiest thing to make responsive. I have struggled for a long time to get my YouTube videos to keep their ratio on different screen sizes. When testing my website on a smartphone, I would spend hours trying to figure out why my videos did not do what I expected… Until I finally discovered a great CSS trick that I can apply to all my iframes. Play with the size of the screen to see the responsive iframe at work. I can’t wait to share this trick with you in the following article.
Classroom Management: Simon Sinek, ClassDojo, and the Nostalgia Industry - Los Angeles Review of Books
As a teacher, I dream of schools without surveillance, armed guards, and ClassDojo. What a relief it would be to attend Shermer High School, the setting of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985), a place without biometric locks or behavior-controlling apps, where the only worry is whether your peers will accept you, not whether you’re being watched by closed-circuit television, and where police officers don’t tackle students to the ground. These schools, of course, are only representations. They never existed. But they symbolize a burning desire among many to drop out of the present and enroll in the past. An entire nostalgia industry has taken shape under the shadow of our deadening control society, where solutions to social problems involve increased monitoring, and public figures teach the gospel of corporate speak as the means to achieve personal fulfillment. In reaction, the nostalgia industry repackages representations of pre-9/11 pop culture and makes a killing in the process. But this business model is a predominantly regressive reaction to living in a society buttressed by a lucrative surveillance economy and plagued with rampant social anxiety, depression, and loneliness — all disorders that, according to Sinek, are caused in some part by social media.
How to hack your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition tech | WIRED UK
Use of facial recognition tech is on the rise, but how do you get away from it? 3D-printed face masks, makeup, infrared lights, and complex patterns are being used to dodge its all-seeing eye
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