the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet... doesn’t serve people... it’s not designed to... “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result…

Where things get interesting is to consider the deep cognitive mechanisms that shape the emergence of truth networks where a coherent shared set of understandings, assumptions, and beliefs are in play.

Fake news has been around as long as real news...  Social media has certainly transformed how fake news circulates, speeding up its circulation and extending its reach and impact...  a much more important problem ... is the continuing delegitimization of real news by American conservatives...  This is not “fake news.” It is a blatantly ideolog…

deep learning... is the reason we’re on the brink of a more general intelligence... essentially one algorithm (with many minor variants) that can adjust its own structure to solve a problem, directly from whatever massively large data set you feed it... we’re seeing extremely narrow systems right now is because they’re extremely useful... we are …

more than a dozen others on both sides of the gun debate ... agreed to meet face-to-face, tell each other their stories, and try to understand one another’s points of view, in an experiment in radical empathy ... Statistics and argument make no dent in fixed opinions: Each side, incredulous, regards the other as sectarians who’ve somehow got thei…

Italy’s antitrust chief has called for EU member states to set up a network of public agencies to combat fake news... “it is not the job of a private entity to control information. This is historically the job of public powers.

battles for both livestreaming and 360 video are underway ... YouTube is leading the way, as anyone can currently live stream in 360, but only if they have special encoder software ... Facebook ... aiming to allow normal profiles to easily broadcast from a 360 mobile device without desktop software.

The privations of the past decade and a half have unleashed nothing if not a stream of flimsy would-be innovations... as a public service, we offer this starter list of Media-Innovation-Don’ts.

Americans almost always think that the year coming to a close is the worst... Many misunderstand how the world is changing or ignore positive change... Surveys from long before 2016 — the era before the world turned “post-factual” — show the same levels of ignorance. .. There are several reasons for this...structure of the media means negative sub…

THE WASHINGTON POST on Friday reported a genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system...media reactions... were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations ... It did not happen. There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” ... The level of groupthink, fearmongering, coercive p…

as we jump to fix the fake news problem, we may end up destroying our best hope to break through our echo chambers... those bubbles, it turns out, are far from airtight... 15-25 percent of the people we connect to on social media, on average, come from across the political divide... the level of diversity we come across in real life homophily is…

It’s not about bots. It’s not about artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing ... It’s about solving a problem for your customer... Stop building bots, start building experiences... Nobody uses and returns to your product or service because it’s a bot, an app, or a website. They return because you’re s…

GROW is ... one of the tools Google uses to teach managers about coaching conversations. This model stresses the importance of adapting and flexing coaching styles based on the team member’s needs and receptiveness.

As IoT grows, the need for distributed computing becomes an absolute necessity... fog computing, distributed AI and parallel stream processing... both data and compute-intensive, and they don’t cope well with centralized infrastructure... A distributed network of computers managed by blockchain and smart contracts can create a shared economy wher…

All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed ... if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster... if you are among the growing ranks of t…

the 'Try Before You Fly' scheme ... generated flights and hotel bookings of over $17,000 and a 40% return on investment... a 190% uplift in New York excursions proving how this technology captures the imagination of travelers.

Shitposters, who are bound by nothing, set a rhetorical trap for their enemies, who tend to be bound by having an actual point. Attempts to analyze what shitposters are doing... reinforces their project by amplifying their signal... hitposters resemble the disengaged ironists ... Søren Kierkegaard discussed ... Stories ... are not descriptive of …

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

real dialogue seems to have given way to parallel monologues, paired with an inability to actively listen... Rhetoric teaches the art of using persuasive tools... resolving disagreement through measured agreeable discussion, known as the dialectic method... In 1922... "communication can by itself create a community". This early definition was clo…

Forty-four percent of people shown a native ad couldn’t correctly identify the company that had paid for it... 54% ... indicated that they had felt deceived by native advertising before. And 77% ... didn’t even identify native ads as “advertising... I guess they co-created it, so I guess maybe that’s not an ad.”

a fascinating inquiry into how our subjective experience of time’s passage shapes everything from our emotional memory to our sense of self....the disorienting sense that time isn’t something which happens to us — rather, we are time.... Distracted by the obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of ourselves…... loss of contact …

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

many leading physicists now consider space-time and gravity to be “emergent” phenomena: Bendy, curvy space-time and the matter within it are a hologram that arises out of a network of entangled qubits... space-time really is just a geometrical representation of the entanglement structure of these underlying quantum systems

One of the primary reasons to get teams together has to do with the hardwiring of the human brain... Building trust is a multisensory experience... Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult t…

many consumers perceive them as scams because they don’t understand that the message/post is actually paid for by the brand... the buyer feels betrayed. This reflects poorly not only on the brand but the publisher as well... The only technique ... is marking native ads. However, due to the very nature of these units, the ‘markings’ are very subtl…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

It’s easier than ever to spread misinformation.... social media tools are, after all, just that: tools.... fake news has been with us, in different guises, since long before anyone ever had the chance to tweet it.

... no one has direct access to reality. The real world is nearly impossible to see in this maelstrom ... because human minds need to “construct” their own version of reality — and each of us does this within a community of shared experiences and beliefs... there are many social worlds and each is built on its own version of what is real and true.…

the idea that fake news was central to the outcome of the campaign has little basis in fact... it’s mostly likely to be shared by people who have already bought into a partisan or ideological worldview... Clinton’s campaign ... problem was ... coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to…

if publishers disagree with their labels they’ll have to take it up with the third-parties... won’t receive any payment from Facebook, but may get a traffic and branding boost from the debunk post links... Facebook is still working on better classifiers to automatically detect fake news, and preventing fake news from appearing as “Related Article…