Newly released emails have renewed questions about who the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, was representing when she met with top Trump campaign officials promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Month: April 2018
👓 DNA blunder creates phantom serial killer | The Independent
She was a mysterious serial killer known as the "The Woman Without a Face" and detectives across Europe spent more than 15 years doing their utmost to bring her to justice for at least six brutal murders and a string of break-ins. Yesterday, however, they were forced to admit that she probably didn't exist.
Interesting to be reading this article after just having read two articles about the DNA-related discovery of the Golden State Killer.
👓 The first step in finding Golden State Killer suspect: Finding his great-great-great-grandparents on genealogy site | LA Times
The clue that led investigators this week to the door of the suspected Golden State Killer came from an unexpected source: GEDmatch.com — an amateur genealogy website that’s something like the Wikipedia of DNA.
👓 How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer | The Atlantic
Powerful tools are now available to anyone who wants to look for a DNA match, which has troubling privacy implications.
I find this mechanics relating to privacy in this case to be extremely similar to Facebook’s leak of data via Cambridge Analytica. Something crucial to your personal identity can be accidentally leaked out or be made discoverable to others by the actions of your closest family members.
👓 Customer acquisition on social media — with your own data | Marketing Land
Marketing Land is a daily, must-read site for CMOs, digital marketing executives and advertising campaign managers.
👓 Navigating Campus For The ‘Not Rich’: Students Launch A Crowdsourced Guide | NPR
University of Michigan students Griffin St. Onge and Lauren Schandevel have published an online guide that anybody can edit called "Being Not Rich at UM." It's a Google Doc about navigating the costs of college that has grown to more than 80 pages.
The two juniors were inspired to create the guidebook after their student government published its own guide about "cost-effective" living at the university, which St. Onge, a first generation college student, found out-of-touch. Its suggestions included skipping weekly manicures and opting to do your own laundry instead of using a service.
"I didn't really realize the culture of Michigan before coming here," she says. "I had been warned about it a little bit, but I had never met the kind of wealth that some of the students have here by the time I came to university."
Schandevel and St. Onge decided to take matters into their own hands.
This is the first kind of financial aid that schools should be providing… It’s not that difficult and is a simple resource to open source and advertise widely. For first generation and low income students I imagine that it’s the type of resource that they should put into acceptance packages to improve their yields. In fact, honestly, it’s the type of resource that students of all income levels should be given to help make them better and more rounded students and people.
🔖 Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text by Nir Grinberg
Nir Grinberg (dl.acm.org)Prior work established the benefits of server-recorded user engagement measures (e.g. clickthrough rates) for improving the results of search engines and recommendation systems. Client-side measures of post-click behavior received relatively little attention despite the fact that publishers have now the ability to measure how millions of people interact with their content at a fine resolution using client-side logging. In this study, we examine patterns of user engagement in a large, client-side log dataset of over 7.7 million page views (including both mobile and non-mobile devices) of 66,821 news articles from seven popular news publishers. For each page view we use three summary statistics: dwell time, the furthest position the user reached on the page, and the amount of interaction with the page through any form of input (touch, mouse move, etc.). We show that simple transformations on these summary statistics reveal six prototypical modes of reading that range from scanning to extensive reading and persist across sites. Furthermore, we develop a novel measure of information gain in text to capture the development of ideas within the body of articles and investigate how information gain relates to the engagement with articles. Finally, we show that our new measure of information gain is particularly useful for predicting reading of news articles before publication, and that the measure captures unique information not available otherwise.
Bookmarked to read as result of reading The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones).
[.pdf] copy available on author’s site.
👓 The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) | Nieman Lab
New metrics specifically for news articles.
I love that there’s research1 going on in this area and it portends some potentially great things for reading, but the devil’s advocate in me can also see a lot of adtech people salivating over the potential dark patterns lurking in such research. I can almost guarantee that Facebook is salivating over this, though to be honest, they’ve really pioneered the field haven’t they, just in a much smaller area of use. Of course I’m also curious if they did or are planning any research in how people read content on social media?
I wonder what it would look/feel like to take each of these modalities and apply them individually for long periods of time to everything one read? Or to use them in rotation regardless of the subject being read? Or other permutations? I suppose in general I like to read how I like to read, but now I’m going to be more conscious of what and how I’m doing it all.
References
1.
Grinberg N. Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text. WWW ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3186180. Published April 23, 2018. Accessed April 27, 2018.
👓 It’s Time to Unlock The Web | Julien Genestoux – Medium
The web needs a better business model — and we believe the technology is finally here to do it.
I like the general idea behind this and Julien Genestoux is certainly someone to take seriously… but blockchain?! really?? I can’t wait to see what comes of it.
👓 Gmail’s biggest redesign is now live | The Verge
Snoozing, nudging, hover actions, and a new sidebar — it’s a mobile app on the web!
I’ve been using gmail for about 2 years now and am curious to see what this delivers though I do have to admit I’m itching to going back to my old methods of owning may own email and data.
👓 MoviePass is no longer too good to be true | The Verge
Restrictions and no longer selling its one-movie-per-day plan, are bad signs
Sad to hear this is happening. Hopefully they can hang along to get the expected economies of scale they were aiming to get before they go under. Of course, somehow the market is going to equilibrate on them.
👓 Aaron Sorkin has been given the go-ahead for a West Wing revival | Radio Times
But will the original cast return to the White House?
👓 Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In | BuzzFeed
Verified accounts turning themselves into bots, millions of fake likes and comments, a dirty world of engagement trading inside Telegram groups. Welcome to the secret underbelly of Instagram.
Eventually there will be so much noise on these platforms that they will cease to have any meaning for the business purposes that people are intending to use them for.
Worse, they’re giving away their login credentials to outsiders to do this.
👓 How teachers can support students during Ramadan | PBS
If students have the right accommodations and support from teachers and their peers during Ramadan, it can turn a challenging month into the most rewarding.
👓 Keeping track of how you discovered books | Matt Maldre
Goodreads has a poll asking about where you heard about the previous book you read. Here are the results: I voted for “blog post” because I heard about “Shape of Design” from Craig Mod’s post “Hack the Cover.” Although I had to think about it for awhile, because I read a bunch of books at …