They make up a quarter of all tweets, but at long last someone has found a way to turn them off…
Category: Read
👓 Audience Doesn’t Matter | Bill Ferriter
Similar to several other mantras I’ve seen recently by various bloggers. Most of them have essentially said that they write to test out ideas, to stretch their thinking, to try to find additional clarity in what they’re contemplating. This takes a slightly different tack, but is roughly the same thesis.
👓 Robert P. Langlands Is Awarded the Abel Prize, a Top Math Honor | New York Times
👓 Changes to Improve Your Instagram Feed | Instagram
👓 The Missing Building Blocks of the Web | Anil Dash – Medium
At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible.
Though the world wide web has been around for more than a quarter century, people have been theorizing about hypertext and linked documents and a global network of apps for at least 75 years, and perhaps longer. And while some of those ideas are now obsolete, or were hopelessly academic as concepts, or seem incredibly obvious in a world where we’re all on the web every day, the time is perfect to revisit a few of the overlooked gems from past eras. Perhaps modern versions of these concepts could be what helps us rebuild the web into something that has the potential, excitement, and openness that got so many of us excited about it in the first place.
I wish that when he pivoted from ThinkUp he’d moved towards building an open platform for helping to fix the problem. He’s the sort of thinker and creator we could use working directly on this problem.
I do think he’d have a bit more gravitas if he were writing this on his own website though instead of on Medium.
References
👓 All the URLs you need to block to *actually* stop using Facebook | Quartz
👓 Trump’s Embarrassing Bluster | The Atlantic
👓 Theranos CEO Holmes and former president Balwani charged with massive fraud | CNBC
👓 The Google News Initiative: Building a stronger future for news | Google
There’s a lot of puffery rhetoric here to make Google look more like an arriving hero, but I’d recommend taking with more than a few grains of salt.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online.
we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals.
I’m curious what their internal projections are for ROI?
People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.
Heavy hit in light of the Facebook data scandal this week on top of accusations about fake news spreading.
That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.
Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die.
Reference: How Facebook is Killing Comedy
we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.
Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?
We worked with the industry to launch the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to improve the mobile web
There was some collaborative outreach, but AMP is really a Google-driven spec without significant outside input.
See also: http://ampletter.org/
We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.
Interestingly the technology here isn’t that different than the Facebook Data that Cambridge Analytica was using, the difference is that they’re not using it to directly impact politics, but to drive sales. Does this mean they’re more “ethical”?
With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web.
Is this sentence’s structure explicitly saying that AMP is not “open web”?!
👓 Introducing Subscribe with Google | Google
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Paying for a subscription is a clear indication that you value and trust your subscribed publication as a source. So we’ll also highlight those sources across Google surfaces
So Subscribe with Google will also allow you to link subscriptions purchased directly from publishers to your Google account—with the same benefits of easier and more persistent access.
you can then use “Sign In with Google” to access the publisher’s products, but Google does the billing, keeps your payment method secure, and makes it easy for you to manage your subscriptions all in one place.
I immediately wonder who owns my related subscription data? Is the publisher only seeing me as a lumped Google proxy or do they get may name, email address, credit card information, and other details?
How will publishers be able (or not) to contact me? What effect will this have on potential customer retention?
👓 Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook | Facebook Newsroom
👓 Former FBI No.2 McCabe fired; claims he is being targeted | Reuters
👓 Mutating DNA caught on film | Science | AAAS
Study in bacteria shows how regularly DNA changes and how few of those changes are deadly
This is a rather cool little experiment.
h/t to @moorejh via Twitter:
Mutating #DNA caught on film https://t.co/UyUbPQsDY2 #genomics pic.twitter.com/Em3degXUWU
— Jason H. Moore, PhD (@moorejh) March 16, 2018
Bookmarked on March 16, 2018 at 12:15PM
👓 G. W. Peck | Wikipedia
G. W. Peck is a pseudonymous attribution used as the author or co-author of a number of published mathematics academic papers. Peck is sometimes humorously identified with George Wilbur Peck, a former governor of the US state of Wisconsin. Peck first appeared as the official author of a 1979 paper entitled "Maximum antichains of rectangular arrays". The name "G. W. Peck" is derived from the initials of the actual writers of this paper: Ronald Graham, Douglas West, George B. Purdy, Paul Erdős, Fan Chung, and Daniel Kleitman. The paper initially listed Peck's affiliation as Xanadu, but the editor of the journal objected, so Ron Graham gave him a job at Bell Labs. Since then, Peck's name has appeared on some sixteen publications, primarily as a pseudonym of Daniel Kleitman.
👓 Waterman’s egg | Lior Pachter
The egg of Columbus is an apocryphal tale about ideas that seem trivial after the fact. The story originates from the book “History of the New World” by Girolamo Benzoni, who wrote that Columbus, upon upon being told that his journey to the West Indies was unremarkable and that Spain “would not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same” had he not undertaken the journey, replied “Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all.” They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end”
Almost every business management book I’ve read has felt like something obvious, but I’m not quite sure how difficult they may have been for others to have written.
A more interesting class of these problems are magician’s tricks, which once explained are almost painfully obvious. Perhaps this is why the class of magicians swear themselves to secrecy? Once the trick is revealed, there’s no more magic, so to keep the illusion, one doesn’t reveal them.