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.
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 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.
👓 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 …
👓 OER 18: Reclaim Video & Cloudron | Lauren Brumfield
Now that I’m on the tail end of this trip, I feel like I can finally wrap my head around the last 10 days and gather my thoughts for a blog post. Last week, the Reclaim team met in Bristol for the OER 18 Conference. The entire experience was definitely a mix of ups and downs, but that’s not a result of OER’s doing; I got sick and had to back out of the second day of the conference & my presentation slot. (Ugh, talk about timing.) It was a huge bummer to prepare so hard for something to then not have a chance to share it, but I’m incredibly grateful to be apart of such a solid team that was able to step in for me. Apparently, they rocked the house!
👓 Large Cache of Texts May Offer Insight Into One of Africa’s Oldest Written Languages | Smithsonian Magazine
Archaeologists in Sudan have uncovered the largest assemblage of Meroitic inscriptions to date
This is a cool discovery, in great part because their documentation was interesting enough to be able to suggest further locations to check for more archaeological finds. This might also be something one could apply some linguistic analysis and information theory to in an attempt to better pull apart the language and grammar.
h/t to @ArtsJournalNews, bookmarked on April 17, 2018 at 08:16AM
Trove Of Inscriptions In Sub-Saharan Africa’s Oldest Written Language Discovered:
“Archaeologists in Sudan have uncovered a large cache of rare stone inscriptions at the Sedeinga necropolis along the Nile River. The collection of funerary texts are ins… https://t.co/8qb3gkkpsa
— ArtsJournal (@ArtsJournalNews) April 17, 2018
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Fired Over an Instagram Post | New York Times
The dismissal of a professional cheerleader has drawn attention to the sports industry, which seemed to be operating outside the #MeToo movement. Until now, that is.
Holy crap! Radicals in the US decry Sharia law as making its way into our system–little did they know that it has apparently taken root within the NFL first. I always thought the whole professional cheerleader bit was horrible and generally pathetic from a broader social perspective, but with the types of workplace repression and environment cheerleaders are apparently working within, prostitution almost sounds like a Sunday picnic. Given what they do for the NFL and what they go through to have their jobs in the first place, I’m appalled that they’re making minimum wage–or less really since very little of their wardrobe and direct needs are covered by the organization.
There are a myriad number of additional social reasons to do so, but I’m going to boycott the NFL until they can manage to remedy this kind of toxic environment.