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What's the Latest Development? Recent class action lawsuits and settlements against major social media sites highlight some of the big problems with typical terms-of-service contracts and the customer's understanding of them. In response, writer Ari Melber, law professor Woodrow Hartzog, and ...
One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. And one of the terrible things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. A lot of people don’t have anything worth listening to, and so sifting through that and finding a way to determine the signal out of all ...
I think it’s important to have people who inspire people to think. But it’s really, really bad to have gurus who you look for the answer from because I think the key is, you want to question authority for yourself. So to the extent that an Einstein gets people to want to open the black box ...
I’m actually fairly despairing about the times we live in on many levels. I think there’s more shame in being poor than there ever was. I think we also have a cultural dynamic of blaming the victim: if you’re poor and you’re struggling, you’ve fallen out of the race, then there’s something ...
Commencement speeches are this weird kind of product. You're about to go outside the bubble and I'm going to give you the last bit of magic, and the magic falls flat often. But sometimes it sticks. So if your school didn't have a good one, you can find a lot of them online. For instance, Steve ...
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So writes Tolstoy in the famous opening lines to Anna Karenina. It is well then that Bruce Feiler offers 200 new ideas on how to make a happier family in his new book, The Secrets of Happy Families. Of course, nobody ...
What really matters in an art education? Do we teach every child to paint or sculpt? Do we school them in names and dates and places? Or do we somehow teach them the elusive and dangerous “truth” of what art is or should be? Jean-Francois Laguionie’s animated film The Painting (Le Tableau) ...
What's the Latest Development? Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang, graduate students working in the Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, have designed a textile that is not only water-repelling but self-draining. It's a combination of a hydrophobic fabric and water ...
Imagine you have a friend who, like many high-achieving people, has a goal. In the service of that goal, your friend eats very little and ends up looking like skin on bone. It is through fasting and reflection that we know God; or, if you prefer, it is through this hunger strike that we can express ...
What's the Latest Development? At last weekend's 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire, pediatrician and pain researcher Amy Baxter gave a lecture on Buzzy, a bee-shaped device she created that, when applied to a patient who's about to receive an injection, uses its built-in vibrating motor and ice pack to ...
What's the Latest Development? California-based UberMedia has launched UberAds, a platform that sends ads to customers' mobile devices based on their publicly-available social media data -- from sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest -- as well as their (optional) GPS location. Using this ...
Thankfully, several women’s organizations have started a campaign to have advertisers pull their dollars from Facebook until it gets over its misogyny and rape love. There’s a link to some appalling examples in this Think Progress article. In its response to the protest, Facebook sniffles that ...
A luxury apartment building is now under construction in Taiwan, and its design was inspired by the double helix of the DNA molecule. The building, named Agora Garden, will twist at a 90 degree angle, and not just because that's a cool thing to do. The design creates more surface area, and enables ...
There are some religion-bashers out there who make it sound as though religion is the source of all violence and conflict in the world. Richard Dawkins has come close to saying something like that, so did Christopher Hitchens. And it’s just empirically false. The greatest bloodshed in the ...
The word code turns out to be a really important word for my book, The Information . The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code. Code, of course, is a word with a long history, and it pops up again during ...