Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A new version of Google+ is rolling out to users starting today, and just like every version before it, you probably won’t use it. Google project manager Danielle Buckley announced the news on her Google+ page today. In the post, she said the redesigned G+ includes three major updates, most of which make it easier…
Image: Wikimedia If you grew up in the 90s, you probably saw one of the legendary ITT Technical Institute commercials in the wee hours of the morning. Now, you’ll probably never see one again. Today, ITT Technical Institute campuses have stopped enrolling students at all of its campuses. The abrupt decision to stop enrolling students…
BRUSSELS/DUBLIN The European Commission ordered Apple Inc to pay Ireland unpaid taxes of up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) on Tuesday as it ruled the firm had received illegal state aid. Apple and Dublin said the U.S. company’s tax treatment was in line with Irish and European Union law and they would…
The Washington Post reports that Amazon is launching technical teams whose workers will only clock in for 30 hours a week. While plenty of employees at Amazon are part-time, the novelty here is that the teams are entirely made up of workers on a reduced schedule, including managers. The teams’ members will receive the same…
Some online publishers and developers were surprised in recent weeks when Facebook seemingly cut off access to information they use to help gauge the performance of content across the social network. Data wasn’t being received from Facebook’s “Graph API” feature, which publishers use to help understand how links to articles are being distributed and engaged…
Mere hours after Facebook announced that its Trending section would become more algorithmically controlled, users noticed that the social network was surfacing a fake news story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly is trending on Facebook for an article that has no basis in reality. pic.twitter.com/31f4ERnzHI — Kyle Blaine (@kyletblaine) August 29, 2016…
This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed…
A bike lane, where — if you’re lucky — a car won’t try to hit you. Probably. (Matt McClain for The Washington Post) About 100 years ago, the auto industry pulled off a neat trick: It stole the public roadways from us. See, in the early days of the motor vehicle, there used to be…
Moderator Megyn Kelly waits for the start of the Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines. (Chris Carlson/AP) Facebook announced Friday that humans would no longer write descriptions for its Trending topics list, handing over even more responsibility to the already-powerful algorithm. But just days after the policy change, Facebook’s algorithm chose a very bad, factually incorrect…
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to…