Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
You probably saw the news about the Chinese guy who created his own robotic Scarlett Johansson in his flat, right? Ricky Ma has caught the attention of many during the past weeks not just because he managed to build a robot that looks just like the American actress, but also because he did this all…
A major wildfire near Fort McMurray in Canada has forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate the area and destroyed roughly a fifth of local homes. One of the affected houses belonged to a man by the name of James O’Reilly, who got a uniquely intimate perspective on his home’s demise thanks to a connected…
Google’s News section will now highlight the importance of local news sources. While Google News has more than 75,000 news sources, it hasn’t always done a good job of surfacing hyper-local blogs and sites about specific topics when a major story breaks. “When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be…
I got my start writing for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin. What is interesting about that statement is that the appropriate follow-up question is “Which student newspaper?” For many years Wisconsin was unique in being the only university with two daily newspapers, both with five-digit print circulations. The older paper, The Daily…
If you haven’t read the two big Gizmodo stories on the human curators of the Facebook “trending news” box, you should stop and go do that now. They are fascinating: the first one details the working conditions and practices of the people paid to select stories for that box, and the second one alleges that…
“[The Amazon Echo] is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future,” writes Farhad Manjoo in the Times. Manjoo, like others, goes on to address what makes the Echo remarkable: first, dramatically improved voice recognition and fast response times make talking with…
Facebook Trending Topics is that special box you see on the right hand side of your Newsfeed that tells you what news is trending. Most people thought it was simply an algorithmic amalgamation of what Facebook users were talking about until Gizmodo reported this month that it’s actually curated by human beings. And some of…
Photo: Liya Hoshi Liya Hoshi, a graphic designer from New Bedford Massachusetts, noticed something a little strange when she plugged in the travel charger she purchased from Amazon. The gadget seemed to come with a specific message. She said it took her a minute to realize the logo actually read “iSmart”—but a very simple…
For many of us, Facebook has intertwined itself into our lives to such an extent that it often seems to fade into the background—it’s always there, like the atmosphere, and so we stop thinking about it. But now and then, the giant social network does something that forces us to consider its over-sized influence on…
Illustration: Jim Cooke Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in…