Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I’ve always been a big fan of libraries. I received my first library card on my 4th birthday, which my parents tricked me into thinking was the best birthday gift in the world. It wasn’t exactly a gift – you simply had to be 4 in order to get a library card. It was…
A version of this story first appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. The central media currency is not audience, but trustworthy measurement. The television business was built on wide adoption of such a single standard. Nielsen’s sampling method determined the size…
So let’s talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we’re really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage. iOS…
3 Month Internet Reading Stats Internet reading goals vs accomplished stats for the last three months: Stories Read / Stories Queued To Read August: 438 / 536 ( 81% completed ) July: 493 / 544 ( 90% completed ) June: 400 / 546 ( 73% completed ) Notes: not all stories read made it to…
Last year, San Francisco released BART Watch, an app for reporting crimes on the Bay Area’s main transit system. After filing a California Public Records Act request to see what people were reporting, the East Bay Express found a disturbing pattern: Of the 763 alerts sent to BART, 198 included a description of the race…
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…
A new wave of smart devices sensors and Internet of Things collecting data will make it hard to remain anonymous offline. Will the public wake up to the risks all of that data poses to their privacy? Image: iStock/maxkabakov Should we do something just because we can? That simple question has bedeviled many leaders over…
Credit Illustration by Javier Jaén Not long ago, our blockbuster business books spoke in unison: Trust your gut. The secret to decision-making lay outside our intellects, across the aisle in our loopy right brains, with their emo melodramas and surges of intuition. Linear thinking was suddenly the royal road to ruin. Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”…
Earlier this week the New York Times reported that Facebook was offering publishers a deal: With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half…
An algorithm that just went up for auction in New York. (Chris Maury, “Progression: Triptych, 2011-2013.” Available on Artsy.net.) Until about three weeks ago, Pinterest was — hands down, no contest — my absolute favorite social network. Yeah, I know it lacks the cachet of Twitter or Snapchat. I understand its associations with the bored…