Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Eli Lake published a column yesterday for Bloomberg View on why Flynn lying was a weird reason to fire him: That sounds about as credible as when the president told CIA employees that the media had invented the story about his enmity toward the spy agency, not even two weeks after he had taken to Twitter to…
If you involve yourself with Airbnb in any way, you’re killing us all. Thanks. via Why Airbnb Is Terrible – Cracked Explains – YouTube.
On March 15, 2002, 15 Saudi girls burned to death inside their school in Mecca. They were not trapped by fallen debris, or unaccounted for by firefighters. The mutaween, Saudi Arabia’s religious police, would not allow the girls to leave their burning school because they were not covering their hair or wearing their abayas. The…
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of…
Byline Unit /33173478/Mediaite_Adsense_468x60 end post-heading In a bizarre twist in the aftermath of Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald‘s highly contentious interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Eichenwald announced that he was taking a break from Twitter after a troll caused him to have a seizure. Eichenwald posted over fifty angry and generally incoherent tweets in the aftermath of the interview,…
Earlier this week, Facebook said that it would be partnering with fact-checking sites like Snopes to help weed out the fake news that has been plaguing the site in recent years. But it seems that Germany is not confident that self-regulation will be enough. The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas Oppermann, has suggested…
If you haven’t heard, Amazon just launched a promo for a storefront that sells meal kits and grocery basics with no checkout lines. It’s based in Seattle and currently open to Amazon employees, with the public launch set for early 2017. While Amazon hasn’t explained their “Just Walk Out” technology that powers the storefront, they do…
California regulators ordered Uber to remove its self-driving vehicles from the road on the same day that the company’s vehicles were caught running red lights – violations the company immediately blamed on “human error”. “It is essential that Uber takes appropriate measures to ensure safety of the public,” the California department of motor vehicles (DMV)…
This week, Amazon announced that it’s launching a new type of grocery store. You walk in, pick up the boxes of food you want, and you walk out. Thanks to a combination of modern tracking technology, artificial intelligence, and a mobile app that has your payment information, you don’t need to interact with a single…