Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings this week, the Associated Press published (by way of CNBC, Yahoo, and others) “Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts.” It’s a story without a byline, or rather, without a human byline — a financial story written and published by an automated system well-versed in the AP Style Guide. The AP implemented…
(John McDonnell/The Washington Post) Jake McLernon began his undergraduate career at George Mason in 2008, two years after the men’s basketball team’s Cinderella run to the Final Four. On Wednesday, McLernon, who earned a Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies in Film and Video Studies in December, released his capstone project, “8 Years Past Midnight,”…
A rooftop deck is seen in Washington in this file photo. (Benjamin C. Tankersley for The Washington Post) Another week, another breathless report showing how darn expensive and wealthy D.C. is. Last week, we reported that D.C. ranked 10th in the most millionaires in the country per capita category when compared with states. (Maryland had the most,…
Before he was voted Hipster of the Decade, before he was coining musical subgenres and helping the New York Times understand “alt” culture, Carles was another mid-00s music blogger who just wanted to get his site listed on Hype Machine. The music discovery engine uses an algorithm to pull the “most-blogged about” songs from the…
Legacies are never simple; they create victims as well as beneficiaries. The more substantial the legacy, the more heated the disputes are over who has title of ownership, who gets to enjoy an inheritance, and who is left out in the cold. One of the most dangerous ways to treat a legacy is to bask…
(Bloomberg) — The economy in the U.S. expanded at a slower pace than forecast in the fourth quarter as cooling business investment, a slump in government outlays and a widening trade gap took some of the luster off the biggest gain in consumer spending in almost nine years. Gross domestic product grew at a 2.6…
Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye1,*, Laura Radaelli2, Vivek Kumar Singh1,3, Alex “Sandy” Pentland1 1Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 2Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aabogade 34, Aarhus, 8200, Denmark. 3School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University,…
Fukuoka, Japan When the Kimura family moved here from Tokyo, their middle school-aged daughter missed her old friends. Midway into her first year in high school, she stopped going. Between 14 and 19, she barely left the house, and for one year hardly left her room, interacting only with her parents. Now 33 and recovered,…
People who are concerned about the use of excessive force by law enforcement may have to deal with another fatal can of worms. If Texas state Rep. Dan Flynn (R) gets his way, teachers will have the right to use deadly force against students in Texas classrooms, in the near future. The Lone Star State…
(Bloomberg) — Companies that defaulted for a second time in the years following the latest recession accounted for more than twice the proportion of total defaults than the historical average, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Firms that missed payments on obligations more than once due to debt swaps or bankruptcy reorganizations, made up 39 percent…