Facebook conducted a study for one week in 2012 testing the effects of manipulating News Feed based on emotions. The results have hit the media like a bomb. What did the study find? Was it ethical? And what could or should have been changed?
Monday, June 30, 2014
Online Security Is a Total Pain, But That May Soon Change
Staying secure online is a pain. If you really want to protect yourself, you have to create unique passwords for every web service you use, turn on two-factor authentication at every site that supports it, and then encrypt all your files, e-mails, and instant messages. At the very least, these are tedious tasks. But sometimes […]
Handsome, Travel-Friendly Surfboards From the Beats Design Team
The design team at San Francisco-based Ammunition does work for companies with a heavy tech slant: Beats by Dre, Adobe, and Polaroid are all clients. As an antidote to all that hyper-connectivity, last year Ammunition launched Octovo: a spin-off line of travel goods meant to create an experience that, as Ammunition partner Matt Rolandson puts […]
How IBM’s Watson Will Make Your Meals Tastier
Coleslaw is a fairly straightforward dish to make. And yet, Dawn Perry, Bon Appetit’s senior food editor, recently found herself staring at list of ingredients for a Fourth of July slaw that included a strange array of flavors: cabbage, tamarind, mayo, buttermilk, basil, two types of onions and flour. If you know anything about the […]
The Emotional Lives of Dairy Cows
Calves are affected by the emotional pain of separation from their mother and the physical pain of dehorning. A new study finds that both types of pain can result in a negative cognitive bias similar to pessimism.
Enhancing Flu In the Lab: Are Accidents Inevitable?
I want to revisit something I wrote about last month — dual-use or gain-of-function flu research — in order to point you to some important recent writing on the issue. To recap, “gain of function” research involves taking a flu strain that already causes severe disease, but is not currently very infectious, and manipulating it […]
Grueling 39K-Mile Yacht Race Tests the Sanity of Cramped Crews
The Volvo Ocean Race is the world's toughest sailing competition. Here's how it goes down.
Vintage Pesticide Paraphernalia From the Glory Days of DDT
The insecticide DDT is mostly thought of today as a bird-killing eco-nightmare. But it wasn't always so. DDT was once a Nobel Prize-worthy miracle of modern chemistry. And for decade or two in the mid-20th century, ordinary people used DDT---lots of it---in ways that seem extraordinary today.
A Perfect Post-Apocalyptic Library That Offers Books and Booze
The folks at the Long Now Foundation are building a clock that’ll keep time for 10,000 years. But in the meantime they’ve built something more practical: A very nice bar.
A Mod That Adds Co-Op Capabilities to Your StarCraft Campaign
Always wanted to play a StarCraft co-op game? Now you can thanks to this mod, which makes it so two players can cooperatively play through the entire game's campaign.
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