from NYTs Smartphones are our constant companions. For many of us, their glowing screens are a ubiquitous presence, drawing us in with endless diversions, like the warm ping of social approval delivered in the forms of likes and retweets, and the algorithmically amplified outrage of the latest “breaking” news or controversy. They’re in our hands, […]
Author Archive | Professor Shannon
This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss
from Bloomberg The proof that the fight between Alex Beigelman and UBS had descended into absurdity was the dispute over the granola bar. It was the fifth day of arbitration hearings, and a lawyer for UBS, the financial conglomerate where Beigelman had worked, seemed to be having some windpipe trouble. “I tried to eat a […]
‘The Goal Is To Automate Us’: Welcome To The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism
From The Guardian We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that […]
The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past
from The Atlantic It’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while TheNew York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising. Twelve months later, […]
Majority Appears Ready To Uphold “Separate Sovereigns” Doctrine
from SCOTUSblog When Terance Gamble was pulled over by police in Alabama three years ago for having a faulty headlight, he probably didn’t think that prosecutors would make a federal case out of it. And he certainly wouldn’t have imagined that his case would make national headlines – not so much for its own sake, […]
Newly Public Documents Paint Picture Of Facebook’s Ruthlessness
from Axios Facebook documents released Wednesday portray the social giant as considering aggressive routes to squeeze more revenue out of user data, giving major companies extra access to data and undermining competitors. Why it matters: While much of what’s in the documents was already reported, together they provide a rare window into one of the […]
Got A Messy Work Desk? Study Reveals What Your Coworkers Really Think Of You
from Fast Company What does a worker’s messy desk signify to the greater office? Unfortunately, far more than just an inability to organize bobbleheads or throw away empty La Croix cans. A new study finds that an untidy work space leads colleagues to perceive that the person is more neurotic, less agreeable, and pretty uncaring. Researchers […]
How Technology Is Driving Change In Almost Every Major Industry
from Forbes I’m sure I won’t surprise you if I write that smart use of technology is an integral part of success in business today. We live in the digital era—using mobile devices to create, cloud computing to collaborate, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence to improve operations, and data analysis to extract key insights. And […]
‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ So Say Some Computer Science Students.
from NYTs A job at Facebook sounds pretty plum. The interns make around $8,000 a month, and an entry-level software engineer makes about $140,000 a year. The food is free. There’s a walking trail with indigenous plants and a juice bar. But the tone among highly sought-after computer scientists about the social network is changing. […]
Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?
from NYTs I joined Facebook in 2008, and for the most part, I have benefited from being on it. Lately, however, I have wondered whether I should delete my Facebook account. As a philosopher with a special interest in ethics, I am using “should” in the moral sense. That is, in light of recent events […]
Fei-Fei Li’s Quest To Make AI Better For Humanity
from Wired SOMETIME AROUND 1 am on a warm night last June, Fei-Fei Li was sitting in her pajamas in a Washington, DC, hotel room, practicing a speech she would give in a few hours. Before going to bed, Li cut a full paragraph from her notes to be sure she could reach her most […]
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
from NYTs Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American […]
The Privacy Battle To Save Google From Itself
From Wired OVER TWO DAYS during the summer of 2009, experts from inside and outside Google met to forge a roadmap for how the company would approach user privacy. At the time, Google was under fire for its data collection practices and user tracking. The summit was designed to codify ways that users could feel […]
Yale University Doubles Down On Female Entrepreneurs With Social Ventures
from Forbes On a recent Tuesday evening, while most people were leaving the Market Street area of downtown San Francisco, more than 100 executives, investors, and entrepreneurs headed to Google for the Women at the Forefront of Social Change conference. Centered on women transforming the world of responsible investment and entrepreneurship, events like this are […]
Internet Freedom Continues To Decline Around The World, A New Report Says
from The Verge Digital authoritarianism is on the rise, according to a new report from a group that monitors internet freedoms. Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said today that governments are seeking more control over users’ data while also using laws nominally intended to address “fake news” to suppress dissent. It marked the eighth […]