Despite employing a small army of contractors to monitor posts, it’s clear the company is no longer fit for purposeWay back in the 1950s, a pioneering British cybernetician, W Ross Ashby, proposed a fundamental law of dynamic systems. In his book An Introduction to Cybernetics, he formulated his law of requisite variety, which defines “the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states”. In plain English, it boils down to this: for a system to be viable, it has to be able to absorb or cope with the complexity of its environment. And there are basically only two ways of achieving viability in those terms: either the system manages to control (or reduce) the variety of its environment, or it has to increase its internal capacity (its “variety”) to match what is being thrown at it from the environment.Sounds abstruse, I know, but it has a contemporary resonance. Specifically, it provides a way of understanding some of the current internal turmoil in Facebook as it grapples with the problem of keeping unacceptable, hateful or psychotic content off its platform. Two weeks ago, the New York Times was leaked 1,400 pages from the rulebooks that the company’s moderators are trying to follow as they police the stuff that flows through its servers. According to the paper, the leak came from an employee who said he “feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight – and making too many mistakes”.... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook and two outside social scientists recently published a scientific paper in which they revealed that they had manipulated users’ news feeds to tweak their emotions. Since then, there has been a growing debate over the ethics and practice of Facebook experimenting on its users, as... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-06-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Protests over secret study involving 689,000 users in which friends' postings were moved to influence moodsIt already knows whether you are single or dating, the first school you went to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber. But now Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-06-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook has gotten plenty of flack for its privacy practices, but here’s a new way to distrust the social media service: It may be playing with your emotions. As reported by The A.V. Club, in January 2012, Facebook adjusted its newsfeed algorithm for several hundred thousand users to see how... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2014-06-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Digital chief on rethinking the rules of journalism, shaking off the magazine group tag, and developing innovationM Scott Havens, senior vice president of digital at newly independent Time Inc is not a man to pussyfoot around journalistic conventions. We have to rethink the old church and state... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-06-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"The Fault in Our Stars" author announced that Sarah Polley has been chosen by Paramount to write and direct a film based on his YA book, 'Looking for Alaska.' Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2014-06-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Oculus VR has accused game publisher ZeniMax Media of attempting to cash in on Facebook’s pending acquisition of the wearable virtual reality technology company.In a court filing challenging ZeniMax’s ownership claims in its virtual reality technology, Oculus also cited mail from a former... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2014-06-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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British spies are authorized to spy on British citizens’ Internet communications transiting through servers outside the U.K., a civil rights group has discovered.Privacy International uncovered the information as part of a lawsuit it filed against the U.K. government over its alleged involvement... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2014-06-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Now that Facebook will include users’ Web behavior to fine-tune targeting, it’s only a matter of time before it expands its ad network to outside publishers, according to marketing experts. Facebook has said that it will gather Web surfing data on users to help advertisers understand... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2014-06-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook comes under fire for all manner of things -- it's just part and parcel of being a social network. When users are not up in arms at the site's privacy policies, they are found voicing their disapproval at the types of content they're not allowed to publish on their timelines. There are... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2014-06-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Professor Jean Seaton, the BBCs official historian, has at last agreed a title with it for her volume on the 1974-87 period, due in January. These were years of endless friction with the Thatcher government over reporting of Northern Ireland, the Falklands War and the bombing of Libya, and ended... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-06-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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John Mason, the esteemed director of library and educational marketing at Scholastic, will officially hang up his tote bag on July 3. We caught up with Mason as he was preparing for the transition. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-06-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Through its ubiquitous "like" buttons on publisher sites across the web, Facebook has long been able to watch the web surfing behavior of its 1.28 billion monthly users.Soon it will begin to use that information for ad targeting on Facebook.Facebook already enables retargeting to users who've... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2014-06-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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PayPal president David Marcus has left to steer mobile messaging at Facebook. Facebook claims that its standalone messaging app, called Messenger, is now used by more than 200 million people monthly. And the company's blog post today suggested that Marcus would lead that specific part of the... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2014-06-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook restricts users to those over the age of 13, but anyone who's talked to a tween lately knows how effective that is.But now it appears Facebook wants to create a way for young people to go legit on the network -- and still comply with the law.In a patent application filed in November of... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2014-05-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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All that hard work promoting The Fault in Our Stars—which started three years ago with John Green signing pages to be bound into the 150,000 copies of the novel’s first print run from Dutton—has paid off. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-05-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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It all began, Emily St. John Mandel says, when she “thought it would be interesting to write about the life of an actor. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-05-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Facebook is to release a new feature on its mobile app that will listen to and identify your music and TV shows before publishing them in a status update. Continue reading at BBC World
[ BBC World | 2014-05-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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PW catches up with the editor of "The Harry Quebert Affair," John Siciliano, to discuss high expectations, the difficulty of importing blockbusters and the fact that, occasionally, something French can be fun. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-05-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"The Fault in Our Stars" author will discuss Fox's film adaptation of his novel, alongside the team behind the movie. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-04-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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John Ortberg’s mentor, Dallas Willard, inspired him to write a book on the proper care and feeding of the soul. Through their conversations, Ortberg captured the wisdom imparted before he died, making the book “a kind of Tuesdays with Willard." Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-04-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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