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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The head of Facebook in Australia has urged the government to make changes to laws designed to force digital platforms to pay media companies for content. Continue reading at Stuff
[ Stuff | 2021-01-20 18:52:54 UTC ]
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Canongate is to publish a set of stories from US writer John Edgar Wideman, 40 years after the author released his first collection. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-01-20 14:47:16 UTC ]
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Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, co-authors of visual anthology Black Futures, will become the first-ever guest curators of the Lift Black Voices section in its flagship mobile applications. Starting Monday and lasting for three weeks, they will personally select collections of dialogues, essays... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2021-01-11 18:55:42 UTC ]
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The late basketball coach offers an honest, unsparing look at his life and his ex-employer. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-12-24 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Breaking from the James Bond mold, he turned the spy novel into high art as he explored the moral compromises of agents on both sides of the Iron curtain. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-12-14 16:04:51 UTC ]
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His genius was that his re-imaginings of people and events have proved more memorable than the real things. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-12-14 10:02:24 UTC ]
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The master of the Cold War thriller, John le Carré, died Saturday at 89. In 2016, 'PW' took a deep dive into the nearly 60-year literary of le Carré and offered a data visualization of some highlights from his long literary career. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-12-14 05:00:00 UTC ]
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A onetime British spy, he used the Cold War as his canvas in such novels as “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-12-13 10:56:56 UTC ]
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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you're reading this online or in a forwarded email, here's the link to sign up for our Wake-Up Call newsletters. Coke’s giant review Coca-Cola is undertaking a massive agency review that... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2020-12-10 10:59:27 UTC ]
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The real-life inspiration for Steve McQueen’s “Red, White and Blue” documents his career in law enforcement in “Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop.” Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-12-04 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you're reading this online or in a forwarded email, here's the link to sign up for our Wake-Up Call newsletters.In the cards Financial giant Visa picked Wieden+Kennedy as its new creative... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2020-12-04 11:04:31 UTC ]
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Click below to watch the first virtual meeting of the Alta California Book Club, which Books Editor of Alta Journal David Ulin describes as: an opportunity for us to rethink the book club as a kind of ongoing process involving events, involving posts and interviews and discussions on the Alta... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-12-02 09:48:47 UTC ]
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Bloomsbury has launched its marketing and publicity campaign for Zakiya Dalila Harris' publishing-set novel, The Other Black Girl, with a proof going exclusively to industry professionals. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-01 04:30:21 UTC ]
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Simon & Schuster is to publish a biography of former Labour minister John Stonehouse, who faked his own death in 1974. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-29 23:08:09 UTC ]
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Alice George’s biography portrays the astronaut as an imperfect but inspirational figure. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-20 13:00:00 UTC ]
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John Murray is publishing New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor, the follow-up to his successful 2011 book Londoners (Granta), in March 2021. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-17 07:19:27 UTC ]
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Bob Gruen’s “Right Place, Right Time” is a low-key chronicle of a man going with the flow. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-04 14:40:16 UTC ]
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With the election days away, this is the perfect time to remember that public libraries exist in a political as well as a civic space. In this episode, hosts David Lankes and Nicole Cooke talk to John Chrastka, head of EveryLibrary, the country’s only political action committee for libraries,... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-10-30 04:00:00 UTC ]
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H.W. Brands critiques the wildly different paths the two men took toward the same goal. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-10-23 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Berryman, who won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, struggled with addiction and despair that also fueled his work. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-10-22 14:00:00 UTC ]
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