Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics machine? The mystery of its strategy is deepened by two factors. First is the company’s communications department, which famously excels at not communicating. Three requests to speak with Amazon officials for this article were delayed and, inevitably, declined. This moves discussions of the…
Have you heard the story about the lady who spilled coffee on herself and won millions of dollars from McDonald’s? Have you looked up the details on the story, or do you just know the story as a TV show punch line? Stella became a symbol for frivolous lawsuits and fodder for talk show hosts,…
I can’t quite understand a world in which people will pay $4 for a cup of coffee… So I have no particular interest in coffee-shop culture, but the unrelenting advance of automation is worth noting. But note the word “could” in the headline. The Briggo coffee kiosk knows how to make a perfect coffee because…
To make a quick buck by annoying your online readers, alienate and frustrate them by breaking your silly compilation article up into 10 or more parts you expect them to click through sequentially, and don’t provide an “all on one page” view. Congratulations! You’ll make a few bucks, and you’ll increase the sum total of…
Random House, which jacked up its ebook prices to libraries 300 percent last year, limits the number of check-outs per ebook. This means libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold … as if the ebook had died or something. In fact, that’s the problem some authors have with ebooks —…
I was never a fan of Sinéad O’Connor, but I remember being impressed back in the 80s when Madonna’s bohemian antics were threatening to overwhelm her talent (not that I was a fan of Madonna, either), and a wise-sounding O’Connor told her some of the same things she has just told Miley Cyrus. You are…
So what if every reader survey ranked international news coverage near the bottom of what people wanted to read? Didn’t they know our Africa correspondent had just won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting? People needed international reporting even if they were too ignorant to recognize it, and we were determined to give it to…
Sadly, the people who are spending (and receiving) the huge sums of money to support the dehumanization of essay-grading are not the ones who will be swayed by an appeal to the humanities. Once the use of automated essay grading becomes common knowledge, the implicit message will be hard to miss. For any self-aware, warm-blooded…
“Real-time” conversations are emerging as the new battleground for competing social networks Facebook and Twitter, and for their advertisers. While Twitter has been beefing up its ad business in advance of its stock market debut, Facebook has been adding features such as hashtags – words or phrases that represent a topic of discussion – and…
The eight-strong group, known internally as the AI team, only recently started work, and details of its experiments are still secret. But Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, will say that one obvious place to use deep learning is to improve the news feed, the personalized list of recent updates he calls Facebook’s “killer app.”…
My favorite: “Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.” —The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar. Similar:How to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro to Toronto York Plays 2025)Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains after mastering series…
Humanities professors from the University of Virginia describe their frustrating attempts to give away their innovative textual study tool via Apple’s App Store. The reason the App Review Team gave (again and again) was that our app was “simply” or “just a book” (their words), and that it therefore had to be formatted in Apple’s…
Over the next three hours, The 9 Nanas who all consider themselves sisters, despite what some of their birth certificates say will whip up hundreds of pound cakes, as part of a grand scheme to help those in need. And then, before anyone gets as much as a glimpse of them, they’ll disappear back into…
I was horrified to see that, in order to opt out of pre-approved credit mailings, the bottom-feeders known as Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion expect us suckers to type our SSN and birthdate into an online form, which we then are expected to print out and mail. I tried typing “000-00-MYOB” and “000-00-0000” into the…
I didn’t watch the show, but I did see the aftermath on Twitter. I think it’s perfectly newsworthy to correct a misconception by presenting a video clip that contextualizes a still image that has been apparently mischaracterized by the media. Unfortunately, Viacom has apparently blocked the copy of the image embedded with this story. The image…
The AP Stylebook jumped in price by more than $2 over the summer, to about $15. I assume this has everything to do with the fact that college students are buying textbooks like mad. Price History Chart of 0465082998 The Associated Press Stylebook 2013 (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law). Similar:How to be…
Death is universal, so one day I’ll face these decisions. I just asked my tween to put down her Legos and my teen to put down his algebra, so I could tell them that when I’m dead, I don’t want them to pay for a fancy coffin, or cushions, or an open casket. I told…
I remember having a Fisher Price airplane pull-toy, and a school that came with a chalkboard and a tray of magnetic letters. But this Sesame Street playset was the best. I was so excited about it my mom let me look at it in the box before “Santa” wrapped it and put it under the…
RT @Laroquod: @DennisJerz If #Blakes7 turns out to be a show you need Xbox/Win8 to watch legally (as per rumour), that’s a sad irony for a show abt rebels. Similar:How to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro to Toronto York Plays 2025)Unemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Comput…Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter…
Lots of links, lots of repeated key words, and multiple postings of a press release to different sites, are all red flags to Google under the new rules. Such actions are viewed by Google as blatant attempts to trick its algorithm into ranking a site higher than its allotted position. Yet these have all become…