Weekly Links & Thoughts #160

Here is this week’s issue of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with interesting analyses and essays, significant yet under-reported information bits as well as thoughtful opinion pieces from the digital and technology world. Usually published every Wednesday/Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend (but temporarily on a slightly irregular schedule).

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Reading time indicator: 1 = up to 3 minutes, 2 = 4 to 9 minutes, 3 = 10 to 29 minutes , 3+ = 30 minutes or more

Note: Some of the publications may use “soft” paywalls. If you are denied access, open the URL in your browser’s incognito/private mode (or subscribe if you find yourself reading a lot of the content on a specific site and want to support it).

• Booking Flights: Our Data Flies with Us (ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org, 3)
  
  A tremendously informative and sobering report about the amount of data people give away when booking flights, and about what happens with this data.
• The Man Who Knew Too Little (nytimes.com, 2)
  
  The story of a man who radically stopped following news on November 8, 2016.
• Scarcity in UX: The Psychological Bias That Became the Norm (uxdesign.cc, 2)
  
  How apps and e-commerce sites create artificial scarcity to encourage people to make quick purchase decisions. From the piece: “Booking.com is the Usain Bolt of scarcity and probably owe much of their success to it. “
• You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? (points.datasociety.net, 3)
  
  Danah Boyd explaining in detail why the popular idea that teaching people new media literacy in the digital age will solve society’s division and eliminate polarization is likely wishful thinking. Because these phenomenon are caused by major differences in regards to epistemological approaches.
• It’s Time To Democratize The Future (medium.com, 2)
  
  An opinionated take on who/what should decide about how the future looks like – and who/what should not decide about it (according to the author: bias, fear and the reinforcement of broken ideologies).
• The takedown of Travis Kalanick (businessinsider.com, 3)
  
  Long feature digging into the multi-layered drama that unfolded at Uber in 2017 and that eventually led to the ousting of the company’s hotheaded CEO.
• Do neural nets dream of electric sheep? (aiweirdness.com, 2)
  
  The bizarre mistakes that image recognition algorithms make.
• YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (nytimes.com, 2)
  
  The past months have been a real awakening when it comes to YouTube’s contribution to polarization.
• Ideas That Changed My Life (collaborativefund.com, 2)
  
  Lots of wisdom in here – some apparent and obvious, yet often ignored.
• Is Envy Harmful to a Society’s Psychological Healthand Wellbeing? A Longitudinal Study of 18,000 Adults (PDF) (andrewoswald.com, 2)
  
  Research clearly shows that society should be concerned about institutions that stimulate large-scale envy. Social media can be considered such an institution.
• After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader (niemanlab.org, 2)
  
  Dynamic, personalized pricing for paid content. This might be the future.
• This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town (politico.com, 3)
  
  What happened after some early crypto enthusiasts realized that a semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.
• A history of machine translation from the Cold War to deep learning (medium.freecodecamp.org, 3)
  
  This is quite interesting to read, also considering the huge importance that machine translation has for essentially every user of the web.

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