Beneath the ubiquitous posters for the Shen Yun ballet is a battle between dissidents and the state over the soul of a nation, both at home and across the diaspora.

News Deserts, Journalism Divides, and the
Determinants of the Robustness of Local News

Longish profile of Apple New's contrarian, human editors.

a company researcher typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her”

Exhaustive comparison of Apple and Google maps comes down pretty negatively on Apple's closed ecosystem vs. Google's crowdsourced one.

Documentary about the history of Nokia

Overlay old maps onto each other to see the evolution of land

This was Facebook’s actual error: It divided total time spent watching a video not by the total number of users who spent any time watching the video (a group that would have included people “quickly scrolling past muted auto-playing video advertisements”), but instead by only the number of users who watched a video for three seconds or more. The result: “A highly misleading result that favored Facebook.”

The ambition of creative people was extinguished by office politics and bureaucracy.

The world’s most valuable company is wooing the media with a human touch and a huge audience. One thing it hasn’t delivered: money.

Another thing to keep me up at night.

The company’s lip-service defense of free speech is in practice a choice to collapse the distinction between disinformation and news-analysis. The right-wing narrative of social-media censorship is dishonest, but it has also been incredibly effective in pressuring platforms into accepting lies as opinion.

Son holds dinners every few months with the CEOs of his investments to encourage them to partner with other companies he has invested in and conduct status checks on their businesses.

“What’s this?” Tim asked.
“This,” I said, “is the greatest sales deck I have ever seen.”

AI at Google: our principles

Summary of mobile app ad tech stack today as it evolves towards true RTB.

Product Management isn’t a major one can study, few folks graduate into, and most people learn by apprenticeship.

How Facebook's ad auction model is different, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves model

Facebook is today making three important announcements on false news, to which WIRED got an early and exclusive look. In addition, WIRED was able to sit down for a wide-ranging conversation with eight generally press-shy product managers and engineers who work on News Feed to ask detailed questions about the workings of the canals, dams, and rivers that they manage.

Popular, YC-recommend Product Management framework.

The Japanese government commissioned a detailed report on the history of Japanese robot anime.

Cheap flight packages

crowd-sourced ratings of all those click-wrap agreements you never read

Even a low-key evening at home can mean handing over a trove of personal information to high-tech companies

Today, we keep passports, birth certificates, utility bills at home under our own control, maybe in an “important drawer”, and we share them when needed. We don’t store these bits of paper with a third party. Self-sovereign identity is the digital equivalent of what we do with bits of paper now.

Elements of a webpage either inspire us by giving us more units of Psych or overwhelm us by depleting our existing store of Psych. Once you understand what elements are adding to or depleting users’ energy, you can then start to manage that energy: adding inspiration and minimizing overwhelm to help users take your core actions.

For when your favorite song just isn’t long enough. This web app lets you search a song on Spotify and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song.

Can the most contentious piece of the web form the basis of a new standard?

In just 72 hours, over a million redditors placed 16.5 million tiles to transform a simple, white, 1000×1000-pixel canvas into a surprisingly beautiful clash of communities, nations, ideologies, and fandoms.

Embedded with full interview with Campbell Brown and Adam Mosseri at Recode's Code Media conference.

How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all.

The final years of Nokia’s mobile phone

Why copyright is not the right concept in an age when ideas can be distributed at no cost.

John Perry Barlow on Neal Cassady and the origin story of the Grateful Dead song, Cassidy.

Adweek’s Super Bowl LII Ad Tracker. Here you’ll find a frequently updated list of all the national (plus a few regional) commercials that will air during the Big Game on Feb. 4, along with details on the agencies that created them.

Silicon Valley CEOs are supposed to be sacrosanct. So how did it all go wrong at Uber?

profile of Michael Wolff

According to Bytedance, every piece of content is automatically screened to check that it is acceptable before appearing on Toutiao. But once something has attracted more views, the system applies a more sophisticated screening algorithm. Certain material is also examined by humans as a final check.

Ultimately, any cure will require the following: clever technical solutions to stop the spread of fake news; efforts to cut fake news publications from revenue sources; and legal sanctions against those that intentionally try to mislead the public, in order to shape public debate.

Tattoo a waveform

Overflights, mapping fiber-optic networks, “strange activities.” Moscow’s West Coast spies were busy.

Findings from CJR research into newsroom’s use of push notifications.

How to get the most out of an interview with a candidate

like pinterest for email design

How to prevent silos.

Research on how to make membership work as a business model.

Evan Hamilton on community management best practices

the political class can smell blood. That Zuckerberg campaign was, to the political world, blood in the water, a signal of a new vulnerability around his company and his industry.

high-level description of machine learning models used to predict what goes into a user's highlights

London Review of Books on Facebook
The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu
Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio García Martínez
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us by Jonathan Taplin

Advice to news platforms from the creator of Google News, Krishna Bharat

BuzzFeed News trained a computer to find them by letting a machine-learning algorithm sift for planes with flight patterns that resembled those operated by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Checklist of how to prep for playing soccer in college

Great for folks, who read their news on the go.

Trump’s budget eliminates ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminates the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All the risks are science-based,” said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the D.O.E., you gut the country.”

Bare bones online toolkit to get started

Toolkit & online curriculum designed for high school teachers of news literacy.

Maggie Farley and JoLT hacked together a game to test your ability to sniff out fake news.

details on upcoming changes to the iOS app store layout

After building online communities for two decades, we’ve learned how to fight abuse. It’s a solvable problem. We just have to stop repeating the same myths as excuses not to fix things.

Rikiya and Shunan propose a novel Bayesian model of uncertainty-aware scoring and ranking for news articles.

With Snapchat Shows, the company’s content team is seeking nothing less than to redefine the very experience of video entertainment on mobile devices.

Take a kernel of truth, warp it and its context in a funhouse mirror, and set it against a heavy backdrop of conspiracy, while raising the stakes with a generous dose of fear. The strategy has made Jones — a stocky central Texan with a penchant for clamorous outbursts, fanciful digressions, and meandering stream-of-consciousness monologues — a celebrity.

Written for designers but appropriate for product managers too.