Year: 2017
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Reuters Tracer combs Twitter for news
Reuters, the news agency that first scooped its rivals with the use of carrier pigeons, is seeing good results from an algorithm to sift through Twitter (over 12 million tweets/day, 2% of total volume) to search for signal in the noise. Reuters Tracer is the system summarized in MIT’s Technology Review, How Reuters’s Revolutionary AI…
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The week that was
Trying something new. A weekly wrap-up of sorts. The Austin headquarters for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission was overrun by “several hundred” rats. A Russian rocket launch went awry when the wrong directions were loaded into it’s flight plan and sent it to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, the Voyager team dusted…
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ProAm Used Car Listing
This is what happens when your boyfriend is a professional director, and you want to sell your used ’96 Honda Accord.
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The World We Live In
Things have gotten so crazy and divisive lately that it’s now increasingly obvious that people are living in alternate realities. Our filter bubbles have become so completely isolating that they are impervious to commonly understood baseline facts such as science and reason. Some examples: Facebook is using your phone to listen to your conversations. The…
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Story behind iconic Steve Jobs portrait
How do you get a portrait subject to relax so you can get their true essence? What if your subject is Steve Jobs? You know the photo – here’s the story behind how it was captured. the pair got to work and Watson began to approach the process like he was conducting a passport photoshoot;…
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Carl Bernstein at ONA 17
Recently, SmartNews (my employer) hosted Carl Bernstein, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the Watergate Hotel during the annual Online News Association conference in Washington, DC. Under a full moon on a warm DC evening, Mr. Bernstein inspired us all to strive harder to make use of the powerful “reportorial platform” the digital era provides…
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Perspective
When your job brings you in regular contact with tragedy on a mass scale (as it does when you work in a newsroom) the rush & tumble of getting the news out gets in the way of stopping to feel the personal impact of these events. As I’m certain will happen with the Napa/Sonoma fire…
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Preventing Harry Tuttle
My last post, Democracy’s Soft Underbelly warned how algorithms for content distribution and advertising have been weaponized to alter public opinion. The most disturbing aspect of the affair is there is no public evidence of the ad campaigns so there is literally nothing to talk about. When there is no public record of what ad…
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Democracy’s Soft Underbelly
journalists digging into ad buying platforms discover the soft underbelly of a democratic free market that was exploited during the election — ian kennedy (@iankennedy) September 15, 2017 Let me explain. It’s now well-documented that outside forces took advantage of social media platforms to spread rumors in order to swing the 2016 presidential election. Journalists…