How Psychology Is Just Catching Up With The Effects Of Online Hate
Lindsay Ellis is a video essayist. She makes videos commenting on films, TV shows, and other media. More than 860,000 people subscribe to her YouTube channel. But there is also this difficult aspect to what Ellis does: online hate.
The Surprising Psychology Of Dieting And Plate Design
You’ve probably heard the idea that using smaller plates and bowls can affect your perception of how much you’re eating, thereby helping you eat less. But how well does it work? A new study sheds light on that popular theory, finding that if you’re really hungry, it doesn’t work.
Selfishness Is Learned
Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes?
Dressing For The Surveillance Age
As cities become ever more packed with cameras that always see, public anonymity could disappear. Can stealth streetwear evade electronic eyes? Is there anything fashion can do to counter the erosion of public anonymity?
We Asked An AI To Write A Column For Us. The Results Were Wild
We’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real article, and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be.
The Pentagon’s Push To Program Soldiers’ Brains
The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
Once Hailed As Unhackable, Blockchains Are Now Getting Hacked
More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built.
Digital Technology Is Not To Blame For Our Hyperfast Lives
Life in the 21st century, we are told, is faster than ever. Time is scarce, the pace of everyday life is accelerating, and everyone complains about how busy they are. For all the smart tech, we still feel pressed for time. Are digital services the problem, or are we humans to blame?
Silicon Valley’s #MeToo Moment Didn’t Change Anything
Despite tech’s reckoning with equality over the past few years, the industry’s storied history of inequality carries on. A small sampling: Only 11% of executive positions in Silicon Valley are held by women, and women make up only 9% of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms.
Why Amazon Has So Many Counterfeit Goods
Seizures of counterfeit products at U.S. borders have increased 10-fold over the past two decades as e-commerce sales have boomed. The total value of seized goods – if they had been real – reached nearly $1.4 billion in 2018. Most are coming from mainland China or Hong Kong.
How Instagram Killed The It Girl
In a world of constant self-surveillance and curation, we may never see the Parises, the Nicoles, the Taras in the way we once did. The It Girl exists within the moral grey areas of life, but with the existence of social media, such grey areas no longer exist for her to live in – everything is now black and white, good or bad.
The Start-Ups Building ‘Dark Kitchens’ For Uber Eats And Deliveroo
Venture capitalists have all aligned on the best solution: kitchens that only serve delivery customers, known as “cloud”, “ghost” or “dark” kitchens, that use a combination of advanced food preparation, underused real estate and algorithm-driven optimisation to lower overheads and increase output.
The Secret History Of Facial Recognition
Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. He died on October 4, 1995. His obituary in the Austin American-Statesman made no mention of his work on facial recognition. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?
Ramzan Kadyrov: Brutal Tyrant, Instagram Star
Ramzan Kadyrov is the leader of Chechnya. He is a Putin proxy that has been in charge of the Russian republic since 2007. Despite revelations about kidnapping, torturing and killing gay people, Kadyrov has continued to maintain an upbeat profile on Instagram, where he is a prolific user.
How To Escape The Overthinking Trap: Stop Judging Yourself
Thinking is what gave humans ascendancy. But overthinking is threatening to bring us down. The despair from comparing ourselves with others is the original fake news. We need to develop a new relationship with our thoughts.
The New Generation Of Self-Created Utopias
The United States has been a laboratory for experiments in alternative living since its founding. As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.
Swarms of Teeny Robo-Tractors Will Outmaneuver Tesla’s Driverless Cars
While Elon Musk’s Tesla and Waymo Cars get all the attention — and regulations — autonomous vehicles for farming face fewer tech barriers and could be just as important.
How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class
Some major textbooks feature illustrations of Texas Instruments–series calculators alongside the text, so students can use their Texas Instruments calculator with the lesson plan, emphasizing how deeply interwoven Texas Instruments remains with the educational hegemony.
Escape From The Matrix
The fear of missing out, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. FoMO haunts our social networks and our real lives alike. But there is a way to break free.
The Rise Of Shopify, $68 Billion In Size. How Did It Get So Big?
Shopify is the leading E-commerce platform in the United States with 23% market share and has become the second-largest platform in terms of total merchandise volume, surpassing eBay in September 2019 and just behind Amazon. The company’s stock is up more than 20 times its IPO price.
The Benefits Of Optimism Are Real
People who are resilient tend to be more positive and optimistic compared with less resilient folks; they are better able to regulate their emotions, and they are able to maintain their optimism through the most trying circumstances.