Month: May 2013

Facebook is Blowing it With Its Mobile Advertisements

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Andrew Leonard pens a very good rant on the annoying, intrusive ads Facebook is delivering to users of the mobile version of the app:

And now she’s in my phone. And guess what? In Facebook’s mobile app, there is no option to hide all sponsored ads from a particular advertiser. Your only choice is the basic option you have with any kind of post — you can mark it as spam. Supposedly, reporting posts as spam will decrease the likelihood that you see them, but I’m afraid I’ve seen zero positive change in the frequency or content of Facebook’s sponsored story ads, despite what Facebook claims. Instead I am getting more of the ads I don’t want on my phone, after years of telling Facebook I don’t like exactly those types of ads. This is not an encouraging trend line.

By the time the first trickle of caffeine had woken up my synapses, I realized that I was done. I had reached my tipping point. I no longer want to check Facebook on my phone.

…

Does Facebook really think so little of me? Am I not man enough to seek my own romantic path without Facebook’s help?

And the money quote:

I’m sorry, Mark Zuckerberg, but my iPhone screen is just not big enough for those breasts.

As a user of the app on my iPhone, I’ve noticed these annoying ads as well. I haven’t quite reached the tipping point of quitting the service, but I am irked enough to highlight others’ reactions to it and am not surprised with Mr. Leonard’s decision.

How Oslo is Running out of Garbage

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In the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Sweden, garbage is a precious commodity. That’s because it is used to generate heat/electricity. And in the case of Norway’s capital, Oslo, there is a problem: the city doesn’t have enough garbage to burn:

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

Part of the success has to do with the meticulousness of the citizens sorting the garbage:

Garbage may be, well, garbage in some parts of the world, but in Oslo it is very high-tech. Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores.

How difficult would it be to ship some of America’s garbage across the Atlantic Ocean to Norway?

Warren Buffett: Women are Key To America’s Future Prosperity

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Warren Buffett joined Twitter today. To coincide with that move, he also penned a piece in CNN/Fortune, in which he explains how women are key to America’s prosperity:

Start with the fact that our country’s progress since 1776 has been mind-blowing, like nothing the world has ever seen. Our secret sauce has been a political and economic system that unleashes human potential to an extraordinary degree. As a result Americans today enjoy an abundance of goods and services that no one could have dreamed of just a few centuries ago.

But that’s not the half of it — or, rather, it’s just about the half of it. America has forged this success while utilizing, in large part, only half of the country’s talent. For most of our history, women — whatever their abilities — have been relegated to the sidelines. Only in recent years have we begun to correct that problem.

Despite the inspiring “all men are created equal” assertion in the Declaration of Independence, male supremacy quickly became enshrined in the Constitution. In Article II, dealing with the presidency, the 39 delegates who signed the document — all men, naturally — repeatedly used male pronouns. In poker, they call that a “tell.”

Finally, 133 years later, in 1920, the U.S. softened its discrimination against women via the 19th Amendment, which gave them the right to vote. But that law scarcely budged attitudes and behaviors. In its wake, 33 men rose to the Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor made the grade — 61 years after the amendment was ratified. For those of you who like numbers, the odds against that procession of males occurring by chance are more than 8 billion to one.

I couldn’t agree more. Go Warren go!

Paul Miller Reflects on a Year Without the Internet

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On April 30 of 2012, Paul Miller took a hiatus. From the internet. For one year. 

How did his experiment go? He divulges in this excellent post on The Verge:

At 11:59PM on April 30th, 2012, I unplugged my Ethernet cable, shut off my Wi-Fi, and swapped my smartphone for a dumb one. It felt really good. I felt free.

A couple weeks later, I found myself among 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, pouring into New York’s Citi Field to learn from the world’s most respected rabbis about the dangers of the internet. Naturally. Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

This is a profound observation:

As my head uncluttered, my attention span expanded. In my first month or two, 10 pages of The Odyssey was a slog. Now I can read 100 pages in a sitting, or, if the prose is easy and I’m really enthralled, a few hundred.

I used to be able to read two hundred pages in one day. Now, I consider myself lucky if I can get fifty pages done in one sitting without itching to grab my phone or computer.

But reading on, we learned that Paul’s experience without the Internet markedly changed after the first months of freedom:

So the moral choices aren’t very different without the internet. The practical things like maps and offline shopping aren’t hard to get used to. People are still glad to point you in the right direction. But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

…

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.

I’ve linked to Paul Miller’s past posts. The archive is here.

The Single Most Valuable Document in the History of the World Wide Web

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Subject to debate, but according to this article in the BBC, the claim of the “most valuable document in the history of the World Wide Web” belongs to a legal document that made the web publicly available in such a way that no one could claim ownership of it and that would ensure it was a free and open standard for everyone to use.

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page.

The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web.

Interesting.