on Nov 14, 2023 07:25 pm
More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp for messaging, customer service, organizing communities, and sharing news headlines. Now, increasingly, they can get those headlines straight from the source.
We talked to the Financial Times, La Nación, The New York Times, Vox, Chilango, the Times of India, and others about their early experiments sharing news on the world’s favorite messaging app.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/11/how-13-news-publishers-are-using-whatsapp-channels/
on Nov 07, 2023 04:37 pm
In this episode, Tom and Helen discuss the history of Britain’s relationship with the Israel-Palestine question; from Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, to Starmer’s recent opposition to calls for ceasefire.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N9TPFXSAJr39hwPe8xa3d
on Oct 24, 2023 03:36 pm
Saudi Arabia has a vibrant internet community.
In 2014 Saudi Telecom Company (STC) had identified the need for a new service that better met the needs of “the Saudi youth”, whose attention and Riyals were increasingly drawn to their competitors.
Working directly with the CEO and the Chief Brand Officer, their ask for Studio D was:
- Help us understand what it means to be a “Saudi Youth”.
- Identify current behaviours, patterns of use, pain points in the current mobile offerings, and opportunities for innovation.
- Challenge existing assumptions around what the new service should offer and why.
- Find the unique voice of Saudi youth culture, and help extrapolate this into what the brand should stand for, and why.
- Build out a community that would become the earliest adopters of the service.
https://studiodradiodurans.com/pages/a-deep-dive-into-saudi-culture
on Oct 24, 2023 11:37 am
These strange symbols are the way hobos passed information on to the next guy (usually a guy, but as Willy pointed out, he did meet his first wife on the road). And as the chart below shows, hobos had a lot to say. They scratched out simple instructions about which direction to go or where’d be a good spot to catch a train, but the marks could also communicated elaborate details about the town (the police don’t like hobos here) or the homeowners (they’re an easy mark).
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/
on Oct 24, 2023 04:36 am
Just over a year ago, Meredith Whittaker stepped into the role of president of the Signal Foundation — and from the beginning, she has been dealing with political threats to encryption.
The foundation’s flagship product, the Signal messaging app, has drawn in users with its default end-to-end encryption and an uncompromising stance on privacy. But those same features have also made it a target. Governments in China, Egypt, Cuba, Uzbekistan and, most recently, Iran have banned Signal outright. In the U.K., recently passed legislation could target messenger services and require an app like Signal to moderate harmful content such as terrorist content or child abuse imagery. To find that content, Signal would need access to user conversations, which would mean breaking the service’s end-to-end encryption. Similar bills have already been passed in India and proposed in Brazil. Whittaker doesn’t mince words, calling such laws an existential threat to Signal.
https://restofworld.org/2023/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-messaing-privacy/
on Oct 23, 2023 02:36 pm
Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog. Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the new memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. They discuss “ecstatic truth,” a term invented by Herzog to capture what he’s really after in his work. Illing also asks him a range of big questions, such as why he is interested in Mars and whether he thinks humanity is destroying itself.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4TPBWDE2NUddbePjqn0vv9
on Oct 23, 2023 10:38 am
Mini Tokyo 3D is a real-time 3D map of public transportation in Tokyo. Trains in operation and airplanes that are arriving or departing are represented on a realistic 3D map with smooth animation. This is a “digital twin” that looks exactly like the real world in the digital world.
https://minitokyo3d.com
on Oct 23, 2023 05:37 am
After spending two years in India, Francis Marion Crawford returned to the United States in 1881 with a heap of memories. But few perhaps compared to his unusual encounter with a merchant of jewels, a man whose “mysterious origins and colourful infamy” made him endlessly fascinating.
https://scroll.in/magazine/1056767/how-a-mysterious-diamond-trader-inspired-the-first-american-novel-on-india
on Oct 22, 2023 11:38 pm
How did an Azerbaijani boy end up owning a building in London’s Mayfair that housed a restaurant with two Michelin stars, an art gallery, and the Condé Nast headquarters? Hint: His father is the country’s president, Ilham Aliyev.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0WL9ETV8kQlYu97SgIRAE5
on Oct 21, 2023 10:38 pm
In November, the actor, director, and former UN Refugee Agency Goodwill Ambassador and Special Envoy will open the doors on Atelier Jolie, a somewhat broadly defined effort to bring her globally minded, socially conscious values to the world of fashion. She envisions it as a space of collaboration, a kind of cultural center–meets–design workshop that combines tailoring and upcycling services with a gallery space for local artisans and a café run in partnership with refugee organizations. “I’ve met a lot of artisans over the years—very capable, talented people—and I’d like to see them grow,”
https://www.vogue.com/article/angelina-jolie-digital-cover-interview-atelier-jolie
on Oct 21, 2023 03:39 pm
In 2001, a group of Japanese scientists made a startling discovery at a rubbish dump. In trenches packed with dirt and waste, they found a slimy film of bacteria that had been happily chewing through plastic bottles, toys and other bric-a-brac. As they broke down the trash, the bacteria harvested the carbon in the plastic for energy, which they used to grow, move and divide into even more plastic-hungry bacteria. Even if not in quite the hand-to-mouth-to-stomach way we normally understand it, the bacteria were eating the plastic.
In the years since the group’s discovery, plastic pollution has become impossible to ignore.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste
on Oct 21, 2023 10:36 am
Spotify’s success is heavily qualified, though. It may be the Netflix of music, but it’s never posted a profit; in 2022, with nearly a half-billion users around the world, around 200 million of whom pay for the service, it lost 430 million euros (the company is based in Sweden). This weird, loser-take-all outcome — which happens from time to time in tech, where dominant firms are allowed to bleed money for years in pursuit of long-term sector domination — means that the music industry’s biggest success story of the 21st century can also seem like it’s flailing. There have been layoffs and a price hike. The company is pulling back from its splashy investment in podcasting. Royalties are by far its biggest operating cost, but outside of a small slice of the highest earners, many artists have been shocked by how little money ends up in their pockets.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/spotify-is-eating-the-entire-music-business.html
on Oct 19, 2023 11:42 pm
You’ve probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living orgaYou’ve probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living organisms. Biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna earned the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in this field — and now she’s here to tell us about its next world-changing advancement. She explains how her team at the Innovative Genomics Institute is pioneering a brand new field of science — precision microbiome editing — that uses CRISPR in an effort to solve seemingly insurmountable problems like asthma, Alzheimer’s and climate change.
on Oct 18, 2023 03:38 pm
Founded in 1974 at the height of the US disability-rights movement, the Creative Growth Art Center is an Oakland-based nonprofit organisation that ‘advances the inclusion of artists with developmental disabilities in contemporary art’. For the organisation’s director Tom di Maria, this means helping to fill in the gaps in a public education system that leaves behind those with disabilities, but also taking their artistic development seriously in an art world that has, historically, marginalised such artists. And, as di Maria notes in this peak behind the centre’s walls, the project has produced some incredible success stories
https://aeon.co/videos/inside-the-unique-creative-space-where-outsider-artists-find-their-form
on Oct 18, 2023 02:37 pm
Lately, advances in 3D printing and other forms of additive manufacturing have made it possible to organize micro- and nano-size building blocks of matter into complex structures with great precision. We can now make new materials from components that range from just a little larger than 100 atoms to several millimeters in size.
This means scientists can decouple properties that have historically been linked together. For example, strong materials are typically heavy, and insulating materials like dinnerware are often brittle. But when ceramics and glass are architected by replacing solid blocks of material with a structure of the same size built of small struts, they can deform and reform like a sponge.
And there’s more—architected materials can evolve in space and time in response to a pre-programmed trigger. They can morph into different shapes to respond or adapt to a new environment or a stimulus. They can be made to release objects by relaxing their grip when heated or break apart at designated locations when strained.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/28/1054282/2022-innovators-materials-science/
on Oct 17, 2023 11:38 pm
Spying programs like Predator help investigative authorities catch serious criminals and terrorists. But the same surveillance tools also spy on innocent people every day, says Sophie in’t Veld, 60, a member of the European Parliament with a civil liberties-oriented party. No mobile phone data is safe any longer, she says, adding that “real hotspots” have emerged all over Europe for the surveillance industry – places that “support it with a reliable financial system and tax breaks.” The Netherlands, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Bulgaria and “many other member states help spy on people around the world,” says in’t Veld. “We have a real European problem here.”
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-predator-files-european-spyware-consortium-supplied-despots-and-dictators-a-2fd8043f-c5c1-4b05-b5a6-e8f8b9949978
on Oct 17, 2023 11:38 pm
The arrival of Chinese shopping apps like Shein and Temu, which bring made-in-China goods directly to overseas consumers, is changing the face of Chinese commerce and making the world’s most powerful export machine even more formidable, according to data and merchants.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3236657/how-shein-and-temu-are-changing-face-chinas-export-machine-making-life-easier-army-small-businesses
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