CEN’s “weird news” stories and images appeal to news organisations precisely because they fall into the category of “too good to check”. They also appeal because they are perfectly tailored to the current media ecosystem, in which the holy grail is to have content go viral on Facebook and other social media platforms, delivering a surge of traffic….In all, we evaluated 41 CEN pieces that struck us as particularly attention-grabbing. Of those, 11 proved to be completely false or to be based on images that did not match the stories; eight more contained suspicious details such as perfect quotes that appeared in no other coverage; 13 we were unable to verify either way; and nine appeared to be real or mostly real.
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/central-european-news
The King of Bullsh*t News
How a small British news agency and its founder fill your Facebook feed with stories that are wonderful, wacky – and often wrong.
In internet slang, 3DPD—meaning “three-dimensional pig disgusting”—is used to indicate that the 2D world is superior to the 3D world. The 3D world is lumpy. The friction from gravity and laws restricts individual freedom. There is the problem of having a body. And the light—the blizzard of photons coming from everywhere—is blinding and ugly. It is much more appealingly dark and smooth and pure to dematerialize into information and nurture faith in a digital platform. The internet is arguably a platform worthy of this kind of faith, but there are other platforms that aspire to parallel or even subsume the internet.
One of these, called ethereum, hopes to be the place for negotiating almost every kind of commercial, cultural, social, or legal exchange. In a video with a white-grey background and a centralized diamond-shaped logo, one of its founders, Vitalik Buterin, seems to barely need a body as he looks off-camera describing the ascendance of the platform towards Turing-complete universality.
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http://www.e-flux.com/journal/iirs/
Keller Easterling IIRS
Domicilio Conocido.
Unique images constructed by combining different elements appropriated from satellite views in Google Maps. They suggest places that look real but don’t exist. Lithography. 2015
(via Domicilio Conocido : EMILIO CHAPELA PEREZ)
Harper was offended, because she had been Shechet’s “boyfriend,” at least for part of the conversation. She is one of 600 crowd-sourced workers who play the role of boyfriend (or girlfriend) for the 7,000 significant others that have been created on the Invisible Boyfriend/Invisible Girlfriend platform. “I recognized the texts. I was, like, wait a minute, that’s not how it went down,” said Harper, a widow who prefers playing a boyfriend on the service because she knows what women want to hear. She almost commented on the article to defend “Albert,” but Invisible Boyfriend discourages “breaking character,” so she refrained.
Invisible Boyfriend is one of the many new online services that take advantage of the cheap, distributed labor forces provided by platforms like Crowdsource and Mechanical Turk.
— Tech companies are sending your secrets to crowdsourced armies of low-paid workers | Fusion
But over the last few weeks, a California-based computer engineer — we’ll call him Patrick — has pitted heterosexual male against heterosexual male. Patrick’s program identifies two men who “like” one of his bait profiles (the first used prominent vlogger Boxxy’s image; the second used an acquaintance who had given Patrick consent) and matched them to each other. The suitors’ messages — some aggressive, others mundane, but all of them unabashedly flirtatious — are then relayed, back and forth, to one another through the dummy profile.
(Source: theverge.com)
The Unicode Consortium has launched a very controversial project known as Han Unification: an attempt to create a limited set of characters that will be shared by these so-called “CJK languages.” Instead of recognizing these languages as having their own writing systems that share some common ancestry, the Han unification process views them as mere variations on some “true” form.
To help English readers understand the absurdity of this premise, consider that the Latin alphabet (used by English) and the Cyrillic alphabet (used by Russian) are both derived from Greek. No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification” and consolidate the English, Russian, German, Swedish, Greek, and other European languages’ alphabets into a single alphabet. Even though many of the letters look similar to Latin characters used in English, nobody would try to use them interchangeably. ҭЋаt ωoulδ βε σutragєѳuѕ.
Even though our language is exempt from this effort, Han unification is particularly troubling for Bengali speakers to hear about. The rhetoric is a blast from our own colonial past, when the British referred to Indian languages pejoratively as “dialects”.
— I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name by Aditya Mukerjee | Model View Culture
Clean Reader – “the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words” – sells more than a million ebooks from its online book store. Its app allows users to search the text, and “put a non-transparent ‘highlight’” over anything potentially offensive. The blanked-out word is replaced, when it is tapped, with one judged suitably safe. So in a passage from its online demonstration – “‘Don’t tempt me, you little bastard,’ growled Vyder” – bastard becomes jerk. In a slice of a David Baldacci novel, “Pick up your damn game, Bobby”, becomes “Pick up your darn game, Bobby”.
— Books without swearwords? There’s an app for that | Books | The Guardian
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