Four short links: 19 December 2018
Observable Notebooks, Disinformation Report, Chained Blocking, and Trivia from 2018
- Observable Notebooks — JavaScript notebooks. (via Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist)
- Disinformation Report — selective amplification (or pre-consumption filtering) remains one of the most interesting open challenges in infotech, and this report gives context and urgency to it. The IRA shifted a majority of its activity to Instagram in 2017; this was perhaps in response to increased scrutiny on other platforms, including media coverage of its Twitter operation. Instagram engagement outperformed Facebook. New Knowledge note that the Russian misinformation agency was run like a digital marketing shop […] They built their content using digital marketing best practices, even evolving page logos and typography over time.. (via Renee DiResta)
- Twitter Block Chain — a Chrome extension that blocks followers of the jerk, not just the jerk themselves. The power of the open web is that we can write the tools the platforms don’t yet provide, however clunky. (via Hadyn Green)
- 52 Things I Learned in 2018 — each comes with attribution. Three sample facts, sans attribution: (*) 35% of Rwanda’s national blood supply outside the capital city is now delivered by drone. (*) [Unicode] includes a group of ‘ghost characters’ (妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁) which have no known meaning. It’s believed they are errors introduced by folds and wrinkles during a paper-based 1978 Japanese government project to standardize the alphabet, but are now locked into the standard forever. (*) Cassidy Williams had a dream about a Scrabble-themed mechanical keyboard. When she woke up, she started cold-calling Hasbro to ask for permission to make it real. Eventually, she made it happen.
