Stores like for us as consumers to give them a customer ID to track what it is that we are buying. Many have phone number or a card or an email address. They use this information to track our purchases and personalize their nudges for us to buy products. There is one way they might…
Because representation matters, I am looking forward to this spin-off of Black-ish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcnQjti7hlc
In shopping for Mother’s Day the algorithms now think I am female. Obviously, they took the items I looked at for this quest and incorporated them into my profile’s records and are basing new recommendations on them. They are fresher. And they have left over inventory they want to move. So, I get it. This…
A sound is a terrible way to get my attention. I mostly live in some kind of background noise. So, there is a strong possibility that I will miss a notification through listening to music or podcasts. Worse, even if I do hear it, I have no clue what weird thing is trying to get…
This guy won the Internet for a while. “I love learning the words that their generation comes up with — both the unique ones as well as the ones where they take an existing word and give it a completely different meaning.” One of my favorite web sites is Urban Dictionary because people apply new…
Geeking out for me takes the form of the explainer. I take what someone knows about something and describe how it works and why I find it interesting. My reading takes me all over the place, but I particularly of late enjoy nonfiction on interesting topics. People find my reading about things like quantum mechanics…
Dear Facebook, it would be awesome if you would create a spoilers option for posts where the poster could say what it contains. You get users feeding you data about engagement with media useful for advertisers. Nice people could contain the damage of spoilers. As it is, I saw several people created a post and…
In October 2017, astrobiologist Karen J. Meech got the call every astronomer waits for: NASA had spotted the very first visitor from another star system. The interstellar comet — a half-mile-long object eventually named `Oumuamua, from the Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger” — raised intriguing questions: Was it a chunk of rocky debris from a…