Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 17
Posts 1 - 10

To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 25.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, privacy, research/study
Summary | Restaurants are facing tough times as people seem to visit restaurants less ofter rises. Now analytic firms have come up with software designs that collect data about customers and waiting staff to find inefficiencies and smooth them out. This way all waiters would recognize guests by name and know their order and payment preferences. It could revolutionize customer service in the hospitality industry.
Image Description | People looking at a chart.
Image Tags | chart, female(s), male(s)

The Secret to a Good Robot Teacher

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 26.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, research/study
Summary | Digitized education as it is usually designed today makes a fatal omission. It ignores the fact that human learning requires not only language as information but also language as social cues. Evolution has designed our minds so that we learn best from other human testimony. Studies with children show that they trust robotic teachers more when they display some kind of emotional range and social cues.
Image Description | Illustration of a robot teaching children.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), school

A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Google, research/study, social media, threat, YouTube
Summary | Social media companies have only recently begun waking up to the fact that their unpoliced platforms are safe spaces for all kinds of extremism. Studies show that extremists nowadays get radicalized online, whether they be islamists or white supremacists. While these two movements may differ in ideologies, they resemble each otehr very strongly in their internet strategies of recruitment and organization of offline events. A research group at Google has now come up with a diversion strategy to combat the radicalization of individuals online. They target people who watch extremist recruitment videos on YouTube with video suggestions that present differing arguments and the downsides of that ideology. So far, there can be no knowing whether this strategy is helping but the redirection videos are being watched.
Image Description | GIF with mouse cursor arrows: black arrows surrounding a white arrow.
Image Tags | gifs

Twitter's Passion Politics

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | politics, research/study, Twitter
Summary | In a study analyzing political discourse on Twitter, the researchers found that Republicans tend to get more retweets when they use emotional-moral language than Democrats do. This also rang true when looking at the presidential candidates: Donald Trump could impress far more people by using emotional language than Hillary Clinton. Ms Clinton was interestingly far further below the Democratic average retweet rate for emotional tweets.
Image Description | Illustration of a man blowing into the fire in a tablet.
Image Tags | male(s), tablet

'Ha' Isn't a Laugh. Seriously?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | abbreviations, emojis, Facebook, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | People express laughs in different ways when the text or otherwise communicate online. Some type a version of "haha", others write "LOL" or a similar abbreviation but none of these messages mean that one is actually laughing. Linguists who have analyzed thousands of texts claim that LOLs signal interlocutor involvement like an "uh-huh" on the phone.
Image Description | Cartoon of various people laughing with various noises.
Image Tags | male(s)

Popular People Live Longer

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 1.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, research/study, social media
Summary | Resent research has shown that popularity significantly improves one's longevity due to many genetic, psychological, and evolutionary reasons. This may explain why so many people value their popularity on social media, i.e. how many followers, retweets, or likes they get. That is however not the kind of popularity that significantly improves one's chances at a long life. That requires a stable and large social surrounding with nurturing relationships.
Image Description | Illustration of a tombstone saying "not enough likes" with a thumbs down symbol.
Image Tags | emojis, Facebook

Where Non-Techies Can Get With the Programming

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 4.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, digitized education, research/study
Summary | Computer programming is the new lingua franca of modern economy. Introductory classes are increasingly popular at universities with 90% of Standford students taking an introductory computer programming class. Coding can be useful for lawyers, doctors, historians, and even students from the humanities because learning to code entails learning computational thinking.
Image Description | Illustration with a diverse group of faces connexted to written computer code.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), text

How can women build better friendships? Start with the right words.

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 11.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | research/study, social media, texting, threat
Summary | Linguist Deborah Tannen has just published her latest book about how women build their friendships through language. Communicating with friends and negotiating the terms of the friendship is fraught with risks especially now that social media lets one know exactly when one is being exluded from group activities. Texting also complicates our friendships.
Image Description | N/A

Tech’s sexism doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It’s in the products you use.

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 8.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, research/study
Summary | Slicon Valley has been entangled in scandals around sexism and racism recently. Many innovations incorporate artificial intelligence which means that the software learns from data reflecting our social reality but which are biased. This leads to issues like image recognition not recognizing black people as humans but as gorillas because the data the program learned from included predominantly white people. A similar case is a health app that tracked various physical paramenters but not the menstrual cycle thereby disregarding a large proportion of the female population.
Image Description | N/A

Talk to your teen about Snapchat Ghost Mode, and track their time

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 15.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | addiction, privacy, research/study, Snapchat, threat, youth
Summary | Teenagers today mainly use Snapchat, 75% to be extact. In comparison, 66% use Facebook, and 47% use Twitter. One third of teenage Snapchat users said they use Snapchat because their parents are not on it. There are various apps that let parents track their children's activity on apps to make sure they do not approach addictive levels of usage. Another good way to track that is to join Snapchat as a parent and keep an eye on one's children from within the app - this is for parents who want to be less "lame" about watching over their children. Snapchat map is a recently added function that parents should be partticularly worried about enabling users to share their location at all times.
Image Description | Screenshots of Snapchat map showing user avatars and settings as well as surveillance apps for parents.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), Snapchat

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