Business, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

The Very Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson. The colors were part of a theme called "Solarized Dark" for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. To be honest, I didn't think much of Solarized at first. But I soon found that I couldn't work with any other color scheme.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Tech Platforms Don’t Treat All Terrorism the Same Mar 22, 2019

Show notes

In January 2018, the top policy executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified in a Senate hearing about terrorism and social media, touting their companies’ use of artificial intelligence to detect and remove terrorist content from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Facebook Changes Its Ad Tech to Stop Discrimination Mar 22, 2019

Show notes

On Tuesday, Facebook reached a historic settlement with civil rights groups that had accused the company of allowing advertisers to unlawfully discriminate against minorities, women, and older people by using the platform’s ad-targeting technology to exclude them from seeing ads for housing, jobs, and credit—three areas with legal protections for groups that have historically been disenfranchised.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fei-Fei Li Wants AI to Care More About Humans Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat’s brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal’s brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. “They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system,” Li told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The EU Hits Google With a Third Billion-Dollar Fine. So What? Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

European officials Wednesday fined Google €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for more than a decade of abusive practices in how it brokered online ads for other websites like newspapers, blogs, and travel aggregators. This is the third billion-dollar antitrust penalty levied against Google by the European Commission, which has fined the company more than $9 billion for anticompetitive practices since 2017.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Mosque Shooter Exploited the Power of the Internet Mar 20, 2019

Show notes

After each new horrific mass shooting, an all-too-familiar cycle often plays out: Reporters (myself included) race to attempt to unpack an alleged shooter’s possible motivations by piecing together clues from their social media accounts and online postings before it all gets scrubbed from the internet.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Deeper Education Issue Under the College Bribery Scandal Mar 20, 2019

Show notes

The college admissions bribery scandal has all the components of a made for TV movie, including celebrity cameos, suspense, and unexpected twists and turns. Behind the broken admissions process and the drama, however, a different educational crisis is looming. According to a 2018 Korn Ferry study, by 2030, there could be a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million people, costing an estimated $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue. In the U.S. alone, the study forecasts $1.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The People Trying to Make Internet Recommendations Less Toxic Mar 19, 2019

Show notes

The internet is an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own. New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How Cambridge Analytica Sparked the Great Privacy Awakening Mar 18, 2019

Show notes

On October 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email to his then-director of product development. For years, Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users’ unwitting friends, and Zuckerberg was considering whether giving away all that information was risky. In his email, he suggested it was not: “I’m generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as you think,” he wrote at the time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With Tech on the Defensive, SXSW Takes an Introspective Turn Mar 18, 2019

Show notes

The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the “interactive” portion of the festival. The city’s downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden “entrepreneurs” and “founders” wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company’s clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices