This article talks about an algorithm that Target has. Based on what someone is buying and how much and how far apart the transactions are, basically target can tell if you’re pregnant. They assign a pregnancy score to you and will send you baby pamphlets in the mail. The article talks about a father who received his daughter’s target mail suggesting various baby things. He went target and complained. It seemed that target was able to find his daughter was pregnant well before him. He later visited and issued an apology.

Personally I love recommendation algorithms on an app like Spotify. I personally don’t use Spotify anymore, but there are some features that I miss. I had been using it for maybe 7 years so it knew what I listened to very well and whenever I was in some genre, it would play me a mix of things I knew and thins I hadn’t heard and I think out of all of my music app experiences the recommendations were the best.

This type of training seems that it has the potential to help. The problem is when a child feels that their needs don’t matter and that their feeling don’t matter. There is a difference between a professional on paper and someone that is actually good at what they do. It takes a special kind of educator to educate those with special needs. I understand too that funding and poverty level affects this as well and can make things so much more difficult. I commend those that can administer effective helpful therapy while addressing a child’s needs in a concerned manner.

A close friend of mine is color blind and it is so easily that I forget that he can’t tell the difference between certain shades. I have to make sure that I adapt when we’re together. He is also left handed and mentions that the world is made for right handed people, many writing tasks that we find seem less become burdensome for him.

We learned about this in my psychology class last year. There are often unseen third variables that could be influencing both of these graphs as they go up and down. Correlation does not immediately mean causation. There are most likely a multitude of factors at play that haven’t been considered yet.

This article is about the small ways that facebook collects data about internet users, even those that don’t have a facebook account. On websites that have features that link back to facebook, they can take the site visit data and get knowledge of your ip address and they can use this information to advertise facebook to you in hopes that you sign up. For users, they can push targeted ads. They can also link facebook users through your phone contacts even if you do not have a profile. For example, if you appear in both of their contact books that get uploaded, but they don’t have each other, facebook might suggest the two as friends.

I had never thought of the troll tactic being used in politics, though now I understand there are new examples everyday. For an anti-Semite to pull out the rug of “words” from folks who are most likely more educated and better intentioned and remove the source of logic from a debate is enacting a child’s tactics of “nananabooboo” or “I know you are but what am I?”.The difference here between an anti-Semite and troll is an anti-Semite in this case was appearing in the real world and could threaten the use of real world violence or aggression that reaches far past the bounds of using all uppercase letters to “really let ‘em have it”.

This article is about Dr. Whitney Phillips who did her doctoral dissertation on internet trolls. She talks about the uncultured as a whole and lists 4 identifier to what makes a troll - Self ID (Trolls know they are trolls), Vernacular (Trolls use a particular set of phrases or words), “Lulz” the payoff that trolls receive, and Anonymity (Trolls don’t use their real names). A troll is someone who might rage bait a commenter into a ridiculous argument pretending to be serious when in fact they are “just doing it for the lulz”. She mentions that most trolls wouldn’t go as far as to harass folks on a memorial website for a teen, but some trolls don’t draw such a line. The point is that they have fun making others upset. She references schadenfreude, which is happiness at the misfortune of others, and is clear to point out that trolling is a bit more pointed.

This is a tough side of inauthenticity to contend with. The Metoo movement is extremely important and valid, especially at the time of its initial surge. Something like this that promotes something to the public eye that needs to be heard while being fake at the same time does something to attempt to discredit the movement. I know that there are certain political affiliations and folks of power that would want something like Metoo to not be taken so seriously. This feels very weaponized.

This article is about a series of 5 photos taken by Elsie Wright in 1917. There is something so compelling about these photos as they point to the evidence of real fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a famous writer used them as part of an article that pointed to the existence of fairies. The photos were later debunked.

Qanon was started on 4chan and believes that a cabal of cannablistic child predators are managing a global sex trafficking ring which is in direct opposition to Trump. This is interesting to me because it doesn’t say republicans, or the American politicians, it targets one specific president. The conspiracy theory group went on to create their own platform (8chan). 8chan is now called 8kun. If you go to their website, you are met with a similar “donate to Wikipedia” ad, but the ad says “be a free speech hero! Donate”. Afraid of what I’d find I decided not to look through 8kun. Anyway, this forum is supported by far right political allies in the U.S. and hinges on creating public dissaray by promoting conspiracy theories.

The creation of 4chan and these alternative message board with more”freedom” seems eerily silimar to the way that AI could potentially get out of hand. Social media wasn’t intended to be a platform for hate speech or illegal contents, but it had evolved into also being that. The evolution of AI right now appears as one thing, but in the future it could be very different. A derivation as far as going from MySpace to 8chan would be very concerning.

I have had this problem as well. I have two middle names and I’ve yet to encounter a form (tax, student loans), etc.) that accounts for that. I understand that it is uncommon, but I know that I can’t be the only one. Overall, especially around gender the alternatives to male or female are absolutely ridiculous and in 2026 standards this would be blantantly ignorant.

The article summarizes the timeline of Elon Musk having cold feet about purchasing twitter in 2022. He was thinking of backing out of purchasing twitter because the communication over what percentage of twitter were bot accounts seemed to be disingenuous. Critiques against Musk say he was trying to find whatever reason he could to pay less for twitter. But Musk backers would say that without accurate information over bots, he would almost be in the dark when it comes to the purchase. Obviously Elon bought twitter in the end for 44 million which was the agreed upon price. But risks of litigation showed in twitter’s favor.

I read this article about the photographer that visited a click farm in Hong Kong. It is an intimidating force in my opinion. There was that quote from earlier in this book “the internet changes nothing on its own, but it can amplify existing forces, and those amplified forces might change something”. So anybody with a large amount of money can pay these click farms for massive amounts of engagement and spread misinformation about COVID for example or a certain politician. How easy it must be to get a certain opinion into the limelight. How strange it is too that as a global community, click farms themselves make money in search of our attention.

I love this bot and its’ intent. I have such little experience with bots, I didn’t know that such a code could be written that could go into a pay gap database and post with that information. I am all for transparency when it comes to large corporations, otherwise I believe the company is trying to hide something. I think a post like this (from the university in this example) is made by a human computer. It is virtue signaling. The university clearly does not believe what it is saying it believes because the wage gap has grown in the last year. I didn’t think I could like a bot, but here we are.

I think it is the responsibility of anyone who works for any company to be aware of the ethics and values that the company holds. Is this benevolent non-profit with only good intentions and a transparent approach that keeps everything on the up and up? Or is this a giant tech conglomerate that has its hands in many pies and seeks making money most of all, no matter who they support and no matter how it gets done? It is the responsibility of the worker, I believe, to work for companies that match their own moral beliefs. I couldn’t work for a place that was poisoning the Earth, for example. I think the lead tech workers, the ones actually steering the ship, have a huge responsibility to ask themselves is this technology 1. Helpful 2. Harmful to anybody Along side making tech should be a failsafe, something to combat any negative effects any piece of tech might hold.

The Aztec Virtue ethics say that it isn’t the action that causes one to be good or bad (balanced or unbalanced), but that the virtue of an action is more about context and circumstance. For example, public drunkenness for nobility was seen as a crime punishable by death, but the elderly at a wedding were permitted and expected to get drunk. They believed “the middle path” to be the one of most virtue - dressing not too formal and not too drab. But most of all virtue was communicated regularly by community. The King had advisors, before leaving on a perhaps risky journey, merchants would make sacrifices and receive virtue adjustments in the form of a community ritual - a “refresher course” if you will.