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Month: April 2017

Google working to counter “fake news” and other fake stuff

Google working to counter “fake news” and other fake stuff

Google wants to give higher priority, in search results, to authoritative sources. However, no one outside of Google knows what “authoritative” means nor how Google determines that information is “authoritative”. How’s Google learning from the data to figure out what’s authoritative? How’s that actually being put into practice? Google wouldn’t comment about these specifics. It wouldn’t say what goes into determining how a page is deemed to be authoritative now or how that is changing with the new algorithm. It…

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Google working to counter "fake news" and other fake stuff

Google working to counter "fake news" and other fake stuff

Google wants to give higher priority, in search results, to authoritative sources. However, no one outside of Google knows what “authoritative” means nor how Google determines that information is “authoritative”. How’s Google learning from the data to figure out what’s authoritative? How’s that actually being put into practice? Google wouldn’t comment about these specifics. It wouldn’t say what goes into determining how a page is deemed to be authoritative now or how that is changing with the new algorithm. It…

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And incredibly, he is still dead 3 years later!

And incredibly, he is still dead 3 years later!

Twitter is today filled to the brim with tributes recognizing the death of Gabriel García Márquez, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. One tiny detail is missing from these tributes – he died in 2014! And apparently he just died again in 2017! Just when you think the social media mob could not possibly do something dumber than the day before, there comes the next day! Easily verifiable items spreading like wild fire on social media illustrate…

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Most car crashes caused by cellular phone usage?

Most car crashes caused by cellular phone usage?

I saw an item on a Facebook group where the general meme was that everyone knows cellular phone usage while driving is the cause of most vehicle crashes. The data, however, paints a remarkably different picture. Cellular phone usage, per the government’s own data, is a minor causative factor in vehicle crashes. There are many causative factors in car crashes: one category of causative factors is “distracted driving”. Cellular phone usage is a subset of “distracted driving”. The U.S.government’s National…

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Are social networks fading? One early proponent says yes.

Are social networks fading? One early proponent says yes.

The man who set up the most popular social network in Russia [VK] axed all of his online friends in one fell swoop this week. Having them, he wrote, was so 2010. Source: Social networks are fading as messenger apps rise up | Stuff.co.nz Just as MySpace fell off the popular list, Facebook has lost many young people who have migrated to Instagram or SnapChat. Many people have deleted one or more of their social media accounts and this does seem to…

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