Evan Williams | Medium, A Better Place to Read & Write Things That Matter

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-q-P5_lMPEk?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;">Video: Serial entrepreneur Evan Williams talks candidly with Digg founder Kevin Rose about his experiences building Blogger, Twitter, and his latest project, <a href="https://medium.com/" target="_blank">Medium</a>.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://medium.com/" target="_blank">Medium</a> is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world. It’s used by everyone from professional journalists to amateur cooks. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.</span></blockquote><br />NOTE: A good place to start at Medium is the <a href="https://medium.com/collections" target="_blank">Collections</a>. <i>~Ed</i><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/14/twitter-co-founder-evan-williams-lays-out-his-vision-for-medium/" target="blank">TechCrunch</a></b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">E</span><b>van Williams, founder of Blogger and co-founder of Twitter, has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm. Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams is among a handful of Internet pioneers who have disrupted the media industry multiple times.</b><br /><br />Williams is taking aim squarely at the news industry’s most embarrassing vulnerability: the incessant need to trump up mundane happenings in order to habituate readers into needing news like a daily drug fix.<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">“News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import. Even if it’s fiction, it’s probably better most of the time.” </span></blockquote><br /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: left; font-family: museo-1,museo-2,helvetica; font-size: 32px; font-weight: 300; letter-spacing: -0.04em; line-height: 1em; margin: 30px 30px 30px -125px ! important; text-align: right; width: 295px;">“Does the Media Matter”</span>It’s true. The daily news cycle doesn’t always do its job at enlightening American democracy. In the aptly titled research paper, “Does the Media Matter”, a team of economists <a href="http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.1.2.35" target="_blank">found</a> that getting a randomized group of citizens to read the Washington Post did nothing for “political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data.”<br /><br />News, alone, is evidently insufficient to make us a more informed society.<br /><br />Instead, Williams argues, citizens should re-calibrate their ravenous appetite for information towards more awe-inspiring content. “Published written ideas and stories are life-changing,” he gushes, recalling his early childhood fascination with books as the motivation to take on the media establishment. The Internet “was freeing that up, that excitement about knowledge that’s inside of books–multiplied and freed and unlocked for the world; and, the world would be better in every way.”<br /><br />In Williams’s grand vision, the public reads for enlightenment; news takes a backseat directly in proportion to how often it leaves us more informed and inspired.<br /><br />Traditional news editors stake their reputations on having an intuition for what drives eyeballs to their sites. Editors don’t, however, know whether readers leave more informed.<br /><br />Williams thinks Medium has an answer: an intelligent algorithm that suggests stories, primarily based on how long users spend reading certain articles (which he’s discussing publicly for the first time). Like Pandora did for music discovery, Medium’s new intelligent curator aims to improve the ol’ human-powered system of manually scrolling through the Internet and asking others what to read.<br /><i><br /><a href="https://medium.com/about/e2f5bfcf0434" target="_blank">What we’re trying to do with Medium</a></i> by Evan Williams</div>

Evan Williams | Medium, A Better Place to Read & Write Things That Matter

Video: Serial entrepreneur Evan Williams talks candidly with Digg founder Kevin Rose about his experiences building Blogger, Twitter, and hi...

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British Security Coordination | Propaganda Masquerading as News in the US

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tbJ_pRaDuXs?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Jennet-Conant/17628764" target="blank">Simon & Schuster</a></b></span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">R</span><b>oald Dahl, the author of the children’s books <i>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</i> and <i>James and the Giant Peace</i>, was a dashing RAF officer when he took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942. His assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. </b><br /><br />A patriot eager to do his part to save his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the upper reaches of the U.S. government and Georgetown society, winning over First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, Franklin; befriending wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to Henry Morgenthau; and seducing heiresses and wealthy dowagers including the glamorous freshman congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/281096-1" target="_blank">Watch author Jennet Conant</a> give several stories (from her book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Irregulars-British-Wartime-Washington-ebook/dp/B001FA0HXY/ref=sr_1_3_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379373550&sr=1-3" target="_blank"><i>The Irregulars</i>)</a> of Mr. Dahl and other spies, including James Bond author Ian Fleming, attempting to shift public opinion in the US about the British crisis with Nazi Germany. <br /><br />Author William Boyd wrote the feature below for The Guardian and penned the novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Restless-ebook/dp/B002VQ7PVS/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379375782&sr=1-1&keywords=restless+boyd" target="_blank"><i>Restless</i></a> based on the British Security Coordination which was made into a TV movie by the BBC.</div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fnkWCv0BImo?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/aug/19/military.secondworldwar" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Guardian</b></span></a><br />by William Boyd<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span><b>he British Security Coordination (BSC) represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history; a covert operation that was run in the US, during 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor and the US’s eventual participation in the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.</b><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT4pGWA7PvdqD3FtSaD_BeT0bTwjh_8wQ4k7aq1eUjp4BUXLErjul8tNpOmjbbcNG-XEvim9m1kGDgDUfnrFSus04-FxjTdaW03XPXztqLvsV7AGJWjynLBj5VecVjz5nitrbgI2r7mc/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT4pGWA7PvdqD3FtSaD_BeT0bTwjh_8wQ4k7aq1eUjp4BUXLErjul8tNpOmjbbcNG-XEvim9m1kGDgDUfnrFSus04-FxjTdaW03XPXztqLvsV7AGJWjynLBj5VecVjz5nitrbgI2r7mc/s1600/1.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dahl, Photo: Bettmann/Corbis 1944</td></tr></tbody></table>The BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against those organizations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist.<br /><br />The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a “good thing” and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.<br /><br />BSC’s media reach was extensive: it included such eminent American columnists as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, and influenced coverage in newspapers such as the Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Baltimore Sun. BSC effectively ran its own radio station, WRUL, and a press agency, the Overseas News Agency (ONA), feeding stories to the media as they required from foreign datelines to disguise their provenance. WRUL would broadcast a story from ONA and it thus became a US “source” suitable for further dissemination, even though it had arrived there via BSC agents. It would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, and relayed to listeners and readers as fact. The story would spread exponentially and nobody suspected this was all emanating from three floors of the Rockefeller Centre. BSC took enormous pains to ensure its propaganda was circulated and consumed as bona fide news reporting. To this degree its operations were 100% successful: they were never rumbled.<br /><br />One of BSC’s most successful operations originated in South America and illustrates the clandestine ability it had to influence even the most powerful. The aim was to suggest that Hitler’s ambitions extended across the Atlantic. In October 1941, a map was stolen from a German courier’s bag in Buenos Aires. The map purported to show a South America divided into five new states - Gaus, each with their own Gauleiter - one of which, Neuspanien, included Panama and “America's lifeline” the Panama Canal. In addition, the map detailed Lufthansa routes from Europe to and across South America, extending into Panama and Mexico. The inference was obvious: watch out, America, Hitler will be at your southern border soon. The map was taken as entirely credible and Roosevelt even cited it in a powerful pro-war, anti-Nazi speech on October 27 1941: “This map makes clear the Nazi design,” Roosevelt declaimed, “not only against South America but against the United States as well.”<br /><br />The news of the map caused a tremendous stir: as a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda it could not be bettered. But was the South America map genuine? My own hunch is that it was a British forgery (BSC had a superb document forging facility across the border in Canada). The story of its provenance is just too pat to be wholly believable. Allegedly, only two of these maps were made; one was in Hitler’s keeping, the other with the German ambassador in Buenos Aires. So how come a German courier, who was involved in a car crash in Buenos Aires, happened to have a copy on him? Conveniently, this courier was being followed by a British agent who in the confusion of the incident somehow managed to snaffle the map from his bag and it duly made its way to Washington.</div>

British Security Coordination | Propaganda Masquerading as News in the US

Simon & Schuster R oald Dahl, the author of the children’s books Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peace , was...

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High School Goes Digital | No More Books

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ET3M4Vw2d2G0uxvcdbcqiKilPw5E6KySl3zHVopl_BePjrN9mPJfm-hjEWYK0VdvPWZjVO7i2OAZWxM34YkW8QA8dXULwkhy-urxrEBmWYbxqg79XRivHdZZ-6zo_IKBifsGGxKjCZk/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5ET3M4Vw2d2G0uxvcdbcqiKilPw5E6KySl3zHVopl_BePjrN9mPJfm-hjEWYK0VdvPWZjVO7i2OAZWxM34YkW8QA8dXULwkhy-urxrEBmWYbxqg79XRivHdZZ-6zo_IKBifsGGxKjCZk/s1600/1.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Izayah Powell, left and DeVante Reid set up their digital devices during freshman orientation at Archbishop Stepinac High School<br />Photo: Matthew Brown/The Journal News</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/12/no-more-books-high-school-goes-all-digital-/2807577/" target="blank">USA Today</a></b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">N</span><b>icholas Dadario weighed his backpack last year when it was filled with textbooks for his high school freshman honors classes at Archbishop Stepinac High School.</b><br /><br />It weighed 35 pounds.<br /><br />That backpack is going to be much lighter this year. Stepinac in White Plains has become one of the first high schools in the country to drop all textbooks like dead weight and replace them with a “digital library.” When students started classes Monday, they were zipping to an app or website on their tablet or laptop and had instant access to all 40 texts in the Stepinac curriculum, not to mention all sorts of note-taking, highlighting and interactive features.<br /><br />“It’s not only lighter, but you’re mobile,” said Dadario, 15. “You can bring your computer to your friend’s house, wherever, and you’re all set.”<br /><br />In the past, students’ families had to spend up to $700 a year on textbooks. This year — after the one-time purchase of a tablet or laptop — families have to pay $150 for access to the digital library.<br /><br />Using the digital library is almost as easy as cracking open a new book (as long as your Internet connection is on). A student can almost instantly tap into a global studies digital book and open an interactive map of Egypt or a speech by President John F. Kennedy about the Cuban Missile Crisis or a PBS documentary about Iran’s disputed presidential election of 2009.<br /><br />“Students can search for what they want, just like with Google, so now we can teach them to interpret and analyze the information,” said Matthew Hogan, social studies chairperson.<br /><br />A teacher can show a page from a digital book on an interactive whiteboard at the front of the class or send students a link to a particular math problem, with the teacher’s notes added in.</div>

High School Goes Digital | No More Books

Izayah Powell, left and DeVante Reid set up their digital devices during freshman orientation at Archbishop Stepinac High School Photo: Matt...

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Travelling Salesman

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6ybd5rbQ5rU?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><i><a href="http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/" target="blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span><b>ravelling Salesman</b></a></i><b> is an intellectual thriller about four mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem in computer science history — P vs. NP. The four have jointly created a “system” which could be the next major advancement for our civilization or destroy the fabric of humanity.</b><br /><br />The solution’s immediate application would be for theoretical computer science. However, its application would soon extend to countless other disciplines. For example, by utilizing the solution to P vs. NP, a hacker could crack advanced encryption codes within seconds—a task that now takes weeks, months, or even years. He could break into La Guardia's air traffic control or China’s communication grid. But the mathematical algorithm would also serve as the basis for accelerated biological research, curing diseases such as AIDS and cancer.<br /><br />The film begins with the four at a secret location waiting to meet with a high-ranking official of the United States Department of Defense. The group discusses the global implications of their solution, and they agree that they must be extremely careful with who they allow to control their discovery.<br /><br />The silver-tongued DoD agent soon arrives and presents them each with an offer of 10 million dollars in exchange for their portion of the algorithmic solution. He attempts to deftly address their concerns and sway the opinions of the four.<br /><br />In the end, only one mathematician speaks out against selling the solution. In pleading his case, he is forced to reveal the dark truth about his portion of the algorithm. As the mathematicians are about to sign documents that will give the U.S. government sole and private ownership of their solution, they wrestle with the moral dilemma of how this volatile discovery will be used. The math is real. The implications are real.<br /><b><br />The math behind the film</b><br />The P vs. NP problem is the most notorious unsolved problem in computer science. First introduced in 1971, it asks whether one class of problems (NP) is more difficult than another class (P).<br /><br />Mathematicians group problems into classes based on how long they take to be solved and verified. “NP” is the class of problems whose answer can be verified in a reasonable amount of time. Some NP problems can also be solved quickly. Those problems are said to be in “P”, which stands for polynomial time. However, there are other problems in NP which have never been solved in polynomial time.<br /><br />The question is, is it possible to solve all NP problems as quickly as P problems? To date, no one knows for sure. Some NP questions seem harder than P questions, but they may not be.<br /><br />Currently, many NP problems take a long time to solve. As such, certain problems like logistics scheduling and protein structure prediction are very difficult. Likewise, many cryptosystems, which are used to secure the world's data, rely on the assumption that they cannot be solved in polynomial time.<br /><br />If someone were to show that NP problems were not difficult—that P and NP problems were the same—it would would have significant practical consequences. Advances in bioinformatics and theoretical chemistry could be made. Much of modern cryptography would be rendered inert. Financial systems would be exposed, leaving the entire Western economy vulnerable.<br /><br />Proving that P = NP would have enormous ramifications that would be equally enlightening, devastating, and valuable...<br /><br />Thanks, Akito.</div>

Travelling Salesman

T ravelling Salesman is an intellectual thriller about four mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem i...

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The Scarecrow

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/lUtnas5ScSE" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">S</span><b>ince its release 3 days ago, <a href="http://www.chipotle.com/en-us/Default.aspx" target="_blank">Chipotle</a>’s YouTube video, <i>The Scarecrow</i>, has generated scads of publicity and media attention, stirred controversy and <a href="http://farmingamerica.org/2013/09/13/hey-chipotle/" target="_blank">angered folks</a> in the food processing industry. </b><br /><br />The restaurant chain is taking aim at Big-Food and courting Millennials who want to eat better, eat local—and brand lightly.<br /><br /><blockquote>“In a dystopian fantasy world, all food production is controlled by fictional industrial giant Crow Foods. Scarecrows have been displaced from their traditional role of protecting food, and are now servants to the crows and their evil plans to dominate the food system. Dreaming of something better, a lone scarecrow sets out to provide an alternative to the unsustainable processed food from the factory.” ~form the <a href="http://www.scarecrowgame.com/film.html" target="_blank">Chipotle website</a></blockquote><br />The film was created by Academy Award–winning Moonbot Studios and is set to a remake of the song “Pure Imagination” (performed by Grammy Award–winning artist Fiona Apple) from the 1971 film classic <i>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</i>. </div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/m3ZOFIE5e4g" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Scarecrow</i> video is a promotion for Chipotle’s <a href="http://www.scarecrowgame.com/game.html" target="_blank">free iOS game</a> of the same name and, coming early next year, four TV show–length <i>Farmed and Dangerous</i> short movies.</div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5skRM-9S4Ng" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;">“We’re trying to educate people about where their food comes from,” Chipotle chief marketing officer Mark Crumpacker <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/12/chipotle-big-food-millennial-marketing/2798023/" target="_blank">tells USA Today</a>. And, not coincidentally, the company is also trying to win over millennials, the coveted twenty-something cohort that Crumpacker says is “skeptical of brands that perpetuate themselves.”<br /></div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/IS8YNQU2z5o" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;">Last year, Chipotle served more than 10,000,000 pounds of local produce. Holthouse Farms is one of more than 40 producers selling to local Chipotle restaurants.</div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eu0bcOQG3s0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;">Niman Ranch Pork Company founder and pig farmer, Paul Willis, talks about reconstructing and restoring tall grass prairie lands and, below, shares his story of raising free-range, pasture raised pigs for Chipotle.</div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4U_ARgiLOiU" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;">Below, Chipotle Founder, Chairman and Co-CEO, Steve Ells, reminisces about how he got the idea for the restaurant.</div><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/wmH73Diqf5Q?rel=0" width="853"></iframe>

The Scarecrow

S ince its release 3 days ago, Chipotle ’s YouTube video, The Scarecrow , has generated scads of publicity and media attention, stirred cont...

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