By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an “echo chamber” that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions.
A recent study published in PNAS examines this phenomenon and finds that social-media users show marked focus in the types of news that interests them. These social-media participants tend to develop strong and well-defined communities around the news outlets they support, and they tend to make connections with like-minded people regardless of the geographic distance between them.
You and a coworker step into an elevator. As you descend in the tiny metal box, the silence between you grows awkward. Suddenly your coworker blurts out, “Such a shame that we’re stuck in the office on a beautiful day like this!” You mumble, “It sure is.” As an introvert, you despise making small talk; it feels like your brain was literally…
Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device. Source: Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should…
A challenge we faced while building SpriteBox Coding, a learn to code game for kids ages 5+, was that the educational component primarily centred around puzzles. However, as we learned with our previous title LightBot, for some kids, puzzles simply aren’t exciting on their own. There were often players who needed a reason for why…
Rogers was so meticulous in his process for translating ideas so they could be easily understood by children that a pair of writers on the show came up with a nine-step process that he used to translate from normal English into “Freddish”, the special language he used when speaking to children. Source: Freddish, the special language…
According to a recent Pew survey, 59 percent of teens have been bullied online, and according to a 2017 survey conducted by Ditch the Label, a nonprofit anti-bullying group, more than one in five 12-to-20-year-olds experience bullying specifically on Instagram. “Instagram is a good place sometimes,” said Riley, a 14-year-old who, like most kids in…
An Indian teenager has built what is thought could be the world’s lightest satellite, which will be launched at a Nasa facility in the US in June. Rifath Shaarook’s 64-gram (0.14 lb) device was selected as the winner in a youth design competition. The 18-year-old says its main purpose was to demonstrate the performance of…
