Humor is great, but what makes me laugh might not be the same thing that makes you laugh. Comedy is subjective. All jokes aren’t created equal.

Unless they are created by a computer…

Scientists from the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom created computer software that can create a joke from scratch. Appropriately named The Joking Computer, this invention builds jokes by using a dictionary and a small collection of rules.

With a few clicks of a mouse, you can construct a joke out of thin air. You can choose a certain type of joke, such as “What is the difference between…” Or you can choose a joke about a specific subject like sports or travel.

Can a computer really create jokes just by throwing together a few words from a dictionary? In order to find out, I decided to take The Joking Computer for a spin. Here are a few of the jokes it created for me:

What kind of a score is running? — A hat track.”

What kind of a calcium sulphate is a boom box? –A ghetto plaster.”

Why is a correct interruption different from a smart tool?– One is a right break, the other is a bright rake.”

What do you call a European that has a Scotland? –A great briton.”

All in all, I created about a dozen jokes. Some made me chuckle. Some just confused me. I give The Joking Computer an A for effort, but I don’t think I would rush right out and buy tickets if the computer at a show at the Improv.

What to see what jokes The Joking Computer will create for you. Try it out here and let me if you come up with any funny ones.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

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If you are like most people, you go right to your News Feed before wiping the sleep out of our eyes.

The Facebook News Feed is a vital part of our lives. How else would we see that Jimmy got engaged or that Molly’s birthday is today? It is how we are fed our news before we are fed our cereal.

You can’t imagine starting your day without it.

But that wasn’t always the case.

When Facebook released the News Feed feature on September 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg thought it would change people’s lives.

It did, but unforunatley, people do not always like change. In fact, people hated News Feed. A student at Northwestern University started a Facebook group “Students Against Facebook News Feed” and the membership reached 700,000 people in less than a week.

The main objection to News Feed was that it released too much of your personal information to the world. People felt the feed bordered on stalking and started referring to Facebook as “Stalkerbook.”

To calm his audience, Zuckerberg wrote a blog post addressing people’s concerns. He agreed that stalking wasn’t cool but also mentioned that, “none of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes.”

The information was always able to be accessed. And now it was being accessed. A lot.

In August 2006, Facebook users viewed 12 billion pages. In October, following the launch of the New Feed, views were up to 22 billion. So, no matter what people were saying publicly about the change, Zuckerberg knew that they actually liked it. He had data to back it up.

News Feed did undergo some slight changes. Facebook decided to add additional protection – the ability to restrict which information could be made public – to make the feed feel less like an intruder.

To address concerns, Zuckerberg participated in a live question-and-answer session to discuss News Feed. During which he explained that he had not expected the uproar because he expected that users would realize that the information on News Feed had always been visible on Facebook, it was just better organized and presented.

Because the introduction of News Feed was a drastic change, it was immediately viewed as the worst thing ever.

And that was what caused all the chaos, change. Not a new feature or a stalker-ish element of the site. It all boiled down to change.

People resist change, even on Facebook.

As David Kirkpatrick puts it in his book, The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg realized, “that users take time to get used to changes, no matter how inevitable or necessary they might seem to him.”

It may have taken time, but now News Feed is a lasting part of our daily lives. Imagine if we would have never given it a chance.

Photo credit: Pixabay

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Let’s start with OK Cupid, a popular (free) dating site that basically admitted they were toying with users for years in a sort of social experiment. If you were a user, they might say you were a better match with someone than you really were.

In one experiment, the site took pairs of “bad” matches between two people – about 30% – and told them they were “exceptionally good” for each other, or 90% matches. “Not surprisingly, the users sent more first messages when we said they were compatible,” Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OKCupid, said in a blog post on the company’s research and insights blog. (BBC)

Umm.

That’s a little scary. To make matters worse, OK Cupid doesn’t even care.

“OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” wrote OkCupid president Christian Rudder in a blog post Monday. He said, “If you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” (USA Today)

Loosely translated:

How can Mr. Rudder be so oblivious to the power his website holds? OK Cupid isn’t Amazon, it’s dealing with the very social fabric that keeps humanity going: relationships. Seriously, did this guy not read Spider-Man comics growing up?

To make matters worse, OK Cupid isn’t even the most damning revelation of a social network affecting human behavior this summer. That goes to the king of all social media:

They admitted to altering users news feeds to influence mood:

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. (The Atlantic)

OK Cupid is just a dating site. If your date goes badly, you can at least chalk it up to assholes with fake Internet dating profiles. Facebook is real life – or as real as it can get online. Everyone is on Facebook; your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, that person you met in line at Jack in the Box last week. Facebook is such a popular social network in part because all your connections on it usually started offline.

Seriously, we need to stress this AGAIN:

Facebook may not actively alter the mood of content, but they do alter what content you see through their algorithms. As danah boyd wrote earlier this month:

Facebook actively alters the content you see. Most people focus on the practice of marketing, but most of what Facebook’s algorithms do involve curating content to provide you with what they think you want to see. Facebook algorithmically determines which of your friends’ posts you see. They don’t do this for marketing reasons. They do this because they want you to want to come back to the site day after day. They want you to be happy. They don’t want you to be overwhelmed. Their everyday algorithms are meant to manipulate your emotions. What factors go into this? We don’t know.

I’m a marketer by profession. I spend my entire day on social media accounts, especially Facebook, in an attempt to push a signal through the noise. I know pretty well how to game Facebook’s system. Post engaging content and your fans will like, comment and share it; making it more likely that they see your content in the future.

This makes perfect sense for Facebook pages, but Facebook also has an algorithm for your friends. Isn’t that irresponsible? Should a corporation really be in charge of the information you get from your social circle?

If Facebook decided to secretly abuse this power, the consequences could be very Orwellian.

Take this other great passage from boyd’s article:

My minimal use has made me an algorithmic pariah and if I weren’t technologically savvy enough to know better, I would feel as though I’ve been shunned by my friends rather than simply deemed unworthy by an algorithm.

It’s scary to think of someone feeling a lack of worth because of Facebook’s algorithm. Even scarier, what if Facebook decided to start altering newsfeeds for someone’s specific personal gain (think a political candidate)?

The next big social network? Maybe not the one that discovers the next great niche, maybe it’s one that does this:

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Our Batman video games look shockingly realistic:

And we are even getting a TV series about the city he grew up in:

Yes, Batman is crushing popular culture as he turns 75, but it wasn’t always that way. YouTube user Matthew Pearce often records videos about various digital video editing techniques, but he took a break to celebrate the Dark Knight’s milestone birthday by uploading this video of a Batman game that came out on the Apple II:

Wow, we’ve come a long way. While we wait for the next Batman blockbuster, let’s remember that there was once a time when all we had to get our Caped Crusader fill was comic books, the above game and this:

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16-year-old Nick Rubin created a plug-in, Greenhouse, that tracks a politician’s campaign donations. The beauty of the plug-in is that it identifies a politician’s name within an article you are reading, highlights the name and lets you click on it. From there, within the article, you can read who has been donating to that politician. Nick was recently interviewed by Vice, where he talked about the genesis of his extension and why he created it.

Let’s have a little fun. I’m going to run through a few Politico articles where specific politicians make claims or push for legislation and see how their political donations matchup to their beliefs.

From the Politico article “Why liberals are abandoning the Obamacare employer mandate.” Maine Senator Susan Collins, who’s been trying to repeal the Obamacare employer mandate, gets the majority of her funding from the retired and health care professionals:

From “Coal fires up West Virginia House race” we find that Nick Rahall, a representative from West Virginia, denounced the Environmental Protection Agency as “callous.” Although West Virginia is one of the biggest coal producers in the country, I also found Rahall’s contributions, specifically from the railroad industry, to be interesting:

In “GOP plays Tom Steyer card against Democrats,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attacks Democrats for their association with pro-environment billionaire Tom Steyer. Now, let’s look at McConnell’s 5th largest campaign contributor:

In “Elizabeth Warren student loan bill stalls,” we find that Warren, senator of Massachusetts, gets a ton of financial support from education:

In “For advocates, anti-soda failures still have pop,” Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro pushes for the first-ever federal bill to tax soda. Is there a coincidence that her biggest backing is from health professionals?

Finally, from “Base closings play into campaigns,” we see that one of Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran’s key messages in his re-election campaign is that he will keep military bases in the state, including Keesler Air Force Base, from being shutdown. Sure enough, “defense aerospace” shows up on the list of Cochran’s campaign contributions:

Now, politicians supporting causes due to financial motivations is nothing new. Lobbying has been around forever. I’m sure you’re not surprised to find Candidate X supporting Cause Y because Firm Z gave him or her a sizable campaign contribution. It’s just nice to see it while reading a specific article. Greenhouse provides just a little bit more perspective and transparency in political journalism.

That can’t be a bad thing.

The post Greenhouse Gives Us Easy Access to a Politician’s Motivation appeared first on Attention Land.

Quick, here’s a graphical representation of the current streaming music industry:

Everybody’s doing it. So why care about Amazon? Pandora is the OG of the streaming music game. Spotify and Rdio were game changers. Rhapsody has been around for years. Beats Music looks cool and was just bought by Apple for, well basically this:

I don’t think Amazon is getting into the streaming music game to compete with these services, I think they are doing it to compete with Netflix.

Right now, there are three types of people in the world: those that use Netflix, those that use Amazon Prime and cavemen.

Honestly, Netflix is better. It has a better interface. It has more options. The only reason to choose Amazon Prime right now? Free shipping.

That’s a big incentive, however. It’s the reason I currently use Amazon Prime. It’s the reason I keep using it when I curse that it doesn’t have a show or movie that I know Netflix would. It’s also a big reason why people new to the streaming video industry might choose Amazon. Now, Amazon will not only offer them a competing library and free shipping, but a streaming music service to (attempt to) rival the heavyweights in the industry? That could be a big blow to Netflix.

Using very simplistic math, if I elect to use Netflix for my video ($8.99 a month), Spotify for my music  ($9.99 a month) and pay an average of $50 a year for shipping products on Amazon, I’m spending about $277 a year. An Amazon Prime membership costs $99. Isn’t that a no-brainer?

Also, according to Time:

A Prime member now makes $1,224 in Amazon purchases each year, on average, compared with $505 for non-Prime customers. After factoring in costs incurred for shipping and streaming, the average Prime member yields Amazon $78 more in profits than other customers, according to Morningstar.

Every time Amazon converts someone to Prime, they are boosting sales of their products. It’s a brilliant little system.

Now, in its current state, Amazon Music isn’t that great. For example, I couldn’t find any Bryan Adams music, but it’s more than likely that Amazon will be expanding its streaming collection in the future. When they do, they might influence even more people to sign up.

Smart move, eh?

The post The Simple Brilliance of Amazon’s Music Play appeared first on Attention Land.

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Now I know how the process actually work. Now you know too. Do you care?

Another one of life’s mysteries solved.

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Also, check out where the curtains go at 3:31 of the video. Awesome!

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The Clippers took the Oklahoma City Thunder to 6 games in the Western Conference Semifinals, the Lakers are coming off one of the worst seasons in franchise history.

How could the restaurant, and their ad agency (if they had one), make such a mistake?

I don’t think it was a mistake. The image of the ad blunder has gone viral. Countless Twitter accounts have tweeted about it and numerous blogs have posted about it – that’s pretty good reach for a local restaurant. Perhaps they are taking a play out of Amy’s Baking Company’s “any PR is good PR” book?

Checking their Twitter account, they haven’t even tweeted a correction. In fact, their one tweet on the matter is laughably bad:

@AMonFM @darrenrovell Wow. So many tweets. We don’t have a lot time for twitting–or much else. Being wholly focused on food and all. hashtag

— Upper West (@theUpperWest) May 22, 2014

 

So bad. Too bad. Too bad to be real, in my opinion.

Your thoughts?

The post Why I Think This Viral Blunder Might Have Been By Design appeared first on Attention Land.