Weekend Reading: Late April Edition

Happy Friday, faithful ProfHacker readers! Here are 5 links worth reading plus a video for your weekend consumption.

• "The Web’s Recommendation Engines Are Broken. Can We Fix Them?," by Renee Diresta (WIRED): "Today, recommendation engines are perhaps the biggest threat to societal cohesion on the internet—and, as a result, one of the biggest threats to societal cohesion in the offline world, too. The recommendation engines we engage with are broken in ways that have grave consequences: amplified conspiracy theories, gamified news, nonsense infiltrating mainstream discourse, misinformed voters. Recommendation engines have become The Great Polarizer."

• "OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong," by Adi Robertson (The Verge): "By the time OLPC officially launched in 2007, the “green machine” — once a breakout star of the 21st-century educational technology scene — was a symbol of tech industry hubris, a one-size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems. But more than a decade later, the project’s legacy is more complicated than a simple cautionary tale."

• "I Sat Through the First Stop on Facebook’s Feel-Good Road Show," by Daniel Kolitz (The Atlantic): "The event was the inaugural stop in Community Boost, a kind of roving technical college that Facebook plans to bring to at least 30 mid-sized U.S. cities this year. Each installment offers a few days of lectures, smaller ‘breakout’ sessions, and one-on-one consultations, free for anyone who shows up. The goal, according to Facebook, is to teach business owners and employees the ‘digital skills’ to make it online. Given the intensity of the Cambridge Analytica coverage, I half-expected pickets, bullhorns, marauders in rubber Mark Zuckerberg masks when I arrived. What I found instead were two idling valets and, inside a bright, high-ceilinged registration hall, a kind of historical reenactment of life as it was lived eight days earlier."

• "What Does The Amazon Echo Look Mean For Personal Style? ," by Kyle Chayka (Racked): "I worry that we are moving from a time of human curation to a time in which algorithms drive an increasingly large portion of what we consume . This impacts not only the artifacts we experience but also how we experience them. Think of the difference between a friend recommending a clothing brand and something showing up in targeted banner ads, chasing you around the internet. It’s more likely that your friend understands what you want and need, and you’re more likely to trust the recommendation, even if it seems challenging to you."

• "The Silicon Valley quest to preserve Stephen Hawking’s voice – San Francisco Chronicle," by Jason Fagone (San Francisco Chronicle): "In 2014 Hawking was still using the CallText 5010 speech synthesizer, a version last upgraded in 1986. In nearly 30 years, he had never switched to newer technology. Hawking liked the voice just the way it was, and had stubbornly refused other options. But now the hardware was showing wear and tear. If it failed entirely, his distinctive voice would be lost to the ages. The solution was to replicate the decaying hardware in new software, to somehow transplant a 30-year-old voice synthesizer into a modern laptop — without changing the sound of the voice."

This week’s video comes from Pulitzer-prize winner Kendrick Lamar:

["Western Kingbird" by Becky Matsubara is licensed under CC BY]