Month: December 2016

Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability : The Two-Way : NPR

Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.

Most middle school students can’t tell native ads from articles.

Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them. … Many high school students couldn’t tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook.

Most college students didn’t suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group. … Most Stanford students couldn’t identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.

The project began before the recent uproar over the prevalence of fake news online. But its relevance is immediately clear.

Source: Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability : The Two-Way : NPR

Trump’s Carrier deal could permanently damage American capitalism – The Washington Post

Some of the worst abuses of power are the acts that the people demand from their leaders.

It seems to me what we have just witnessed is an act of ad hoc deal capitalism and, worse yet, its celebration as a model. As with the air traffic controllers, only a negligible sliver of the economy is involved, but there is huge symbolic value. A principle is being established: It is good for the president to try to figure out what people want and lean on companies to give it to them. Predictability and procedure are less important than getting the right result at the right time.

I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.

Source: Trump’s Carrier deal could permanently damage American capitalism – The Washington Post

A top GE executive says organizations must prepare for the “Emergent Era” — Quartz

we need new frameworks to understand and anticipate what’s coming next.

One of those frameworks is known as emergence. Up until recently, it’s been used primarily to explain natural systems. Basically, the term describes how, when individual agents interact en masse according to a set of simple rules, highly complex structures and behaviors emerge.

Bureaucracies were necessary when information was scarce. But in The Emergent Era, bureaucratic structures act as bottlenecks for information and inevitably throttle change. Organizations should instead use these six concepts to adapt to life in The Emergent Era.

  1. Organize around information flows; ditch hierarchy and bureaucracy.
  2. Empower individuals
  3. Replace long lists of rules with a good M.O.
  4. Establish feedback loops. They are critical.
  5. Get Used to Living in the “In Between.”
  6. Tap into the power of minds and machines together.

Source: A top GE executive says organizations must prepare for the “Emergent Era” — Quartz