Link Blogging

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/whats-new-in-digital-and-social-media-research-how-editors-see-the-news-differently-from-readers-and-the-limits-of-filter-bubbles/ “Shares, Pins, and Tweets: News Readership From Daily Papers to Social Media”: From Duke University, published in Journalism Studies. By Marco Toledo Bastos. "Social media users tend to favor hard news over soft news, especially on Twitter." "news items about arts, science, technology, and opinion pieces, which are on average more frequent on social networking sites than on newspapers." “The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion,”  "analyze a billion links [...] shared on Twitter. One of out every 3,000 links produced a “large event,” or a sharing phenomenon that reached 100 additional persons [...] truly viral events (many multiple generations of sharing, several thousand adoptions at least) occurred only about once in a million instances."

http://www.vox.com/charles-kenny/#b03g31t20w14 How is the world getting better? Ezra: When I read some of the American decline literature [...] Charles: I think that we’re running out of "others" in a really positive way. We’re not allowed to discriminate against many people we used to discriminate against and so who are we going to have as the threat? Maybe what we’re left with is China. I hope we discover Martians because China is a really bad other. We really need to be cooperating with China. Treating them as a threat is going to be really counterproductive to our own quality of life.

http://proseand.co.nz/2014/02/17/type-programming-shifting-from-values-to-types/ Type programming: Shifting from values to types by Joe Barnes "I need to understand a lot more about the type system in Scala. So as of this morning, I have decided it is time for me to actually learn type programming in Scala [...] I find that all of the resources out there thrust the reader so quickly into the deeper areas of the pool, that reading them is akin to flailing for my life until the lifeguard rescues me and the only lesson I’ve learned is how to not die while in the pool. In this post, I will gently break us into type programming in the kiddie pool."