URLs of wisdom (28th December)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. Thanks for following this year – more to come in 2015!

Network analysis

• A network of blogs read by science bloggers – Paige Brown reveals some of the initial results from her survey of science bloggers, using Gephi to depict which blogs other bloggers say they read.

Behaviour

• How engaged time affects reading comprehension “Roughly 40% of participants engaged for less than 15 seconds correctly assessed the message of the article, compared to more than 80% of those engaged for more than a minute.”

• How our photo obsession is threatening our memories – a small-scale study showed that taking photos in a museum impaired the overall number and details of the objects that could be recalled.

Academia online 

• Great read on big data, machine learning and the social sciences – long, but lots of ideas captured.

Blogging

• The three types of academic blogs – including useful tips for running each type.

Social media

• Using Facebook interest lists to manage personal and professional interactions.

Web/social media developments

• Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty – Facebook’s 2014 summary hasn’t been a welcome suggestion for all users. “It may not be possible to reliably pre-detect whether a person wants to see their year in review, but it’s not at all hard to ask politely—empathetically—if it’s something they want.  That’s an easily-solvable problem.  Had the app been designed with worst-case scenarios in mind, it probably would have been.”  And the follow-up post, by the same author: “…they have fallen prey to…a failure to anticipate how a design decision that really worked in one way completely failed in another, and work to handle both cases.”

• Jay Rosen on the importance of understanding the relationship between journalism and business models based on content – “The Editor has to come to a clear agreement with the publisher and commercial staff on: a.) what the business model is, meaning: how are we going to sustain ourselves and grow? b.) exactly how — in that model — the editorial team creates value for the business, and c.) the zone of independence the editorial team will need to meet those expectations.”

• Twitter analytics now viewable directly from the iOS app.