Just let the AI handle it …

Sep 27, 2021 | Humour, News

Having deligated its English-to-Swedish translation duties to an AI tool (Alexa perhaps ..?) Amazon announced

“We are pleased to open the doors for Amazon.se and offer Swedish consumers a selection of more than 150 million products, of which tens of thousands come from local Swedish companies,” said Alex Ootes, vice president of European expansion at Amazon, in a press release.

Upon reviewing feedback from local Swedish press Computing commented:

“Among those 150 million products, Swedish shoppers were surprised,  some no doubt delighted, to find an expansive range of “cock brushes”, “cock paintings”, “rape curtains” and “prostitute earrings”, although how many came from local Swedish companies was not made clear.”

Call for Papers #SMSociety

Sep 23, 2021 | Conference, Events

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2022 International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety)! #SMSociety will be held virtually onJuly 18th & 19th, 2022. The conference’s two-day program will feature live panels and paper presentations, tutorials, and networking events.

In keeping with the conference’s inter- and transdisciplinary focus, we welcome both quantitative and qualitative scholarly and original submissions that crosses disciplinary boundaries and expands our understanding of current and future trends in social media research across many fields including (but not limited to): Communication, Computer Science, Education, Journalism, Information Science, Law, Management, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

#SMSociety is a gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. It is the premier venue for sharing and discovering new peer-reviewed interdisciplinary research on how social media affects society. Organized by the Social Media Lab at Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, #SMSociety provides participants with opportunities to exchange ideas, present original research, learn about recent and ongoing studies, and network with peers.

 

NEW FOR 2022

·       #SMSociety will switch from being an annual conference to a biennial conference. After 2022, the next iteration of #SMSociety will be in the summer of 2024 (exact date, location and format TBD).

·       The Program Committee for #SMSociety will be authors who have submitted their papers to the conference for consideration. For a submission to be considered, one author from each submission is required to peer review (double blind) three other conference submissions.

·       Instead of Full and WIP paper submissions, #SMSociety will now be inviting authors to submit extended abstracts with a 1k-1.5K word limit.

·       The program will be organized in a way to support attendance across multiple time zones and will allow our authors to safely connect. All presentations will also be recorded and made available to registered attendees for a limited time after the conference. 

TOPICS OF INTEREST

1.     Cyberbullying, Trolling and Antisocial Behavior

2.     Digital Methods

3.     Discourse and Public Opinion

4.     Health and Wellbeing

5.     Marketing and Outreach

6.     Misinformation and Disinformation

7.     Online and Offline Communities

8.     Platform Governance and Regulation

9.     Politics and Policy

10.  Privacy, Security and Trust

11.  Use and Users

SUBMISSION DETAILS

·       https://socialmediaandsociety.org/submit/

PUBLICATIONS:

·       Publication of Pre-prints and Datasets: To promote your work during and after the conference, authors of accepted papers (extended abstracts) are encouraged to share their work as a pre-print via EasyChair Preprint. Preprint will be accessible via the conference online program and other channels. If you have a dataset to share, you can also upload it to one of many data repositories such as Dataverse or figshare. Authors of accepted papers will then have an opportunity to provide a link to their pre-print and/or dataset for inclusion in the conference program.

·       Journal Publications: We will circulate CFP to relevant journal special issues as they become available in 2022. (We hope that feedback received from other scholars during the review process and the Q&A part of your presentation will help you refine your ideas and develop your work into a full paper after the conference. Once ready, you are encouraged to submit your full paper to a journal of your choice.)

 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

·       Anatoliy Gruzd, Ryerson University

·       Philip Mai, Ryerson University

·       James Cook, University of Maine at Augusta

·       Zoetanya Sujon, London College of Communication

·       Chei Sian Lee, Nanyang Technological University

·       Jenna Drenten, Loyola University Chicago

·       Céline Yunya Song, Hong Kong Baptist University

·       Katrin Weller, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences

·       Felipe Soares, Ryerson University

2022 International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety)

held virtually on July 18-19, 2022

https://socialmediaandsociety.org/2021/smsociety-2022-cfp/ 

IMPORTANT DATES

Conference Date: July 18-19, 2022

Papers (Extended Abstracts) Due: Jan. 31, 2022

Workshops & Tutorials Due: Mar. 14, 2022

Panels Due: Mar. 14, 2022

Notification Due: Mar. 31, 2022

Facebook CTO steps down

Sep 23, 2021 | News

A change in the FB technology leadership team follows hot on the heels of  a series of reports last week by WSJ that discussed how Facebook “either ignores or fails to properly address numerous problems affecting users across its services”.

Included in the articles was the allegation that FB was fully aware that Instagram has had a negative effect on the mental health of teenage girls as well as how algorithm changes “made users angrier” and how Facebook is exploited by criminal gangs to recruit members.

FB has criticised the WSJ articles saying that they contain “deliberate mischaracterisations” and saying that they ” [make] a claim which could only be made by cherry-picking selective quotes from individual pieces of leaked material in a way that presents complex and nuanced issues as if there is only ever one right answer.”

The current FB CTO is to replaced by the head of FB hardware which some have seen as potentially signalling a switch away (or diversification) from the FB social media platform to alternative hardware-based products and services for the corporation.

article updated in the interest of balance  to include responses from FB critiquing the WSJ articles

Computer Pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81

Sep 17, 2021 | News

Well-known computer computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair has died at home in the UK, aged 81, following a long battle with cancer.

His achievements spanned the latter quarter of the 20th Century with ground-breaking inventions such as an affordbale microprocessor-based pocket calculator, a range of low-cost Z80 based personal computers and the (in)famous C5 personal transport pod.

Sir Clive has been credited with making BASIC programming accessible to the general public with the Z80, Z81 and Spectrum machines ranking amongst the most popular and affordable machines brought to market years before the introduction of the IBM PC.  Many IT professionals (including the author) got their start with a Sinclair computer at a time when only offices and schools could afford personal computers.

Whilst his vision of personal transport attracted considerable criticism at the time of the product’s launch, Sir Clive was arguably massively ahead of his time with a vision of electric cars having been shown to be rather prescient though technology, tools and specifically batteries taking decades to catch up with that vision.

He opened many people’s eyes to the opportunities of computing and technology though famously did not use computers himself preferring to use a sliderule claiming that he found it distracting to use computers as he would focus on imprioving/redesigning thenm rather than the job at hand.

He was named “businessman of the year” in the 80’s by Margaret Thatcher and Knighted by the Queen 1983 for services to the technology industry. 

UTW Episode 24: Azeem Azhar

Sep 17, 2021 | Media, News, Podcast

On the Exponential

For this episode, we talk with Azeem Azhar, an entrepreneur, investor and author. Previously, he founded PeerIndex, a big data analytics firm acquired in 2015. And his first book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” was just published this month.

Azeem was an early user of the Web — he takes us back to those days and tells us about some of the first social media sites. Then, he describes what it was like when platforms like Facebook and Twitter were much more open, which also allowed more data to be collected. But he also brings us to the present, where we live in the “exponential age.” He breaks down exactly what that means and more in this latest episode.

 

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