Hasta La Gadget!

A newly published paper reveals that scientists at Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on hundreds of thousands of users by tweaking their feeds and measuring how they felt afterward.

In other words, Facebook decided to try to manipulate some people’s emotional states — for science.

The research involved Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of status updates, photos and news articles that appears when you first fire up the site. For a week in January 2012, a group of researchers, variously affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, altered the algorithm that determines what shows up in News Feed for 689,003 people. One group was shown fewer posts containing words thought to evoke positive emotions, such as “love,” “nice” and “sweet,” while another group was shown fewer posts with negative words, like “hurt,” “ugly” and “nasty.” The findings were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal.

The researchers were studying a phenomenon called “emotional contagion,” a fancy psychological term for something you’ve almost certainly experienced: If you spend more time with a happy-go-lucky friend, you end up being more of a ray of sunshine yourself. (Same goes for sadness: Hang with a Debbie Downer, and you likewise become a vector for gloom.) Researchers have found that emotions can be contagious during face-to-face interactions, when a friend’s laugh or smile might lift your spirits. But what happens online? Facebook was trying to figure that out.

It turns out that, yes, the Internet is just like real life in this way. People who were shown fewer positive words on Facebook tended to turn around and write posts of their own that contained fewer positive words (and more negative words). And people who were shown fewer negative words tended, in turn, to write posts with fewer negative words and more positive words.

Hypothesis: proven!

In the PNAS article, lead researcher Adam Kramer and his team note that “the effect sizes from the manipulations are small.” And in a statement to The Huffington Post, Facebook offered justification for doing the research.

“This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account,” a company spokesperson told The Huffington Post. “We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it’s positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow. We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process.”

Still, reaction against Facebook was swift when the story was picked up by Animal and then the A.V. Club:

I wish I hadn’t quit Facebook so I could quit them all over again.

— John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) June 28, 2014

“Facebook isn’t just the place you see pic of your friends —it’s also an exciting research lab, with all of us as potential test subjects.”

— Alba Mora Roca (@albamoraroca) June 29, 2014

Get off Facebook. Get your family off Facebook. If you work there, quit. They’re fucking awful.

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 28, 2014

The researchers’ findings aren’t exactly trivial. If positivity begets more positivity online, we may be overblowing the whole idea of “F.O.M.O.,” or “fear of missing out” — the idea that pixel-perfect beach pictures and other evidence of fun fills Facebook friends with jealousy, not joy.

Facebook employs a group of data scientists to study user activity and publish their findings, often pegged to events like Valentine’s Day and national elections. But until now, the research has mostly fallen into the category of “observational studies” — that is, research that involves someone poring over existing data and trying to draw conclusions from it.

The News Feed manipulation, though, is a different beast. It’s an experiment, in which scientists create the data by tweaking one variable to see if it affects another. That’s what’s disconcerting: The “things” being manipulated in this case are people on Facebook — i.e., basically everyone with an Internet connection.

If you don’t remember agreeing to being a Facebook guinea pig, well, you must not have read all of the site’s mind-bogglingly complex terms of service when you set up your account. Within those TOS is language specifying that Facebook members consent to having information about them used for “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

Even though this research was not illegal, Susan Fiske, the Princeton University psychology professor who edited the study for PNAS, was queasy about it. Fiske told The Atlantic:

I was concerned until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it — and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.

“Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.” That’s comforting.

[New Scientist via Animal]

I don’t know about you, but I love the design and artistry of arcade game cabinets. That’s why I am really digging Mer-Maid Manor. It is just an illustration of an arcade game cabinet, but it hits all the right notes.

This illustration by Zac Gorman is the first in a series of fictional arcade game cabinets that he hopes to create. It gets all of the details just right. Not just the art, but also the premise of the game. The idea behind this game, if it actually existed is described as follows:

Can you clean the manor before the Sea King comes home? In Mer-Maid Manor, you play as two lovely Mer-Maids tasked with cleaning the home of the angry Sea King in time for his daughter’s coronation.

Now somebody needs to make this into an actual game.

[via Laughing Squid]

This week BlackBerry is suggesting that they “must fight back” against their competitors using an offense constructed entirely of facts. No, they’re not attempting to recreate the “Bears, Beats, Battlestar Galactica” battle between Dwight and Jim on The Office – they’re creating a “Fact Check” portal in which they attempt to cut down web-based articles and comments “trying to incite … Continue reading

Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 3 tablet went on sale not too long ago and it looks like some early adopters are facing issues, networking issues to be precise. A Microsoft Community forum thread is already live and filled with complaints from users who have faced similar issues on their new tablets. Some claim the tablet has problems connecting with numerous 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers from the likes of Belkin, ASUS and Netgear. The issue is said to occur when the Surface Pro 3 is on battery and resuming from Instant Go.

Instant Go is a sleep state which lets the system pull notifications and update emails while taking minimal power from the battery. Once up from this state the tablet shows limited connection status even if one waits for a full minute.

It doesn’t look like this problem only affected those with routers from the aforementioned companies. ZDNet has reports of the same bug biting people using Linksys and D-Link routers. It is believed that these networking issues started after the driver and firmware update was shipped by Microsoft for this tablet on June 18th.

This update was meant to squash reliability bugs a day before the Surface Pro 3 went on sale, but it seems that it may have added one to the mix. Then again, it is not uncommon to see bugs appear in new hardware.

The issue has been reported to Microsoft which has forwarded it to the engineering team. Hopefully they’ll have a software fix ready soon which will put an end to networking issues on the Surface Pro 3.

Some Surface Pro 3 Early Adopters Face Networking Issues , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Earlier in the week Apple confirmed that it is stopping development of Aperture for OS X. This is being done due to the introduction of the new Photos application and iCloud Photo Library, shown off at WWDC 2014 as apart and parcel of OS X Yosemite. Those who used Aperture might now look to other software even though Apple might believe they have no need to. Adobe seeks to bring the professional Aperture users into the fold of its software.

Soon after Apple’s confirmation Adobe released a statement recommending an “Aperture or iPhoto customer looking for change” to try out its new Creative Cloud Photography plan that was announced last week, or its standalone Lightroom application for desktop as an alternative.

Adobe also said that it is “doubling down” on its investment in Lightroom and the new Creative Cloud Photography plan and that users can expect to see a “rich roadmap of rapid innovation for desktop” in the near future. It reiterates commitment to the iOS and OS X platforms and says its dedicated to helping iPhoto and Aperture users “migrate” to its solutions available across desktop, mobile and the web.

Even though it has ended development for Aperture, Apple reassured users that other professional applications such as Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are not going anywhere.

For Adobe though this is a great opportunity to capitalize on Aperture’s demise and bring countless new users to its software.

Adobe Capitalizes On The End Of Aperture’s Development , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.