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https://www.themarysue.com/facebook-rebrands-itself-as-meta/
It’s been a disastrous month for social mega giant Facebook, as whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal, resulting in a series of bombshell exposés about the company. Haugen shared that Facebook’s chief drivers were creating anger and sowing division among its users, and that those in charge stoked online vitriol for clicks and engagement.
In adding to making the world less safe, Facebook and Instagram were found to cause and exacerbate anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues, especially in teenage girls. The company is well aware of these issues, and is committed to doing nothing to stop them.
In light of all this horrific press, one would think that Facebook would implement new policies or change their algorithms, but founder Mark Zuckerberg is not doing either of those things. Instead, he’s pivoting to a new company name: Meta. In a video announcement, Zuckerberg said, “It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, … From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Zuckerberg continued, “Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future.”
Okay but … what exactly is it? Zuckerberg demonstrated a variety of VR and AR applications, where your avatar can do … things! With products and tech made by Facebook Meta! What exactly those things are and how one would use them remain deeply ensconced in Silicon Valley vague-speak. The main thing that Zuck referenced was enhanced safety and privacy features, which is a dead giveaway that they’ll be selling off our data to the highest bidder. Very normal, cool stuff!
Great work, everyone.
(via NPR, image: screencap)
- Sony is now using the PlayStation PC label for its PC games. (via The Verge)
- A Boston surgeon is being fined for leaving the operating room to eat lunch in his car, where he fell asleep and slept through the procedure. (via The Boston Globe)
- Denis Villeneuve always envisioned Dune as a trilogy, says there will be no director’s cut of part one. (via The Playlist)
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele star as the hellishly funny demons of a teen named Kat in Wendell & Wild:
- Benedict Cumberbatch talks taking over for Iron Man as Spider-Man’s mentor in No Way Home. (via comicbook.com)
- How B.J. Novak became a stock photo superstar. (via NY Times)
- Here’s a look at systemic inequality in fictional magical academies. (viaTor)
Only 57 shopping days ’til Christmas!
Hope you’re having a kickass Thursday, Mary Suevians!
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
The post Things We Saw Today: Facebook Ignores Problems, Rebrands Itself as “Meta” first appeared on The Mary Sue.
It’s been a disastrous month for social mega giant Facebook, as whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal, resulting in a series of bombshell exposés about the company. Haugen shared that Facebook’s chief drivers were creating anger and sowing division among its users, and that those in charge stoked online vitriol for clicks and engagement.
In adding to making the world less safe, Facebook and Instagram were found to cause and exacerbate anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues, especially in teenage girls. The company is well aware of these issues, and is committed to doing nothing to stop them.
In light of all this horrific press, one would think that Facebook would implement new policies or change their algorithms, but founder Mark Zuckerberg is not doing either of those things. Instead, he’s pivoting to a new company name: Meta. In a video announcement, Zuckerberg said, “It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, … From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Zuckerberg continued, “Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future.”
Okay but … what exactly is it? Zuckerberg demonstrated a variety of VR and AR applications, where your avatar can do … things! With products and tech made by Facebook Meta! What exactly those things are and how one would use them remain deeply ensconced in Silicon Valley vague-speak. The main thing that Zuck referenced was enhanced safety and privacy features, which is a dead giveaway that they’ll be selling off our data to the highest bidder. Very normal, cool stuff!
Great work, everyone.
(via NPR, image: screencap)
- Sony is now using the PlayStation PC label for its PC games. (via The Verge)
- A Boston surgeon is being fined for leaving the operating room to eat lunch in his car, where he fell asleep and slept through the procedure. (via The Boston Globe)
- Denis Villeneuve always envisioned Dune as a trilogy, says there will be no director’s cut of part one. (via The Playlist)
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele star as the hellishly funny demons of a teen named Kat in Wendell & Wild:
- Benedict Cumberbatch talks taking over for Iron Man as Spider-Man’s mentor in No Way Home. (via comicbook.com)
- How B.J. Novak became a stock photo superstar. (via NY Times)
- Here’s a look at systemic inequality in fictional magical academies. (viaTor)
Only 57 shopping days ’til Christmas!
Hope you’re having a kickass Thursday, Mary Suevians!
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
The post Things We Saw Today: Facebook Ignores Problems, Rebrands Itself as “Meta” first appeared on The Mary Sue.From elementary to high school, we found the best science books for kids to help inspire them.
Science and reading go together like quarks and gluons. Every scientist I know is a serious reader, and a lot of them became scientists because of something they read. The books on this list are great ways to ignite a lifelong interest in STEM, no matter what year of school your kid is in. As always, the age categories here are rough guidelines. Nothing bad will happen if your middle school aged kid reads a book on the elementary school list.
Elementary School
Basher Science Series
Illustrator Simon Basher and a variety of co-authors have created a series of science books that are adorable and create excitement about science. My daughter read the Dinosaurs: The Bare Bones book so many times our copy went extinct. Basher’s kawaii-style illustrations get into some pretty obscure scientific territory at times. I don’t recall ever seeing a drawing of an alpha particle in any of the books about science I read as a kid, much less one where the alpha particle is personified as a standoffish kawaii guy surrounded by a wall of paper. Mr. Basher is a hard worker—he’s illustrated about 50 books, including books on fascinating non-science topics like grammar and punctuation.
Fun with Nature
Every naturalist starts by learning about the nature of their own neighborhood. This is a terrific book for young people who are just starting to explore the natural world. There are sections about insects, reptiles, amphibians, trees and mammals living in American suburbs and rural areas. The book explains what each critter looks like, what they eat, how to identify their poop, and other facts that your elementary school student will be happy to share with anyone within the sound of their voice. In the tree section, the book explains how to identify and take care of different kinds of trees, as well as what their seeds look like. Each section has cool projects to do, including how to make a chipmunk swimming pool, which is something I didn’t know chipmunks would be interested in. The book has lots of scrapbook pages, so your kid can start their own collection of interesting leaves, eggshells, sticks, lichen, and other samples, and maybe not leave their nature collections hither and yon like a certain kid that I know. This book is part of a series of Take Along Guides, including books on Birds, Nests, and Eggs and Wildflowers, Blooms, and Blossoms.
First Human Body Encyclopedia (DK First Reference)
If you and your kids want to learn the basics about anything, I don’t think you can go wrong with DK’s reference books. The ones I’ve seen have all been great, and the First Human Body Encyclopedia is no exception. Each two page spread covers a different topic, like How Muscles Work, or Inside the Intestines, and provides a thoughtfully designed combination of pictures and text that sheds light on both the inside and outside of the human body. There’s also sections on important processes like healing, aging, and the ever-popular topic of where babies come from.
Middle School
Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
This colorful book has one-page biographies of 50 scientists, starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. The capsule biographies describe what each woman did, why it’s important today and outline some of the obstacles they faced. It gets across how careers in science can start, which is a good subject for middle school students who may have trouble finding their entry point into science. Many institutions in STEM still aren’t friendly to girls and women—the stories in this book might give your daughter the inspiration she needs to keep her interest in science alive during tough times. The book rounds out with a timeline and information about lab equipment.
How Stuff Works
The How Stuff Works book is an offshoot of the excellent Howstuffworks.com website. This book explains (surprise) how items and systems that your kids use every day work. Knowing how something works, like, say, a virus, is empowering and interesting for its own sake. Let me get up on my soapbox for a second here: People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and people who don’t understand what’s going on around them are afraid all the time. That’s no way to live. You can’t make it so your kids are happy, but you can pass along a foundational knowledge of how the stuff around them works. Combine this knowledge with an understanding that expertise is real, and that it’s possible for them to gain expertise, and you’ll have given your kids an adamantium/vibranium alloy shield against people who would take advantage of them.
The Way of the Hive
The Way of the Hive, formerly published as Clan Apis, is the only graphic novel on this list, but it earned the spot. It tells a great story about Nyuki, a young bee learning how to be a bee. Nyuki and her friends are philosophical bees, and Jay Hosler’s imagining of bee beliefs is very cool. He also drops a lot of science about bees, and does it so subtly that the reader won’t know how much science has been dropped on them until much later. The art is very much in the same tradition as Jeff Smith’s Bone (in our article on Best Graphic Novels for Kids). Jay Hosler has made a couple of other science-themed graphic novels: Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, Last of the Sandwalkers, and Optical Allusions, starring Wrinkles the Wonder Brain!
High School
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba is a young engineer who grew up in rural Malawi, where starvation was never far away. Kamkwamba writes with real urgency about waiting for the corn crop to be ready so that he and his family could eat. Despite these grim conditions, he did have a couple of resources available that changed the course of his life: abandoned farms full of abandoned farm equipment and a library supported by the US Agency for International Development. Guided by books he checked out from the library, Kamkwamba scavenged old farm machine parts and used them to build a wind turbine that provided his family with electricity for the first time. William Kamkwamba is the best example that I can think of what an engineer can and should be: someone who uses the forces of nature to solve problems. His story has also inspired a young readers edition, a documentary, a picture book and a movie.
The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe
This giant coffee table book introduces readers to the building blocks of all that is. This book got its start when author Theodore “Theo” Gray built a table based on the periodic table of the elements, which is a fascinating project in its own right. Each element in the book has a two-page spread, which features how they were discovered, what kinds of items they are in and where they fit in human history. Each visible element is pictured in great photos, and the invisible ones like Flerovium (or Ununquadium) are represented by the logos of the research institutions where they were discovered. The book is a tribute to the elegance and explanatory power of the periodic table. The Elements is part of a trilogy, which continues with Molecules: The Elements and Architecture of Everything and Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules and Change in the Universe.
The post Best Science Books for Kids by Age appeared first on Nerdy With Children.
When one thinks of elegance something like a propulsive rocket landing or Simone Biles pirouetting through the air probably comes to mind. The sea-dwelling gossamer worm may deserve a mental slot in the same category, incredibly, because it’s able to swim like Aquaman covered in Vaseline. The worm’s such a good swimmer, in fact, it’s likely to inspire next-generation aquatic robots. (Because there’s nothing nightmarish about that.)
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently posted the above video of the gossamer worm to its YouTube channel. MBARI, a nonprofit research institution associated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, posted the video as a complement to a research paper published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology analyzing the creature’s extraordinary swimming abilities.
MBARI
As the video shows, the gossamer worm, or Tomopteris, is a stellar swimmer thanks to its unique physiology. Apparently the sea worm has a “flexible, gelatinous body” that allows for its agile movement. More specifically, the worm has a series of swimming “legs”—or parapodia—that it uses for propulsion. Thanks to its flexible body, the propulsion from the parapodia causes a wave to undulate up the worm’s body as it swims. This body wave, in turn, extends out the parapodia, amplifying the worm’s overall thrust. In either the forward or backward direction too!
MBARI
The authors of the research paper looking at the worm’s abilities note that it could very well provide inspiration for “soft materials” and robots. Indeed, it really seems like it’s only a matter of time before there’s a Cambrian explosion of animal-like robots. Obviously robot dogs are already frighteningly popular and ubiquitous flying robots can’t be far behind in our estimation. There are also some robo-animals we’re genuinely excited for, however. Such as all of the ones that researchers are going to model off of squirrels.
The post This Elegant Sea Worm Is Inspiring Aquatic Robots appeared first on Nerdist.