Katy Perry is performing in the name of bringing a light to domestic violence and abusive relationships, yet she criticized Taylor Swift for opening up about her experience with emotional abuse and publicly defended her abuser.
she also called Kesha’s sexual abuse allegations against Dr.Luke as a case of “sour grapes” x
Artist: schädel Title:Watch My Captor Grow Old and Die Format: Digital Release Date: Mar 10th, 2015 Artwork: Chris Randall and Evan Scott Sharfe Catalog #: RCP 045 Mastering:Constantine Bischoff
Newcomer schädel presents what may be the most cerebral and moody album on the label so far. Watch My Captor Grow Old and Die is a journey through time and space born from equal parts ambience and groove. The EP itself represents years inside the head of schädel, it's creation spanning for almost 6 years. With a defiance for typical time signatures and tones it is the beauty in the space between the notes and percussion that let the darkness shine out like a dark, back hole. At times driving and at times unsettling, this album surprises with infectious basslines and swarming stabs that are equally at home in the raunchiest of the late night underground as well as the chin-stroking aficionado's home stereo. Some would say it is a lofty goal to compose an EP of electronic music itself let alone make it your introduction, but Watch My Captor Grow Old and Die is like a box of puzzle pieces that are poured out into interlocking shapes and sizes perfectly right before your ears.
schädel emerges from its creator's diverse and often conflicted interests in music. This, in coordination with experimentation, makes schädel very difficult to classify. After leaving his post-rock band behind, producer Stephen Boyd set aside his guitar and began to experiment with different instruments. This began a journey that would take him from laptops to modular synths and back again, including many sonic adventures in between. The result is predominantly dark in nature, but there are also high notes of beauty and passion in his work that can be heard among the varying tones, tempos, and time signatures that schädel delights in. No stranger to the RACECAR Family, schädel has been in cahoots for years, remixing tracks for labelmates Ellie Herring and Skeleton Hands. In fact, we would say that his first release has been a very long time coming.
One of the biggest consulting and accounting firms in the world, Deloitte, announced Monday that its next CEO would be Cathy Engelbert, the first woman to run the company, and the first female CEO at any of the “big four” global consultancies.
Engelbert, 50, is currently the chairman and CEO of Deloitte’s accounting, auditing, and risk advisory subsidiary, and has been with the company for nearly three decades. She’ll start the new post in March.
Women are still a very small fraction of CEOs in big companies, accounting for just 4.6% of CEOs at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (which Deloitte is not part of). Data from Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on advancing women in business, shows how the ranks of women thin out as they ascend the rungs of the corporate ladder.
One obstacle to progress is the slow pace of turnover. But Engelbert didn’t have to wait around for decades for her industry’s old (and still predominantly male) guard to step aside or get ousted. The firm elects a new CEO every four years. The process requires a nomination and then approval from two-thirds of all of the company’s voting partners and principals.
Another consulting firm, Strategy&, noted in a 2013 study that in the past 10 years there had been 75% more women in the incoming class of CEOs than in the outgoing classes at the world’s 2,500 largest companies. In 2040, the firm predicted, a third of new CEO appointments will be women.
But the study contained a cautionary tale for newly minted female CEO: women in top positions are more likely than their male counterparts to get fired. Among the CEOs examined in the study, 38% of the female CEOs had been ousted, while the same was true for only 27% of the men.
Google Ventures = buy a seat on a potential disruptor's board early on, grab all the info you can, provide minimal assistance, then release a competitor
hi hongsplong
HughPickens.com writes Google, with billions of dollars in the bank and house-by-house maps of most of the planet, seemed like the perfect partner for Uber, the hugely popular ride-hailing service. But Mike Isaac writes in the NYT that just two years after Google's venture capital arm poured more than $250 million into Uber there are signs that the companies are more likely to be ferocious competitors than allies. Uber recently announced plans to develop self-driving cars, a longtime pet project at Google. Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO, has publicly discussed what he sees as the inevitability of autonomous taxis, saying they could offer cheaper rides and a true alternative to vehicle ownership. "The Uber experience is expensive because it's not just the car but the other dude in the car," Kalanick said at a technology conference in 2014, referring to the expense of paying human drivers. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost [of taking an Uber] gets cheaper than owning a vehicle." Uber is also adding engineers who are experts on mapping technology. And the company, based in San Francisco, has been in talks with Google's advertising archrival, Facebook, to find ways to work together. Not to be outdone, Google has been experimenting with a ride-sharing app similar to Uber's and both companies have long toyed with the idea of offering same-day delivery of items like groceries and other staples. Last month Google announced it would start presenting data from third party applications inside Google Now, a service that displays useful information prominently on the screen of Android smartphones. Google said it had struck deals to draw data from such apps as Pandora, AirBnb, Zillow, and the ride-sharing service Lyft. The company most obviously missing from that list? Google's old and possibly former friend, Uber. According to Isaac, for young companies, even one as well funded as Uber, dancing with giants is a part of doing business — even if there is always a risk of getting squashed. "There are some hard lessons about the dangers of cooperation that are strongly in the memories of these companies," says John Morgan. "Something that makes partnering harder, even when it might make economic sense to do so."
The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to impose backup power requirements on Internet providers that offer phone service, but cable companies and telcos don’t want to be required to keep customers connected through long power outages.
While copper telephone lines can keep working through outages by drawing power from a telco’s central office, the old lines are going out of favor because they can’t provide Internet speeds as fast as cable or fiber. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service delivered over the newer networks stops working as soon as the power goes out unless there is a battery backup in the customer's home.
The FCC thus opened a proceeding to determine whether Internet providers that offer voice service should have to offer backup power systems.
'Give it a GPS waypoint and it will roll along walls and careen off of ceilings as it looks for an open path toward its destination.
"The goal of this flying robot is to reproduce the amazing capabilities of insects," '
We've seen some incredible progress recently when it comes to the sense and avoid technology that lets drones navigate around obstacles. But we're still waiting for these systems to be robust enough to actually deploy to the public. In the meantime, a Swiss company called Flyability has created a novel solution. As Engadget reports, it just won a million dollars in the UAE's Drones for Good competition by creating a craft where crashing into stuff is not a bug, but a feature.
The GimBall is a two-rotor drone inside of a soft, flexible globe. That outer frame rotates independently of the drone inside, allow the unit to bounce off walls while maintaining its altitude. In fact, the GimBall uses smashing into obstacles as a form of navigation. Give it a GPS waypoint and it will roll along walls and careen off of ceilings as it looks for an open path toward its destination.
"The goal of this flying robot is to reproduce the amazing capabilities of insects," says Adrien Briod, Flyability's co-founder and CTO. "Especially the fact that they can collide into things and continue flying afterwards.
Flyability envisions the GimBall being deployed in dangerous indoor situations like fires, chemical leaks, or nuclear meltdowns, when rescuers want to search through a building to locate potential survivors, but sending humans might be too dangerous. Although for my money, this unit also has a lot of potential as a training partner when you're trying to improve your toddler's freeze tag abilities.
enable life on other planets by draining meat juices into uncleanable crevices
Perfect your slicing and dicing skills while brushing up on your general knowledge of the solar system with this cutting board from ElysiumWoodworks on Etsy.
Cooking and learning about the cosmos is no longer mutually exclusive! Our engraved solar system diagram cutting board includes the following in beautiful detail: planet names, distances from the sun, orbital periods and pictographic representation of moons. We’ve also thrown in a few asteroid and kuiper belt objects for good measure!
'to leave a comment, you must select and pay a rate: $2 a day, $18 a month, or $180 a year.'
'I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY. Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we'll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.'
Want to comment on a story on Tablet magazine's website? You'll have to pay. The Jewish "daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture" is testing a new monetization method that scans like a modern day Indulgence: to leave a comment, you must select and pay a rate: $2 a day, $18 a month, or $180 a year.
It's a mitzvah!
"[T]he Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion," writes Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse, "sometimes allowing destructive — and, often, anonymous —individuals to drag it down with invective (and worse). Instead of shutting off comments altogether (as some outlets are starting to do), we are going to try something else: ask those of you who'd like to comment on the site to pay a nominal fee — less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation."
Those who don't wish to pay the fee, Newhouse notes, can still comment on the site via its many social network channels, or contact the site directly via e-mail. In a throwback to paper magazines, a handful of those missives will be published weekly in a Letters to the Editor section.
Curious about the choice of rates, I contacted my wife via Gchat for an explanation:
WHAT! THAT IS AMAZING! you know why it's $18 and $180 right 18 = chai in Hebrew each letter in the hebrew alphabet has a numerical value. chet is 10 and yud is 8, those are the two letters that spell "chai" and they add up to 18 chai means life so it's a mitzvah to give money in increments of 18 or that has 18 involved on bar/bat mitzvahs most gifts are like $36 or some such b/c that's double chai i LOVE this. they're basically making you pay to be an asshole
There is, of course, an argument that charging for comments is kind of classist, and that $2 a day for the minor privilege of leaving feedback on a single website invites only those with cash to burn to participate in the conversations on the site. But that's part of a larger conversation about the perceived right to comment freely on privately owned website. Anyway, now at the bottom of a Tablet post readers will find this explanation of the commenting policy:
COMMENTING CHARGES Daily rate: $2 Monthly rate: $18 Yearly rate: $180 WAIT, WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TO COMMENT? Tablet is committed to bringing you the best, smartest, most enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal-and, often, anonymous-minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse). Starting today, then, we are asking people who'd like to post comments on the site to pay a nominal fee-less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place. I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY. Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we'll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll. We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.
The Verge's comments remain free. Feel free to use them below.
wherein Pettis continues to emulate George Lucas as much as possible
This is interesting, Audi and VICE are doing a video series, this one has MakerBot’s Bre Pettis –
“My life is dedicated to empowering people to be creative,” Bre Pettis says in the first episode of The Challengers, presented by the Audi A3. A natural-born maker, his desire to create led him to found MakerBot Industries, one of the leading 3D printer producers on the planet. In the documentary above, watch as Pettis breaks down the ways in which the ever-evolving technology is changing our idea of luxury, essentially allowing anyone to make anything. See how MakerBot technology is allowing children to print their own prosthetic limbs, providing an easy and affordable way for people to make their creative visions come to life, and learn about the idea behind Bold Machines, an innovation workshop at Stratasys that created a film’s entire merchandising using a 3D printer. “When we started, nobody knew about 3D printing,” he states. Now that we know what 3D printing is, “what can you do with it?” asks Pettis.
The Challengers is a three-part series from the Audi A3.
Microsoft took Samsung to court back in August, seeking to enforce a contract with Samsung over Android royalty payments. Samsung has been paying out per-device royalties to Microsoft for every Android product it sells, and a court case revealed Microsoft has earned $1 billion from Samsung in the form of patent-licensing royalties during 2013.
Samsung originally signed two contracts — a cross-licensing agreement and a business collaboration agreement — with Microsoft in 2011, ahead of its dominance of Android shipments. Samsung has, understandably, been looking to avoid paying huge Android royalties to Microsoft, and the Korean company decided Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business was a good excuse to try and invalidate the contract.
A confidential agreement between two giants
It’s not clear what type of deal the pair have agreed upon, but both companies say they have ended their dispute today. "Samsung and Microsoft are pleased to announce that they have ended their contract dispute in U.S. court as well as the ICC arbitration," reads a joint statement from Microsoft and Samsung’s legal teams. Both companies are keeping the terms of the agreement confidential, meaning we might never learn how much Samsung will continue to pay Microsoft for Android royalties.
Fans of Apple's Swift language can now use their newly developed skills to write software for systems supporting both .NET and Java, including Android.
The Silver compiler, currently in beta, compiles Swift programs to run in the .NET and Java runtimes. It can also produce native binaries to run on OS X. With Silver, Swift developers can share their business logic and non-interface code across the different platforms.
Silver won't, however, permit full cross-platform apps to be developed. The company behind Silver, RemObjects, promotes the use of native development: iOS apps should use iOS user interface libraries so that they feel right on iOS. Similarly, .NET apps should use Windows' user interface libraries, and Java apps should use the Android or Java libraries as appropriate. The justification is that this will produce interfaces that are familiar to the users of the various platforms.
If you were watching FXX at 1:30 AM EST last night, and are a fan of Robert Jordan’s 10,000 page spanning fantasy epic, TheWheel of Time, you were treated to an unusual surprise: the half-hour pilot of The Wheel of Time: Winter Dragon. Furthermore, you weren’t alone: In a statement released earlier today by Jordan’s editor and widow, Harriet McDougal, the pilot that aired was produced without any knowledge or cooperation from either her or Jordan’s estate.
McDougal explains that "Bandersnatch [Jordan's estate] has an existing contract with Universal Pictures that grants television rights [to The Wheel of Time] to them until this Wednesday, February 11 – at which point these rights revert to Bandersnatch."
the pilot that aired last night happened without involvement of jordan's estate
It appears Universal had been working with Red Eagle Entertainment to bring the series to the screen when they received the rights in 2008. However, the terms of Universal's contract with Jordan's estate and their involvement with Red Eagle Entertainment's pilot still remain unclear. Rick Selvage, the CEO of Red Eagle Entertainment, stated in an interview with io9 that the timing of the pilot was a factor in it's sudden airing, and that it should be viewed as "a pilot for a high-budget production television series," with more announcements coming soon.
The Wheel of Time is an epic fantasy series written by Robert Jordan and later concluded by author Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death in 2007. It spans over 14 books and details the story of Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn. The pilot itself portrays the events of the prologue to the first book, The Eye of the World, depicting events and characters from hundreds of years before the series is set.
With the massive popularity in Game of Thrones, itself famously adapted from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, it’s easy to see why Red Eagle Entertainment would want to attempt to keep their rights to a similar epic fantasy series in an attempt to produce a TV series farther down the road. It's a shame it had to have been done in such a clandestine manner.
just buy Avid already, jesus, the sexual tension between you two is killing me
Autodesk purchased the assets of Tweak, maker of the widely used RV software for VFX playback and review. RV will remain available, the companies said, while Tweak's entire staff, including partners Jim Houriahn, Seth Rosenthal, and Alan Trombla, will become part of … more »
According to Jones, a settlement was reached between Hardy and his accuser, Nicole Holder, although the case was dismissed by the judge before that settlement was finalized in court. The district attorney said Holder, who didn't appear in court Monday, made herself "completely unavailable" for the trial.
Hardy, 26, played just one game in 2014 after he was convicted last summer for assaulting and threatening to kill an ex-girlfriend. His appeal trial was set to begin Monday, but is now over before jury selection even began. That doesn't mean things will go back to normal for Hardy, though.
The NFL issued a statement on Hardy after the case was dismissed, via Albert Breer of NFL Network: "His status remains unchanged until we fully review the matter."
The 2013 Pro Bowler is unlikely to return to the Panthers and could still face ramifications from the NFL. Hardy didn't serve a suspension during the 2014 season and instead stayed on the commissioner's exempt list, so it remains to be seen if he'll have to face the six-game suspension that is now automatically tied with domestic violence acts and followed by a lifetime ban with a second violation.
Even a lesser suspension from the league would likely damage Hardy's price tag on the free agency market, which appears to be where the defensive end is headed. The Panthers were wary about paying the pass rusher much even before his arrest and hedged their bets by using the franchise tag instead.
In the time since Hardy's arrest, Panthers owner Jerry Richardson has spoken strongly against domestic violence and the team has shown zero interest in making future investments in Hardy, according to the Charlotte Observer.
Still, it's difficult to imagine a 26-year-old pass rusher who managed 26 sacks in 2012 and 2013 won't be able to find a landing spot quickly. Hardy received a one-year, $13.1 million deal for 2014 after Carolina used the franchise tag.
"We are aware of the decision by the district attorney's office to dismiss charges against Greg Hardy. Greg remains on the Commissioner's Exempt List and the NFL has advised us to allow it to complete its review under the Personal Conduct Policy. There is no change in his status at this time."
President Barack Obama has received a lot of amazing gifts since becoming the President of the United States, but one of them fell flat. Former adviser David Axelrod spoke to New York Magazine about a gift he gave President Obama, and we learned that Michael Jordan doesn't know how to spell the president's name.
"When the president turned 50, I wanted to get him something special ... so I sent it to Jordan to have him sign it for me." In black Sharpie, Jordan scrawled, "To Barrack: you still owe me dinner. Wishing you well, Michael Jordan."
Think this was just a typo in the story? Think again.
"I gave it to the president, and he said, ‘I can't put this up, he misspelled my name!' So I said, ‘Fine, I'll take it.' "
"Anthony Davis' best quality (besides him being a real life Kaiju from Pacific Rim)"
"He was born the same year The X-Files debuted, which is apt because Scully and Mulder are probably looking for him."
"He doesn't care that his unibrow looks like an actual Pelican in flight"
"He doesn't care that his unibrow makes it look like his face is calling the caped crusader in Gotham. No, he will gleefully walk around with a Wu-Tang sign above his eyes and laugh about it with everyone else."
"Unless he shaves off his V for Vendetta eyebrow and loses his powers"
The NBA is starting to realize how terrifying the New Orleans Pelicans star really is. It's impossible to imagine what he'll be like at his peak.
There's so much to like about Anthony Davis. At 21 years old, the Chicago-born power forward finds time between fighting Godzilla to rank third in NBA scoring, ninth in rebounds and No. 1 in PER. Not only is he stomping through cities and terrorizing the Power Rangers and their Megazords, but he's once again topping the league with nearly three blocks per game. The monster from Cloverfield is in the top 25 for steals, has 13 games of of 30+ points and 29 double-figure rebound games.
He's also delivered signature moments like this amazing shot to beat the Thunder on Friday.
Anthony Davis is like if one of the Walkers from Star Wars decided to start putting Jedis in the post. His gangling arms feel like someone attached back-scratchers to normal arms and made them work. Guards trying to see over him is like looking for a silver lining on a Monday morning.
There was a graphic recently that showed Davis' growth through the years:
You have to laugh at the fact that he's a Monstar now. It's like if they did the "Where are they now?" montage for Space Jam characters and revealed Pound is now crushing human beings as the star of the Pelicans. If he keeps growing at that rate, he'll reach his final form in about two years and finally take over the Earth.
But Anthony Davis' best quality (besides him being a real life Kaiju from Pacific Rim) is that he's always improving. So many players waste away or short-change their own talent because of lack of work ethic and/or basketball intelligence. Davis, on the other hand, has done every thing possible to belie the fears that he would go down that path. His numbers are remarkably an improvement on last season's breakout performance. He's going to get better and that is terrifying.
Consider this: he's still only 21 years old, which is absurd. Teammate Jrue Holiday described him with an old adage: "first one in the gym, last to leave." As with most cliches, the natural inclination is to roll your eyes. In this situation, it's more than just talk. Davis is growing at a tremendous rate, whether it's physically, mentally or as a basketball player. All this in spite of him looking like a pterodactyl lost in time.
Guards trying to see over him is like looking for a silver lining on a Monday morning.
Davis is also highly intelligent, a counter to the stereotype that usually follows cyclopses like himself. Pelicans assistant Kevin Hanson described him as the smartest 21-year-old that he knows, praising him for his maturity and patience. And to remind you again: this is a 21-year-old we're discussing here. He was born the same year The X-Files debuted, which is apt because Scully and Mulder are probably looking for him.
Davis is doing all this despite being underused. An article on Pelicans site Bourbon Street Shots noted that Davis is 132nd in the league in frontcourt touches per game and isn't in the top 20 in usage rate, which measures the percentage of possessions a player ends with a shot, turnover or drawn foul. Davis is also being assisted on just under 80 percent of his shots even though he's fully capable of creating his own look. There is so much more space for him to be used even more. He could be twice the beast he is today.
We will eventually see an Anthony Davis that is more fiction than human. More Ultraman than big man.
On-the-court skills aside, Davis has a great sense of humor. He doesn't care that his unibrow looks like an actual Pelican in flight; hell, he's starring in increasingly funny commercials that poke fun at that. He has Blake Griffin's dry humor. From making his eyebrow talk about selling apps to catching James Harden wearing his face, Davis isn't the all-too-serious superstar.
He doesn't care that his unibrow makes it look like his face is calling the caped crusader in Gotham. No, he will gleefully walk around with a Wu-Tang sign above his eyes and laugh about it with everyone else.
At an age when kids are still taking clothes home from college so their mothers can wash them, Anthony Davis is already an MVP candidate and one of the best players in the NBA. His ceiling is in the stratosphere. Davis will be as good as he wants to be, and that's in every phase of the game. He's a monster offensively and defensively, and time is firmly on his side.
Unless he shaves off his V for Vendetta eyebrow and loses his powers, Anthony Davis will eventually be one of the best players the league has ever seen.
All illustrations in this series were done by Harrison Freeman. Click here to view his portfolio. Click here to view our piece on Pau and Marc Gasol.
LSU's head coach was born in Elyria, Ohio and graduated from Elyria High School. He then left his home state to attend college and play football at Michigan, which is not in Ohio.
With this in mind, his sentiment towards Louisiana high school football players with the temerity to want to play for any school outside Louisiana's borders is somewhat curious.
It's awesome when an up-and-coming athlete gets to meet a superstar, and Stephen Curry had exactly such an opportunity in the presence of Little League World Series dynamo Mo'ne Davis Monday night before Warriors-Sixers.
Michael Gambon has announced his retirement from theater acting after admitting that he can’t remember lines anymore.
In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, Gambon, 74, revealed that learning scripts takes him longer and that he quickly forgets them. “It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do it. It breaks my heart. It’s when the script’s in front of me and it takes forever to learn. It’s frightening,” he said.
The actor, who played Dumbledore in six Harry Potter films, admitted that he had recently resorted to using ear pieces to feed him lines. But his forgetfulness had become so pronounced that he realized six months ago it was time to bring down the curtain on a five-decade career in the theater.
"This acquiescence may well be seen as a signal of the court's intended resolution of that question," Thomas wrote in an opinion that was joined by Justice Antonin Scalia. "This is not the proper way" for the court to carry out its role under the Constitution, he wrote, "and, it is indecorous for this court to pretend that it is."
The opinion was remarkable less for the legal result it suggested than for its open criticism of fellow justices.
It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly.
Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.
“It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook.” In Africa, Christoph Stork stumbled upon something similar. Looking at results from a survey on communications use for Research ICT Africa, Stork found what looked like an error. The number of people who had responded saying they used Facebook was much higher than those who said they used the internet. The discrepancy accounted for some 3% to 4% of mobile phone users, he says.
Since at least 2013, Facebook has been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet. But even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook users who don’t know they’re on the internet. So is Facebook succeeding in its goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet? And what does it mean if masses of first-time adopters come online not via the open web, but the closed, proprietary network where they must play by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rules?
This is more than a matter of semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. And that has implications for us all.
The data
11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. Measuring Facebook penetration versus internet penetration is tricky business. Internet penetration numbers come from national regulators and from estimates by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body. These are generally months if not years old. Facebook numbers come from Facebook’s advertising platform. These can be tricky, too. Some people have more than one account. Some accounts are rarely used. And some people access Facebook through phones with only the most basic of online features, in which case it is hard to argue that they really are using the internet in any meaningful way.
In an attempt to replicate Stork and Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30 days. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500 respondents each.
It would appear, on the surface, that more people use the internet than use Facebook, a perfectly sensible outcome.
But a closer look at the data (available in full here) shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook users said they do not use the internet. These are largely young people; the median age of respondents with this combination of answers is 25 in Indonesia and 22 in Nigeria.
It would be silly to extrapolate this to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. But the survey does provide replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya. Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions. (Quartz commissioned limited surveys in just two countries; we encourage researchers and other journalists to conduct more large-scale studies.)
The effects of the misconception also are visible in the survey results. We asked respondents whether they follow links out of Facebook. In both countries, more than half of those who don’t know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook, compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook and the internet. If people stay on one service, it follows that content, advertisers, and associated services also will flow to that service, possibly to the exclusion of other venues.
How Facebook became the internet
At Davos this year, Sandberg told the well-heeled crowd (paywall) that in the developing world, “people will walk into phone stores and say ‘I want Facebook.’ People actually confuse Facebook and the internet in some places.” Or as Iris Orriss, Facebook’s head of localization and internationalization, has put it, “Awareness of the Internet in developing countries is very limited. In fact, for many users, Facebook is the internet, as it’s often the only accessible application.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Facebook is “often the only accessible application,” as Orriss puts it, but that’s because Facebook—which did not respond to requests to comment on this story—has worked to ensure that it is the easiest and cheapest to access. The company backs internet.org, an initiative to “bring the Internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.” Yet internet.org’s showpiece, an app now available in nearly half a dozen countries, provides free access only to Facebook, Facebook messenger, and a handful of other services (the precise lineup varies by country).
Most of these other services are well-meaning and related to development: Women’s rights. Jobs. Maternal-health information. An Ebola FAQ. The only concessions to the wider web are Wikipedia and Google search. But clicking through on a Google search result requires a data plan—and that must be paid for by the user. (Despite the name, internet.org is not a non-profit concern, but very much a part of Facebook Inc.)
Ghana’s Facebook phone looked like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Telecom operators across the developing world also contribute to the confusion—though this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mobile web users spend a lot of time on Facebook and WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook). Mobile networks see this and offer these customers social-only plans.
In India, you can get a Facebook-only data plan for $2.50 a year (the cheapest full data plans cost about $10 a year.) In the Philippines, Facebook-only plans cost a fifth as much as data plans. In Ghana, telecom operator Tigo once sold a Facebook phone. It looked like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Even in America, Sprint offers a data plan (paywall) solely for access to Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook bosses generally dismiss suggestions that the whole internet.org project might be self-interested. Writing in Time, Lev Grossman was granted access to Mark Zuckerberg when the Facebook CEO went to India to promote internet access. When Grossman asks whether internet.org is self-serving, Zuckerberg allows only that it may, one day, several decades down the line, pay off: “If you do good things for people in the world, then that comes back and you benefit from it over time.”
Dave Wehner, Facebook’s finance chief, is more forthright. “I do think that over the long term, that focusing on helping connect everyone will be a good business opportunity for us.” If Facebook becomes one of the top services in these countries, he explained in a recent earnings call, “then over time we will be compensated for some of the value that we’ve provided.”
That is a fair goal for any profit-seeking company. And besides, isn’t some access better than none at all? John Naughton of the Guardian argues that this is not the case:
This is a pernicious way of framing the argument, and we should resist it. The goal of public policy everywhere should be to increase access to the internet—the whole goddam internet, not some corporate-controlled alcove—for as many people as possible. By condoning zero-rating we will condemn to a lifetime of servitude as one of Master Zuckerberg’s sharecroppers. We can, and should, do better than that.
“It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and cherish.” Already services are starting to move away from the open web and to Facebook. And it’s happening not just in the poor world, but in poor parts of the developed world, where there also exists a sense among some that using an app isn’t the same as using the internet, which requires a web browser like Safari or Internet Explorer. Salix Homes manages government-owned subsidized housing in some the poorest parts of Salford, a deprived area in the north of England. Salix recently decided to accept complaints and rent payments from its tenants on Facebook.
“We took the view that let’s go where people are rather than force them to go to our website,” says James Allan, the firm’s marketing manager. As a result, interactions are up 90% while traffic on the website has fallen.
Allan is not in the business of deciding whether Facebook’s omnipresence among less affluent internet users is a good or bad thing. It is simply a thing. But as LIRNEasia’s Samarajiva says, “It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and cherish.” Yet he is optimistic that Facebook eventually will lead its users to that place.
“Maybe it will introduce them,” he says, “to the larger concept of the internet. They’re already on the internet. They just don’t know they’re there.”
A note on the methodology: The surveys of Indonesia and Nigeria used through this piece were administered by GeoPoll, which uses SMS to conduct real-time surveys without the need for face-to-face interaction in remote areas. This survey was conducted in late December in Indonesia and Nigeria, with 500 respondents from each country, equaling a margin of error of 4.38% at the 95% confidence level. For more information on this methodology visit research.geopoll.com. In addition, Quartz also commissioned surveys of India, Brazil, and Indonesia from Jana, whose members are reached via smartphone. Quartz asked Jana respondents, “Do you agree with the statement ‘Facebook is the Internet’?” Quartz also asked a representative sample of Americans the same question using SurveyMonkey.
O’Connor launched the organization that teaches students about the different branches of government through online games in 2009, three years after her retirement. The newspaper reports that the event will be a discussion with the retired associate justice and later she’ll answer some questions from the audience.
Super Opinionated.
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