You Can’t Handle the Truth About Facebook Ads, New Harvard Study Shows

You Can’t Handle the Truth About Facebook Ads, New Harvard Study Shows

AFTER IT EMERGED that Facebook user data was illicitly harvested to help elect Donald Trump, the company offered weeks of apologies, minor reforms to how it shares such information, and a pledge to make itself “more transparent,” including new, limited disclosures around advertising. But Facebook still tells its 2 billion users very little about how it targets them for ads that represent essentially the whole of the company’s business. New research illuminates the likely reason why: The truth grosses people out.

Källa: You Can’t Handle the Truth About Facebook Ads, New Harvard Study Shows

TED: Därför ska du skapa värdelösa saker

TED: Därför ska du skapa värdelösa saker

In this joyful, heartfelt talk featuring demos of her wonderfully wacky creations, Simone Giertz shares her craft: making useless robots. Her inventions — designed to chop vegetables, cut hair, apply lipstick and more — rarely (if ever) succeed, and that’s the point.

”The true beauty of making useless things [is] this acknowledgment that you don’t always know what the best answer is,” Giertz says. ”It turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. Maybe a toothbrush helmet isn’t the answer, but at least you’re asking the question.”

TED: Därför ska du skapa värdelösa saker

TED: Hur skapar du en produkt som folk verkligen vill ha?

How do you build a product people really want? Allow consumers to be a part of the process. ”Empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success,” says designer Tom Hulme.

In this short talk, Hulme lays out three insightful examples of the intersection of design and user experience, where people have developed their own desire paths out of necessity. Once you know how to spot them, you’ll start noticing them everywhere.

TED: Håller världen på att bli bättre eller sämre?

TED: Håller världen på att bli bättre eller sämre?

Was 2017 really the ”worst year ever,” as some would have us believe? In his analysis of recent data on homicide, war, poverty, pollution and more, psychologist Steven Pinker finds that we’re doing better now in every one of them when compared with 30 years ago.

 

But progress isn’t inevitable, and it doesn’t mean everything gets better for everyone all the time, Pinker says. Instead, progress is problem-solving, and we should look at things like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. ”We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one,” he says. ”But there’s no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.”