archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet – Gyrovague Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, odds are you’ve already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included.
Numlock Sunday: Ryan Broderick on what’s actually popular on the internet he fourth-most interacted with posts on Facebook in June was a picture of a potato that had the caption, “This is the Potato of Luck, don’t ignore it, and tomorrow you’ll get good news.” But the weirdest thing was that everyone underneath it was just writing the word “amen,” which is insane. It’s just wild.
The Pleasure — Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine Despite centuries of hard-won wisdom among Native Americans and colonial settlers alike, many mysteries still surround the wily nature of Toxicodendron diversilobum. How does the plant adapt and morph to thrive in a variety of wilderness environments? Why are some people seemingly immune to its toxins? Can its excruciating rash re-emerge on its own years later? And, most perplexing of all, could the plant be possessed of an intelligence beyond human understanding?
Investigating the financial power brokers behind EdTech Investors consider such digital platforms a particularly reliable revenue stream because they can be regularly upgraded with new features, integrated with other platform services and continuously collect user data, to be used as intelligence for future product and functionality development (Komljenovic, 2021). As in the wider digital economy, user data provides a source of value creation and subscription fees from users while simultaneously amassing data to develop further derivative products and services for future financial yields (Sadowski, 2020). Digital education platforms therefore act as new kinds of intermediaries, connecting users to educational services and extracting data traces from every interaction as a route to monetisation (Decuypere et al., 2021).