Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 63
September 9, 2018
How To Tell If You’re An Asshole (And Why It’s So Hard)
Last week a small army of cruise ship passengers disrupted a funeral in the tiny Norwegian city of Honningsvåg and took pictures of the mourners. According to The Guardian, Barcelona is crowded with careless tourists who overrun destinations and fail to respect the culture. A political story of a Supreme Court nominee seeming to ignore a handshake and walk away this week went viral. Each is a self awareness #fail.
Do people really need help knowing when they are acting like assholes?
There ar...
September 5, 2018
Why The Brazilian National Museum Fire Matters
The story of the devastating fire this week at the National Museum of Brazil made me unexplainably sad. Yet on three different trips to Brazil, I never went there. So why am I so upset about it?
Experts estimate nearly 20 million artifacts may have been lost. Even though many museums have ways to protect their collections, this loss isn’t really about the collection shown to the public. Instead, it is about the millions of artifacts which are studied by experts to learn from our history. Some...
September 1, 2018
Can Kellogg’s Reinvent Froot Loops As A Lifestyle Brand?
I remember last year I was walking past some trendy retail stores in NY and I saw a few handbags with the Pan Am logo. Apparently there is a whole historical foundation and store featuring all kinds of retro products like t-shirts and travel kits. The airline may have died but the brand is alive.
I was thinking about that as I read this story about Kellogg’s partnering with fashion pioneer AWAYTOMARS to try and evolve Froot Loops into a lifestyle and fashion brand. As they face more consumers...
August 30, 2018
How Digital Teachers Can Make Education Better
Earlier this month my family and I made a memorable journey to a fishing village in Cambodia. While there we were lucky to spend some time at a local school with a group of sixth grade children who had taken a rowboat to get to class. Unfortunately, their teacher was missing that day – because many teachers there are forced to work second jobs to make ends meet. So the kids show up to class and try to work alone. Some days they have a teacher, and some days they don’t.
In New Zealand this wee...
August 28, 2018
The Loneliness Industry and the World’s Saddest Product
About a year and a half ago, a Japanese company called Gatebox released a depressing preview video of a new AI powered “Holographic Wife” that would offer lonely young Japanese salarymen companionship at home. The character is based on anime and stand about 8 inches tall inside a glass box. This week the company finally released their actual product with a slightly less depressing video – so now the “holographic wife” is available for sale for about $1300 USD plus a monthly subscription fee.
...August 23, 2018
Why Facebook Rating Your Trustworthiness Is Good News
The Washington Post story this week revealing the “previously unreported ratings system” used by Facebook to rate the trustworthiness of users on a scale of zero to 1 has all the usual components of an outrage-worthy announcement. How dare Facebook think they can rate all of us? What if they abuse this system or someone hacks it? And doesn’t this just get us one step closer to the scary imagined world of Nosedive? Perhaps it’s a good time to take a step back and curb our outrage.
The problem...
August 20, 2018
Why More Millennials Are Uncovering Their Tattoos At Work
For the past several years the debate about tattoos at work has gone back and forth between those who think a tattoo is taboo in the office and those who feel it is a modern expression of individuality and may even help connect with certain people. The view of this article is that more millennials are uncovering their tattoos at work because they are less likely to be judged negatively for it today versus in the past.
August 17, 2018
New Study Finds Robots Can Emotionally Manipulate Humans Easily
A team of German researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany studied how humans interact with robots. In a paper published in PLOS ONE – they offered the finding that people who were asked to turn a robot off were more likely to leave it on if the robot pleaded with them to “live.” The conclusion of the study was that the more human a machine acts, the more we can be emotionally manipulated into treating it as we might treat a fellow human. In the future this tendency for us...
August 14, 2018
Why Does The Internet Make Stupidity So Viral?
Earlier this week the US government had to officially ask people to stop jumping out of moving cars to dance in the streets in response to a viral dance challenge for one of Drake’s songs. About the same time I first read this story, for some reason another story and video about how you can make a spare tire by wrapping duct tape around a bare rim popped up. It’s hard to get away from stories like these and they all seem to have one thing in common: they take stupidity and glorify it to the p...
August 12, 2018
Why Netflix Uses Taste Communities Instead of Demographics
Last week Netflix announced that they would be stopping their long standing policy of asking customers to vote on early pilots for programs to see if they have enough critical mass and audience to continue. In the same week, at a television industry event a Netflix executive shared that Netflix finds demographics to be useless as a predictor of what people watch. Instead, “Netflix’s scientists have found that there are several connections among content types and what people like to watch, whi...
