Kaitlyn Tiffany was greeted with an email from Influencer Intelligence last Tuesday morning. Influencer Intelligence is an analytics company that works with people who desire to hire influencers and celebrities to advertise things.

“Authenticity is the most critical attribute to building influence,” the company’s website reads. The email was about, as emails often are, a recently compiled report about the business of selling things on Instagram, which promised to “tackle the concept of what authenticity really means today.” The PDF’s cover was an image of a beautiful white woman wearing pink eye shadow and putting her hand to her mouth—which was, needless to say, open.

Inside, Kaitlyn found advice on how to determine the authenticity of an influencer.

Request Google Analytics information from her (to prove that her numbers “add up”), ask for quantitative results of previous “brand campaigns,” map her audience demographics—all told, fairly standard stuff. The report also suggested the use of “soft metrics,” which apparently entails looking at a person’s Instagram profile and taking note of the tone and frequency of her responses to her “audience,” judging how “natural and authentic the content feels,” and deciding whether the influencer really “lives and breathes what they are presenting.”

For Kaitlyn, it’s a weird question to ask a person if she’s authentically living and breathing what she’s presenting. After all, what she’s presenting is herself. “That’s literally how our body works.” But then again, what she’s presenting is not herself, and “that’s literally how Instagram works.”

Coincidentally, this email arrived the same day as a new essay collection by the New York fashion and culture writer Natasha Stagg, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, from Semiotext(e). Stagg is best known for her fashion work—particularly as an editor at V magazine—but Sleeveless also touches on her brief tech career. She remembers working on an app that could “recommend all the ways to become beautiful,” then an app that took “mood selfies.”

But the most interesting thing, at least perhaps for Kaitlyn, is that Stagg zones in on the question of what the modern “It Girl” is like.

But why is loneliness “the hottest trend in Instagram”? Find out over at The Atlantic.

(Image Credit: ijmaki/ Pixabay)

Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a German chemist born in 1742. He achieved a long string of scientific breakthroughs in his life, but rarely received any credit for his discoveries. Whether this was because of bad luck or some form of incompetence is a matter of opinion. There is no doubt that Scheele was brilliant, but each of his projects seemed to suffer from one grave misstep that prevented him from benefitting.

Scheele’s discovery of oxygen came three years before Joseph Priestley did, but he took six years to publish his findings. By then, Joseph Priestley had already published his experimental data and conclusions concerning oxygen. Before the gas was named “oxygen”, Scheele called it “fire air” because it seemed to support combustion. Scheele also found that air was a mixture of “fire air” and “foul air”, one of which was breathable and the other not.

Scheele went on to discover at least six more elements—barium, chlorine, molybdenum, manganese, nitrogen, and tungsten— for which he received no recognition. In the case of chlorine, Scheele thought it was an oxide obtained from hydrochloric acid, and called it ‘muriaticum’. It was some four decades later that Sir Humphrey Davy ascertained that muriaticum didn’t contain any oxygen and was in fact an element. Davy gave it the name chlorine. As for barium, Scheele knew it was an element but he was not able to isolate it. It was again Humphrey Davy who isolated the metal. The same with molybdenum. Scheele stated firmly that the mineral molybdena was unique and not an ore of lead. He proposed, correctly, that it contained a distinct new element and suggested the name molybdenum. However, it was Peter Jacob Hjelm who successfully isolated molybdenum and got the credit. Scheele’s run of poor luck continued with manganese, an element he identified but was not able to extract.

The one discovery that Scheele went down in history for was one that ended up inadvertently killing many people. Read the story of Carl Wilhelm Scheele and his many discoveries at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

With frightening and vivid images that seem all too real, nightmares terrorize us in the dead of night, making our hearts pound with fear and our bodies drip with sweat. For kids, it might be terrifying images of monsters or ghosts, while it can be horrifying images of harmful events which can be real or imaginary. For those who have experienced traumatic events, nightmares force them to relive the tragic events they have experienced, such as a car accident, or memories of war, to name a few examples.

“Occasional nightmares are a normal part of dreaming and can provide valuable insight into our psychological and spiritual lives,” Rubin Naiman, psychologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, writes in the paper “Dreamless: the silent epidemic of REM sleep loss.”

For others, frightening dreams are a chronic condition.

Trauma survivors — specifically those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — are more likely to experience nightmares. In fact, while only 2.5 to 10 percent of adults experience nightmares, according to the Sleep Health Foundation, up to 90 percent of those with PTSD have reported “disturbing dreams with some degree of resemblance to the actual traumatic event,” according to a report co-authored by Anne Germain, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience Center at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Head over at Fox News to know more details about this one.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Quick, how many horror TV series can you think of? Probably not that many off the top of your head, but in today's lineup of hundreds of cable channels and streaming services, there are plenty running right now. There are also a few dating back as far as the mid-20th century that had decent runs on the Big Three networks and still haunt viewers' dreams, even if you need to be reminded of their existence first. And horror often has less to do with state-of-the-art effects than with its storytelling. In a ranked list at Rolling Stone, there's plenty of both old and new horror TV, a lot of it available for re-viewing or streaming if you choose, from The Outer Limits to The Walking Dead. You might argue with the ranking, but you'll also be tempted by something you haven't seen before.

(Image credit: Ryan Casey)

Horror movie's iconic cat counterparts... in time for Halloween.

It has been seven years ever since the release of Tinder, the app where you swipe right if you want to meet a person, and swipe left if you don’t want to. Tinder is, by far, the most used dating app in the UK and the US. The app is download 300 million times and has over five million paying subscribers, making it the highest-grossing app of any kind in the world, according to the analysts App Annie.

For Americans, apps and online dating are the most common way to meet a partner. “It’s an amazing responsibility, and an amazing privilege,” says Elie Seidman, Tinder’s 45-year-old chief executive. If he finds it less daunting than others might, that’s because, before he took over Tinder in 2018, he was in charge of OkCupid, the Tinder of the 2000s. He has spent much of his working life helping people to find love.

“The vast majority of our employees are energised by that very mission,” he says. “We’re not selling plumbing supplies, right? Obviously, plumbing is really important, but ours is a really noble and exciting mission. So, when we’re taking new risks – new challenges, new chances – we know that, if we’re successful, it’s about helping members connect.”

At times, however, the app seemed to chase that goal with too much passion. As it launched on college campuses before it expanded to New York, London, and then to everywhere, Tinder became less of a dating app, and more of a “hook-up” app.

In its early days, Tinder leaned into this reputation. Perhaps the most notorious feature was the introduction of a secret “Elo ranking”, a term borrowed from the chess world to describe a way to score people based on their previous matches. With the Tinder version, your score went up a lot if hot people swiped right on you; if ugly people swiped left on you, it went down just as much. Whether your matches were hot was based on their own Elo ranking, and so on.

For Seidman, this feature was a big mistake.

Find out more about this topic over at SCMP.

(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)

Over the course of three days alone, San Francisco has already faced down 600 wildfires. Emergency workers in California hurried to evacuate rural areas of Northern California on Thursday. They warned residents that the high winds that propel the out-of-control blaze could become stronger in the coming days.

The Kincade fire, the largest fire to ignite this week, raged through the steep canyons of northern Sonoma county, racing through 10,000 acres within hours of igniting. The wind gusts made it worse, as it propelled the fire through forests like blowtorches, which left firefighters with little opportunity to stop, or at least slow down, the fires.

Aerial footage showed homes engulfed in flames. But beyond the destruction, which appeared limited on Thursday to a relatively small number of buildings, hundreds of thousands of people were affected, both by the fires and a deliberate blackout meant to prevent them. Schools and businesses closed and thousands of people evacuated their homes.

It has been three consecutive years of record-breaking fires, and researchers say that these are to continue as the world warms. In light of all this, how, then, should we live in an ecosystem that is primed to burn?

More of this over at The New York Times.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Noah Berger/ Associated Press)

On a recent Friday evening, two dozen men and women gathered to a backyard patio. Most of them are heavily tattooed and wore several beaded bracelets, while some of them wore tie-dye tank tops. All of them carried a steel water bottle.

The people listened attentively as celebrity chef Seamus Mullen conducted a cooking lesson and discussed the importance of food as “nourishment” while pointing to a bouquet of squash. They then were divided into four groups. Each group was tasked to cook an assigned dish.

This is but one of many events at Haven Coliving, a fully furnished adult dorm in Venice dedicated to wellness. When these residents aren’t sleeping in a pod-style room with up to half a dozen strangers, they’re treated to a full lineup of Goop-friendly activities.

Check out more about this dorm over at the Los Angeles Times.

(Image Credit: Dania Maxwell/ Los Angeles Times)

Manly men eat steak, barbecue, and bacon -just ask Ron Swanson. Women eat yogurt and salads to keep their weight down, but they have a weakness for chocolate. Stereotypes, for sure, but it hasn't always been that way. Up until at least the Civil War, there was no notion of gender-specific foods. Families or other groups ate the same dishes, even when men got first pick. Yale history professor Paul Freedman puts the beginning of the shift around 1870.

As more women spent time outside of the home, however, they were still expected to congregate in gender-specific places.

Chain restaurants geared toward women, such as Schrafft’s, proliferated. They created alcohol-free safe spaces for women to lunch without experiencing the rowdiness of workingmen’s cafés or free-lunch bars, where patrons could get a free midday meal as long as they bought a beer (or two or three).

It was during this period that the notion that some foods were more appropriate for women started to emerge. Magazines and newspaper advice columns identified fish and white meat with minimal sauce, as well as new products like packaged cottage cheese, as “female foods.” And of course, there were desserts and sweets, which women, supposedly, couldn’t resist.

You could see this shift reflected in old Schrafft’s menus: a list of light main courses, accompanied by elaborate desserts with ice cream, cake or whipped cream. Many menus featured more desserts than entrees.

The divide only accelerated as advertisers got involved. Over time, the clash between eating light to maintain her appearance and the obligation to satisfy a man's hearty appetite became a guilt-inducing conundrum for women that advertisers exploited mercilessly. Read up on the history of gendered food at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting  

What's it like to feel the warm embrace of another human being? Your dakimakura can offer you only so much and, honestly, she's been thinking that the two of you should go on a break.

You should think of this difficult time as an opportunity. You can have an even better relationship. Artist Lucy McRae invented the Compression Carpet, which is a mattress that constricts around you as another person* turns the crank. Hi-Fructose magazine quotes her:

Lucy McRae’s new “Compression Carpet offers a full embrace for those who feel like they need a hug, a meditation on how technology can aid intimacy or support. The “body architect” recently showed the device at Festival of the Impossible in San Francisco. For some, the device may recall the hug machine created by Temple Grandin for stress relief and therapy. With her device, McCrae says, you “relinquish control to the hands of a stranger as your ‘servicer’ decides the firmness of your hug.”

*The flaw in the design.

The most senior Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, has urged the government to investigate TikTok, stating that the China-owned social media app is “a potential counter-intelligence threat we cannot ignore.” He also warned that it could be used to interfere in the US elections.

TikTok, which allows users to share short videos online, has enjoyed wild success since it launched in 2017, and has been downloaded more than 1bn times.

Schumer and Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, co-wrote a letter to the acting director of national intelligence on Wednesday. The pair said they were writing “to express our concerns about TikTok … and the national security risks posed by its growing use in the United States”.

Know more details about this news over at The Guardian.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Djazator, Russia — One of the most endangered animals on the planet is the Altai snow leopard. Thanks to the three decades of hunting and poaching, the elusive cats in the remote mountains of Southern Siberia were almost wiped out from existence.

In the village of Djazator, CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer met former poacher Boris Markov, who said just one pelt used to fetch him enough cash to buy a car.

Palmer and her team traveled off road, even on horseback, to get deep into Russia's Sailugemsky National Park, where they met the park's biologist and researcher Alexei Kuzhlekov. He's part of an innovative program to bring the leopards back.

Their goal is to shoot animals, not with guns, but rather with motion-triggered cameras, which are hidden everywhere across the Siberian backcountry.

The results are astounding; intimate photos of incredibly shy animals that will do just about anything to avoid human beings.

Even Alexei, who studies the animals and knows as much about them as just about anyone, has only seen a snow leopard once.

But what did people like Alexei do that made poachers stop poaching?

Find out on CBS News.

(Image Credit: World Wild Fund For Nature)

Data is Beautiful gives us a moving timeline of the most popular websites based on monthly visitors, starting in 1996. That was not long after I started regular internet use, after a disastrous flirtation with CompuServe in the '80s. It starts out with AOL and Yahoo! dominating everything else, and you might be surprised at how recently today's online giants made their move up the ladder. -via Digg

Climate change is quickly and more severely affecting a huge part of the Earth. This is worrisome and according to some scientists, the quicker the Earth changes, the less time there is to learn from its past and understand its mysteries.

"The climate crisis threatens to destroy our cultural and ecological patrimony within decades," Fisher said earlier this year in a TEDx talk. "How can we document everything before it's too late?"

One of the proposed way to preserve the record of our planet’s present state is to use lasers in creating a high-resolution, 3D map of the entire world.

In 2018, archaeologists bathed part of a Guatemalan forest in laser beams to reveal the profile of a hidden, ancient metropolis. Now, researchers at a nonprofit called The Earth Archive would like to use this method again to map the entire land area of the Earth.

The answer, Fisher said, is light detection and ranging, or lidar — a method of remote scanning that uses aircraft to shower a landscape with a dense net of laser beams. From this bombardment of light, researchers can create high-resolution, 3D maps of a given area and then digitally edit out foliage and other features that might be concealing hard-to-spot secrets near Earth's surface. 

Discover more about this here.

Image Credit: Luke Auld-Thomas and Marcello Canuto

You might let out a big sigh when you board your plane and you ended up sitting next to a screaming child, or a man taking off his shoes during the flight. But how would it feel to have a 70-pound pig setting next to you?

This is Hamlet the hog, a pot bellied pig owned by 31-year-old Megan Peabody, who’s based on the U.S Virgin Islands. Hamlet is classified as an emotional support animal, and so Peabody can bring him onboard the plane (at least in the United States) free of charge as aid for her air anxieties.

"His presence is calming because it is familiar to me," Peabody tells CNN Travel. "It distracts me from my surroundings when they make me anxious."

Emotional support animals (ESAs) are an increasingly hot topic in the United States, as more and more passengers arrive at the airport with an animal in tow, arguing that a furry friend will alleviate their aviation anxieties.

The phenomenon's prompted vigorous discussion on what constitutes an ESA, whether the system's being manipulated by pet owners keen to skip travel fees, what the impact is on air crew and fellow passengers, and whether ESAs on the plane do a disservice to those who genuinely need service animals on board.

More details over at CNN.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Megan Peabody)