What I Learned From Raising Sea Monkeys was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scrolling through these lists induced a shocking self-awareness of how domesticated it all felt. Luckily, I was struck with inspiration, a beautiful idea that would be our lone savior from the terrible pre-mature aging we were experiencing. I suggested to Nick that we spend our free afternoon going around Providence, each capturing the sights we found particularly notable in our own series of photos. Then we would exchange photos and make up mini-stories (max 3 sentences) for the other person’s photos. He loved the idea, so that’s exactly what we did, spending a picturesque afternoon creating the following.

Nick’s Photos + Griffin’s Stories:

“Janet. Bill. Move closer together so it looks like you guys actually like each other.” -Photographer

“You try being married for 40 years.” -Janet

“Ok, well I can’t wait to overcompensate for my failing relationship with matching jackets.” -Photographer

Like a poisonous insect colored “avoid me,” his car was painted red. How foolish of me not to heed Mother Nature’s warning.

A life radiant as the sun’s own rays, now reduced to a single floral necklace. She thought it tragic. And yet, 10 years postmortem, her uncle was still bringing joy to the Providence boatyard — there was beauty in that.

Look at the goose plotting the demise of its cousin — the ever so dazzling, ever so elegant, and ever so overshadowing swan. Don’t believe me? Check out the “V” they form in flight; it stands for “vengeance.”

Her name was Fiona and I thought she was the bee’s knees. But she sliced my heart in two when she left me alone in the SUV limo on the night of prom. I tore friendships apart to get that limo.

Tropical Smoothie Cafe’s Mango Magic is like crack cocaine — you can’t stop once you start — or so they said. Mark your calendars people, because on this day, Saturday, 12/21/2019, Priya L. Duma did the unthinkable. Next up: the downfall of big tech.

Never before has Ms. Beer Can been made so aware of her uncouth appearance. The same shiny exterior that brought many a good man grasping at bars now looks out of place in this holy sanctuary.

At a park, we spot 3 young women in a big, jumping group hug, so naturally my boyfriend decides to take a picture. When they notice and shout “um hi,” he turns around and walks away. He lives to fight another day.

Griffin’s Photos + Nick’s Stories:

My favorite aunt brought me a belt as a gift, which arguably became my favorite belt though it clashed with most of my outfits.

I woke up in a panicked confusion, not remembering how I returned to my bed. I had a text from Jesse, “Are you alive?”

“Yeah, what happened? Also where’s my belt?”, I replied with a whoosh sound effect from my iPhone. With a sigh I thought, It was never mine to begin with, only a borrowed gift.

The most fascinating feature of the urban landscape is the dialogue between the manmade and the organic. Stones of granite are laid with precision, iron cast and molded into place, all answering to the grand design of municipal powers. What would these designs look like if they accounted for the public who occupy these spaces, and the stories they embed into these structures?

I’d repeat to myself, “Sit outside, because soon it’ll be winter and the air will be dry, and you’ll have to trudge through the snow, and you’ll wish you took advantage of the warm weather.” Now, in the darkness of winter, I can feel the warmth of those days past.

This is the hill that I die on. This is the hill that I die on? This is the hill that I die on.

Mix two parts white wheat flour with three parts water, stir out any lumps, and heat the mixture to a boil. When it thickens, add more water. Continue cooking on low heat for at least half an hour, stirring constantly so as not to burn the mixture.

“I’ve got bad news: you’re too small to row and you’re too big to be a coxswain.”

“This is my favorite song”

“What is it?”

“”Under the Bridge”, the Red Hot Chili Peppers”

“You say every song is your favorite”

Thanks for reading!

A Moment in Time was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A junior in high school, the imminent horizon was dull and gray, devoid of any possibility. After weeks of unsuccessful recruiting at my high school to staff my non-profit, my sweeping plans to bring my love, the sport of ultimate frisbee, to my younger friends at Lutheran Settlement House sat on the verge of oblivion because I couldn’t encourage my classmates to join me. Dead were my dreams of bridging Philadelphia’s deep socio-economic divides through frisbee.

As one does in such situations, I made a meme and shared it on social media. Within seconds, my messenger inbox filled with interest and support for my vision, and from there, I brought together a full-fledged group. We formalized our union with a group chat to coordinate developments in the initiative, and just weeks later, Frisbee Friends was born. Our rag-tag coalition of high school juniors lacked the money to supply the shelter with frisbees and athletic supplies, so I launched a GoFundMe page, promoted entirely on social media. $435 later, Frisbee Friends took off, with a website I developed and an active community, both in the shelter and in the high schools of my Philadelphia suburb.

It was only through mobile technology, people on their phones seeing and sharing my posts, that I able to launch the initiative — an initiative that fundamentally strengthened the community of which I was a part. And mobile technology continued to sustain Frisbee Friends by allowing our team to plan times to visit the Settlement House (in that same groupchat), coordinate with the guardians of the kids, and recruit new volunteers.

There are a lot of issues with mobile tech, ranging from privacy concerns to addictive usage. But, mobile technology has also given us the power to communicate with one another more easily and, by extension, has fostered the necessary discourse to bridge misunderstanding. This means, microscopically, we’ve used our phones to reinforce our individual kinships, while macroscopically, we’ve used mobile technology to effect positive social change. But as mobile technology continues to develop, the potential for positive impact on communities across the world is immense. AR and VR are already being utilized to help consumers picture products in their home, but imagine the capacity of such technology to cultivate empathy by enabling us to literally put ourselves in other people’s shoes. And cloud technology has immeasurable significance for the accessibility of data in communities that lack the computing resources and infrastructure.

Nonetheless, having the power to build community does not mean we do in fact build stronger communities. It’s up to the purveyors of such mobile technology to market and package it in a way that inspires consumers to do so. Developers to this medium, like Facebook or Apple, must prioritize facilitating conversation and truly strengthening the connections between humans. Only then can people across the world indeed fortify their communities through mobile technology.

Quick Thoughts on Mobile Tec was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I remember when my insomnia first set in, around the age of 10, when I began to wonder. I would find myself lying in bed at 1 AM in the morning, my vastly underdeveloped brain wrought with confusion over what exactly I was doing here. I would sit up in bed and ponder what it meant to be human — was I just a thing like my bed (that just happened to be able to think and speak) or something more? As the hours drifted by, I would eventually fall asleep and my internal struggle would manifest itself as a dream in which I would find myself physically lost, walking the streets of some unfamiliar city, passing people and buildings I had never seen before.

When my nanny explained Christianity to me at the age of 13, in an attempt to convert me, I thought I had found the answers to my questions. I decided to give the whole religious thing a try, constantly praying for the wellbeing of friends and love ones and reading from the Bible like it was one of the YA novels I was so obsessed with. However, no matter how convenient it was, no matter how hard I wanted to, I couldn’t make myself truly believe.

Later, in high school, I was introduced to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle whose educated thoughts hashed out the meaning of life, slicing it into a dozen logical and digestible pieces. But their well-crafted writing failed to penetrate even the epidermis of my personal quandary. Explanations of life existing for knowledge or pleasure provided me no comfort nor security in knowing what I was meant to do with my life. As my conversations with my friends grew richer and more profound, I realized I wasn’t the only one to experience what were called “existential crises.” Unfortunately, while these things seemed to be a phase that they grew out of, I never got my shit together enough to do the same.

Like the protagonist of some pretentious YA perks-of-being-a-wall-flower-esque movie, I’m endlessly searching for something with not a clue as to what it could be. In fact, an uncle once told me I could really benefit from learning to live in the moment, something I don’t deny. And yet for me, internalizing the platitude has proven near impossible except in short bursts. Sometime in high school, my vague and abstract contemplations of what I am and what I was meant to do began to consolidate into a single question of what lay ahead. Forever dissatisfied with the present (but not sad), I looked to the future to provide what might be — asking myself over and over again one short question. Is there more?

Fast forward a couple years, I’m now 20 and a junior in college, and the passage of time and the experiences I’ve accumulated seem to suggest otherwise. In the past few years, I’ve loved and lost, triumphed and failed, “found” myself a hundred times over. It feels like I’ve been around the world and seen all there is to see. And still, I haven’t shaken that feeling that this isn’t enough. Nevertheless, my cynicism is disrupted by the understanding of how young I am. I can’t possibly have experienced everything. Rapidly approaching the age milestone of 21, I’m suspended in a dichotomy of youth and maturity. On the one hand, it feels like I’ve learned so much and done so much, but on the other hand, the abundance of years ahead of me prevents me from jumping to any conclusions. So, the question remains, is there more?

I’m headed to New York City this summer and I can’t help feeling that if I’m going to find an answer ever, it’ll be there — the world’s largest city, filled top to bottom with 20-somethings finding their place in our universe. Both excited and apprehensive, I move forward with as much of clear eyes and a full heart that I can muster. Fingers crossed, here we go…

Is There More? was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unilateral decision-making on what qualifies as false information by any one of governments, corporations, or individuals could lead to exploitation. Most obvious, government regulation — the government power to specify content to remove (i.e. take down anything that has both “Trump” and “bad”) — could lead to partisan persecution of dissenting opinions. In fact, valid journalists have already been subjected to government scrutiny like the Al-Jazeera producer accused of broadcasting fake news and arrested after showing a documentary critical of Egyptian military conscription.[1] Even our own president, Donald Trump, has consistently attacked the media that condemns his actions, and the power to decide on the legitimacy of news sources would allow him, or even a partisan Congress, to silence any political opposition. In general, identifying harmful content can be subjective, so even well-intentioned legislation like the 2017 German law that requires large social media companies to remove racist or slanderous posts within 24 hours give necessarily ambiguous definitions of illegal content and pave the way for misuse.[2] Self-regulation by social media platforms is subject to similar concerns since it would also concentrate power in the hands of the few. Indeed, TechCrunch has pointed out “we don’t fully know how [Facebook] identified the particular ‘tens of thousands’ of [fake] accounts to close” prior to the UK and French elections[3]. But perhaps less obvious, the crowdsourcing of the decision-making process could result in tyranny of the majority if characterization of phony news sources is split ideologically. Imagine if social media platforms took down any content that received a certain number of user flags — like Trump, many would be tempted to label conflicting opinions as fabricated to get them removed. Thus, no single party should be able to determine what content qualifies as fake news since a one-sided decision sourced by governments, companies, or users would be vulnerable to power abuse by nature.

Automated detection of fake news in conjunction with another check could eliminate the need for any party involved to unilaterally decide what content needs to be removed and provides the scalability necessary for any practical solution — but means we would rely on tech companies to deploy the solution. More concretely, the Face2Face method of replicating video speech introduced by the Visual Computing Lab at TUM shows how this can be done by illustrating how imitation videos are made by morphing some target input[4] (like a real news video). Essentially, Face2Face uses principle component analysis (PCA) to construct a model that reduces a face to several parameters that can be learned, allowing for the reconstruction of realistic looking artificial faces. On top of the PCA model, the method use k-means clustering to build a fully connected appearance graph to synthetically move a mouth. In other words, the “mouth retrieval” works by minimizing some distance metric between two mouth expressions at each frame and between subsequent frames in the fake video.[5] Although this is a little more creative than the vanilla auto-encoder methods responsible for most of the fake news online since Face2Face claims to operate in a lower-dimensional space to provide more flexibility, this “novel approach” reaffirms that every video and text conveying false information must imitate legitimate news sources by distorting some seed value (a real article or video). Thus, an automated solution can identify patterns and known inconsistencies that distinguish fake news without bias but requires large amounts of training data and technical knowledge, both of which are exclusively available to tech companies.

However, social media platforms lack economic incentive and automated fake news detection requires a check, making proper government policy and user involvement necessary for implementation. To elaborate, companies would need to invest in new infrastructure and since automated solutions are sometimes prone to failure would also need to hire more employees to double-check propaganda identification. In addition, the Brookings Institution research group also points out that “false information can be profitable due to ad revenues or general brand-building.”[6] This means not only do tech companies not have a reason to bear the brunt (or cost) of building solutions to widespread disinformation but actually have an incentive to encourage fake news. However, a solution where the government shares the cost of deployment for an automated solution and users share the burden of checking that fake news is properly classified is accurate, scalable, logistically viable, and above all, democratically sound. According to Microsoft researchers, one method for leveraging crowd signals in fake news detection would provide an extremely effective check on automated detection and allow tech companies to prevent abuse by users in flagging content. The method, using Bayesian inference to jointly detect fake news and learn about users over time, is “robust in leveraging flags even if a majority of the users is adversarial”[7] — meaning it works even when the majority of users are abusing the flagging mechanism. Having consumers perform the check on a platform’s automated system, would vastly reduce the cost to social media platforms of hiring managing personnel. So, at a high level, an example architecture for an effective solution could involve 1) government policy that offsets costs through tax breaks for socially responsible social media platforms and fines for those that contribute to the issue in order to 2) encourage platforms to deploy automated fake news detection that 3) incorporates user checks on potentially problematic content.

To reiterate, automated detection of fake news in conjunction with user checks would prevent the unilateral classification of fake news and provide an accurate and scalable solution. In addition, proper government policy that doesn’t decide what fake news is but rather encourages the development and implementation of automatic detection through cost reduction would make such a solution logistically viable. Thus, the responsibility for fighting extensive disinformation online should be distributed across the government, social media platforms, and the users of such the platforms.

[1] West, How to Combat Fake News and Disinformation.

[2] West, How to Combat Fake News and Disinformation.

[3] Lomas, “Fake News is an Existential Crisis for Social Media.”

[4] Thies, Zollhofer, Stamminger, Theobalt, and Nießner, “Face2Face,” 3–6.

[5] Thies, Zollhofer, Stamminger, Theobalt, and Nießner, “Face2Face,” 3–4.

[6] West, How to Combat Fake News and Disinformation.

[7] Tschiatschek, Fake News Detection in Social Networks, 5–7.

Sources

Lomas, Natasha. “Fake News is an Existential Crisis for Social Media.” TechCrunch, 2018. https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-an-existential-crisis-for-social-media/.

Thies, Justus, Michael Zollhofer, Marc Stamminger, Christian Theobalt, and Matthias Nießner. “Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos.” Commun. ACM 62, no. 1 (January 2019): 1–8. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3292039.

Tschiatschek, Sebastian, Adish Singla, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Arpit Merchant, Andreas Krause. Fake News Detection in Social Networks via Crowd Signals. Microsoft, 2018. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.09025.pdf.

West, David M. How to Combat Fake News and Disinformation. Brookings Institute, 2017. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/.

Fake News: Who’s Responsible? was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Come over?

My girlfriend’s question is what I’ve been waiting for all night, and so while I’m physically with my friends, mentally I am definitely not. Thoughts of getting to spend even a second with her tear me away from the beauty that unfolds in front of my eyes, and yet I would have it no other way. The thing is, I’ve found True Love, that magical entity depicted in movies and books and songs as the apex of emotional experience and the real reason that humans exist on this planet. Thus, I have no trouble with making statements like “Megan is the most important thing in my life” and “I wish I could spend every waking second with her”. These words sound romantic to my ears and spending time with her feels right in a way that spending time with my friends never could.

The truth of the matter is that if I had to pick between saving Megan from falling to her death and saving all my closest friends from reaching the same fate, I would pick Megan in a heartbeat. I know some people would criticize me for thinking this way but those people are jealous and bitter and wish they could have what me and Megan have. I would tell them, what is a life worth living if not for True Love? I would tell them success and scholastic pursuits and even friends could never complete me in the way she can and when I’m on the verge of dying I won’t regret not working harder in life but rather not pursuing the love of my life.

This is actually my junior-year-of-high-school self. Now I’m a rising junior in college and since then, my outlook on life has changed drastically, as it should with four years of existence. After a particularly harsh breakup, I was told by a friend that I was perpetually attempting to find my manic pixie dream girl, which they went on to explain was this literary character that exists only to lift angsty young men out of depression and show them how to embrace life’s intricacies. Slowly I warmed up to the idea that instead of finding someone to make me feel whole again, I could do it myself, and now, at the moment, I’m casually seeing someone from whom I’m emotionally shielding myself in the name of independence and personal growth. A serial monogamist turned self-reliant individual, I went from dating one person after the other — each time believing they were the one I was going to spend the rest of my life with — to not wanting to date anyone.

I’ve spent almost a year alone now and I’ve made strides in my life I could never imagine I would make. I’ve molded myself into an expressive and confident (or at least more so than before) person whose first instinct when faced with a problem is that I can figure it out on my own, and oftentimes I surprise myself by actually doing so. Further yet, I’ve become a much more caring and considerate friend, which has proven to be a virtuous cycle in that when I do nice things for my friends, it makes me happier and more likely to continue being a good friend. It’s hard to imagine that I would ever be at this point, since I was knee deep in emotional dependency and not even looking to change it, but in retrospect the change I’ve made represents progress to me. For the first time in my life, I’ve developed a true self-derived happiness and a confidence that allows me to face rejection unfazed.

However, one of my best friends whom I used to admire for being one of my most compassionate and emotionally mature friends is complicating things by becoming my diametrical opposite. He’s dating a girl now and has allowed his love for her to consume his life in much the same way I used to — but placing our flip-flopped paths side by side has made me question the validity in our respective perspectives rather than confirming the truth to my own. I hear him arguing his side of the coin by explaining that it’s robotic to not fall for love, that people who give their all to someone else are the people who are truly living life. He would say that the people who place themselves before their relationship, their own sovereignty and their own self-sourced fulfillment in the form of career or friends or whatnot, are inherently selfish.

At face-value, I can’t find anything wrong with these statements, and because I know that I’m not the smartest person around, I’m left questioning if idealizing independence is the right way to go while also wondering if it makes me a bad person. Everything I thought I had figured out — from learning to associate maturity with emotional strength to developing an admiration for those individuals that define autonomy — is now being questioned by his argument. Nonetheless, digging more deeply, I find myself admiring people who are able to make those life decisions that he might call selfish because I recognize how truly difficult it is. It’s so hard for humans to be alone, not physically but rather without a significant other to provide emotional support, and yet to not have that support is by definition to give yourself room to grow as a person. I used to think of that as idealized bullshit because those flimsy words were insignificant in the face of the comfort of love and the pain of separation, but having actually lived it, I’ve come to believe them.

More than that though, I like to believe that the choice to not commit oneself fully and entirely to a significant other when we’re so young is an act of altruism. Note the word choice that implies a deliberate rejection of the alternative — because such choice is often rooted in the knowledge that doing so makes us better friends and better people. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since, like many people, I know from experience that the alternative leaves hardly any room for one to care about anyone other than that special person. Simultaneously, because I’ve been there so many times before, I know that love is like a burning flame that can and will consume you if you let it. It’s so easy to buy into all the fodder fed to us by movies talking about soulmates and songs telling us that love is the one thing worth living for. The second you let your guard down, the moment you let yourself fall into those patterns of thought — and it really is so easy to give in — you’re engulfed by the fire we call love. So naturally, I’ve replaced a conception of those like my needy, indulgent high school self as people achieving their best self with an image of them as victims falling for an appealing trap.

At the same time however, I was traveling alone about a week ago, arriving into Atlanta’s airport close to midnight, and was suddenly overcome with a crippling loneliness that reminded me that at the end of the day I’m really the same emotion-driven person I’ve always been. And the truth is, there are indeed nights when I’m lying in bed alone in the dark and all I want is someone to hold me and someone for me to hold. There are mornings when I wake up and wish there were someone there to tell me that I’m a worthwhile human being, to validate me with their love and admiration. In those moments I’ve struck with the urge to text whoever I’m keeping at a distance then that I miss them. I want to tell them things like I want to be with them and tell my friends all the romantic things I used to say.

So maybe I am completely and utterly wrong. Maybe this craving for physical contact and emotional support is an innate part of humanity and shouldn’t be ignored. Maybe the strength of such desire is a sign that to be absorbed by love is really the right way to live life. Or maybe the way I view the world around me is too black and white, and in fact, there’s a middle ground straddling the realms of all-consuming love and an independent mindset. What’s likely is that it’s to each his own in that there’s no single right way. I don’t know and I don’t claim to know — but I’m hoping thinking about it is the first step in figuring it all out.

The Right Way to Love? was originally published in Curious Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.