TOW Post #19

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/20/its-unanimous-facebook-buying-whatsapp-is-the-best-or-worst-deal-ever/

Facebook recently bought the mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion, acquiring a 5 year old company that was well on the rise towards becoming a popular application that consumers could use to reach their friends without having to go through text messaging. Most analysts seem to agree on the fact that this deal was simply not worth the money that Facebook has invested. According to people like Jon Swartz from USA Today, the deal was "downright silly", and due to Rob Enderle it seemed to be a desperate move by Facebook, who is currently having to deal with a massive slowing of user growth and advertisement growth. The author of this piece, Forbes' own Jeff Bercovici, seems to agree with these points of view. His favorite quote regarding Facebook's purchase was from Henry Blodget, who calls the decision, depending on how it turns out, either brilliant or incredibly moronic. Throughout, the Bercovici uses exemplification, or repeated testimony from analysts, to convey the idea that this purchase was probably not a good idea for Facebook. He uses a lighthearted diction to almost make it seem as though he's making fun of Facebook, or not taking the purchase seriously due to how bad of a decision it was. But due to the amount of negative commentary he added to the article, it appears that he seems to agree that WhatsApp wasn't worth $19 million.

IRB Intro post

The book that I've been considering reading is called Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It's about how, despite having a lot of money to spend on good players, the Oakland Athletics ends up being one of the best teams in baseball in 2002.

TOW #18

http://sports.yahoo.com/photos/quirks-of-sochi-construction-1391548019-slideshow/

Sochi, the site of the 2014 winter Olympics, isn't exactly up to the standards of the visitors who have come to watch the games. To add to the political controversy circling Russia over their treatment of LGBT citizens with the recent anti-gay propaganda law, the town appears to be not quite ready. To give the people who worked to develop Sochi credit, they transformed a virtually unimportant plot of land into an Olympic-ready game town very quickly, but it doesn't exactly match up to the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics with their huge glass dome. TIME Magazine calls it one of the worst Olympics destinations ever. After people get by the hotels that are either in shambles or unprepared for their arrival, they have to worry about terrorism or nonfunctioning equipment in rooms. The visas are expensive, and people are simply not having a good time. The pictures shown in this slideshow help to show viewers exactly what the people are seeing, along with the ethos of the prestigious Olympic games, and adds an irony that is hard to ignore when thinking of the games overall.

TOW #17

This is a picture that went viral recently through social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr. The caption reads that a shark collapsed at the Discovery science center in Kuwait, and that it's something people on these sites should like or upvote because it's something they'll only see once in a lifetime. As it turns out, however, this picture was a hoax, and it wasn't originally designed to make people believe that there were actually sharks swimming in a mall. Jamie King, a photoshop expert, made this photo to be a joke and posted it on his twitter. Someone else added the caption and, before we knew it, the picture went viral. This is just one example of many where people simply believe things without checking the sources of what they've found interesting. A recent "disease" was shared on the internet called Alexandria's Genesis where a child is born with purple eyes, they have no hair on their armpits or their legs, for girls they wouldn't menstruate, and fair skin that would never burn. People shared this diagnosis on Tumblr for months, not knowing that it was an interesting character trait made by an author of fanfiction. No one really knows why people change the meaning of certain things to make large numbers of people believe something that isn't true.  It does, however, prove that we, when we use the internet and see something, need to check before we share it, effectively making more and more people "dumber".