I'm not sure first year students always have selected a major, but if we go by degree at graduation, I think this article (and the charts therein) is useful: https://www.chartr.co/newsletters/2023-10-08
(n.b. No archive.org evergreen link available, alas)
> " 20 years ago, roughly 8% of all US bachelor degrees were attained in the 4 core humanities subjects — a figure that’s fallen every year since 2007, with the share now sitting at just 4% per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Conversely, STEM subjects (science, technology,
engineering and math) have been growing at an unparalleled pace, as students swap Charles Dickens for computational dynamics and Jane Austen forJavascript."
> "Indeed, computer science has risen from a 2.7% share of all degrees in 2009 to 5.4% by the end of 2022, while engineering has risen from 7.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame — more than double the share that the core humanities subjects currently occupy."
I don't have the answers here any more than anyone; but I notice that most approaches tend to cut along the existing verticals (e.g. the product areas).
The break-up of AT&T provides another perhaps more viable arena for thought...
There the breakup resulted in multiple, independent competing companies cleaved from AT&T. Three organically produced combinations now remain of the original 7:
1. Verizon is what was the north eastern region (Bell Atlantic + NYNEX).
2. The now reunited trademark AT&T started as the western ones (Pacific Telesis and Ameritech) then added the southwest (Southwestern Bell/SBC) in 2005 and the southern states' one (BellSouth) in 2006.
3. The midwestern region was Qwest which is still around in some form as CenturyLink/Lumen.
From one massive company which did everything you got a bunch of companies that actually competed with each other in the main and market dominant sector. The market continued to evolve and real market forces forced combinations among them; IMO this is a good and natural thing.
Remember MCI and Sprint? Did you know they were already around pre-breakup as starving competitors of the monopoly? Suddenly they became national brands and introduced their own leaderships' priorities into the consumer marketplace (MCI in particular was early in seeing the importance of several early Internet packet-based technologies and in consumer email).
Prior to the breakup did you know that the domestic television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, there wasn't Fox yet) had long-term contracts to send their signals over AT&T's terrestrial network? Almost immediately after the breakup (this is not a causal thing, but there is a lot of correlation) they all switched almost immediately thereafter to sattelite distribution (which had been available for nearly a decade).
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The point I'm making is that you don't have to just draw inside the preexisting lines. The goal isn't the punish Alphabet, but to maximize competition in the market to the benefit of the nation (externalities positive and negative) and its consumers (first-order real good). Promoting competition may result in 2 search companies that can't reunite or something equally unthinkable...
Did anyone else find themselves focusing on the eyes?
Pupil diameter in most humans is affected by autonomic arousal, e.g. in conversation it provides an often unconscious signal to the listener/observer. I didn't detect any dilation or constriction of the pupils in either head image; and for me it introduced some uncanny valley-ness.
The contrast between Mark's lighter iris color and both the blackness and relative smallness of his pupils drew my attention repeatedly. The middle image of the sampled video shows some contrast between iris and pupil but that might have been too noisy for their use. Anyway, I'd be curious, what they tried here. It seems they're rendering the pupil, I wonder if they'd tried playing with the diameter as a fixed proportion of the iris diameter, or whether they tested edge blurring for lighter-colored eyed individuals to reduce contrast.
I'd be curious to learn, but suspect that sending the "wrong" eye dilation information may be worse (e.g. sending a "beady" eyed signal triggering unconscious emotional responses) than just sending a static pupil size too.
I didn't read the article as playing blame-games or stoking hatred, personally. The author does kind of walk through a timeline from 2020 to now about hand sanitizer; but that felt more like just a timeline. Yeah, we all kind of freaked out about washing early on (I had a UV-C sterilizer in an aluminum foil lined box (!!!)), but each of us was doing our best during an emergency. That, at least, is the sense I got from that part of the article. I realize the article set you off, and I could totally see that happening to me in different circumstances, so just want to say that I get it. But, speaking for myself, I liked this article because it made me think about something I hadn't before so I thought I'd share that perspective.
The article talks about how there's tons of left over hand sanitizer we now have to deal with. I personally just never spared a thought for there now being many millions of gallons of this stuff sitting around. I also hadn't ever thought about how they can't sell or give away or cheaply dispose of it, so it's just sitting there being all haz-matty and stuff. And, I can absolutely see some low-margin operators looking for an out in that situation.
Anyway, I'd encourage anyone who liked the article to read the complaint the county filed in this instance. It's not short but it's a pretty quick read. Start at "Pre-Fire Violations of the Hazardous Materials Laws at the Property" if you just want to read the timeline [according to the Plaintiffs] there's also lots of pictures. It does sounds like the authorities were trying to do the right thing, but the company [allegedly] ignored the repeated citations. See: https://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/lac/1118231_CountyvProlog...
That made me wonder whether there are any other facilities improperly storing this stuff. To be clear, this isn't political code; I'm not saying we need different laws, not drawing parallels to the Beirut or Tianjin warehouse explosions and saying we now suck, or drawing parallels to the Ohio rail fire and how we keep defunding and defanging government safety inspectors... Instead, this is an article talking specifically about an industrial accident and the many Americans who suffered. I had never heard about it previously, found it interesting, and learned something both from the article and by following up and looking into it a bit more myself.
Anyway, while I respect your opinion, speaking for myself I don't see this article creating any sort of division... I mean, between who? You and me and everyone who reads the article versus people who [allegedly] improperly store dangerous chemicals in residential areas despite multiple citations to stop doing that? That's the sort of polarization I don't mind.
The first banner ads were certainly less annoying; but since I definitely remember my reaction to seeing Canter+Siegel posts... I'd still say online advertising has always been relatively obnoxious.
I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.
Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.
Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).
All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.
Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.
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So, what changed?
Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)
What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?
You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.
But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.
But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.
In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.
Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.
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What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.
And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.
The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.
But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!
If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.
Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!
But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.
And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).
(n.b. No archive.org evergreen link available, alas)
> " 20 years ago, roughly 8% of all US bachelor degrees were attained in the 4 core humanities subjects — a figure that’s fallen every year since 2007, with the share now sitting at just 4% per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Conversely, STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) have been growing at an unparalleled pace, as students swap Charles Dickens for computational dynamics and Jane Austen forJavascript."
> "Indeed, computer science has risen from a 2.7% share of all degrees in 2009 to 5.4% by the end of 2022, while engineering has risen from 7.2% to 9.4% in the same time frame — more than double the share that the core humanities subjects currently occupy."