To Siri, With Love

Just how bad a mother am I? I wondered, as I watched my 13-year-old son deep in conversation with Siri. Gus has autism, and Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant” on the iPhone, is currently his B.F.F. Obsessed with weather formations, Gus had spent the hour parsing the difference between isolated and scattered thunderstorms — an hour in which, thank God, I didn’t have to discuss them.

NYTimes

‘Location, location, location.’ How where you live influences how you shop online.

In the digital era, there’s no doubt consumers are more connected to each other and to global retail brands than ever before.

But despite this connectivity, researcher David R. Bell makes the case in his new book, “Location is (Still) Everything,” that the neighborhoods we live in — and the acquaintances we encounter there — still have deep influence on how we shop.

Washington Post

Photographer documents people carrying heavy loads on their heads

A photographer has travelled the world photographing people with unwieldy objects balanced on their heads. French photographer Floriane De Lassée travelled across some of the world’s most rural landscapes, from East Africa to South America, in search of people for her ongoing photo series, How Much Can You Carry.

The Telegraph

Man to live another’s life for 4 weeks

A London man is to live the life of another person for 28 days, in an experiment that he hopes will give him insight into the nature of human existence but which experts have called potentially `extremely disturbing’. Mark Farid is set to recruit an `avatar’ or `other’, who will video his whole life for 28 days, and watch all of that video through an Oculus Rift, while people feed him all of the food that his participant eats.

Times of India

7 charts that explain the undocumented immigrant population

President Obama’s executive order on immigration could exempt from deportation more than five million undocumented immigrants — almost half of the total undocumented population in the country, which is about 11.5 million (depending on the data you’re looking at). The population is vast and diverse, coming from different countries and living in very different proportions in different states.

We took a look at some of the demographic breakdowns of the group pulled together by the Pew Hispanic Trends Project and the Department of Homeland Security.

Washington Post