You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?

There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!

Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!


Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!

free counters

Google

Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts

Monday, September 27, 2021

Rest In Peace!

My column in Mindanao Daily News and BusinessWeek Mindanao

OPINION
By KLAUS DORING
 September 27, 2021

Years ago, I was still a freshman, when it came to the Internet and blogging. When I started my first blog as a German expatriate living in the Philippines, a very special social network came across my path: Facebook! I started chatting with some media friends from all over the Philippines.
 
Actually I started with "Friendster". Friends from the whole globe! Facebook was introduced to me as a new site for college kids.
 
Nowadays, we're experiencing different headlines, when it comes to social media networks. Despite scandals over fake news and data privacy, one thing is for sure: the social network Facebook is unlikely to disappear any time soon.
 
Actually, during the first year, I found Facebook’s evolution and societal function both equally fascinating and disturbing.
 
The biggest question of all that gnaws at the back of my mind is whether there is any stopping Facebook in the future?  It looks increasingly like the answer is no.
 
“Friendster failed for simple reasons: the time wasn’t right,” says Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Not only is it about the readiness of people to participate in a social networking site, but it’s also just about the nuts and bolts.” Friendster and MySpace helped blaze the trail for Facebook's global popularity, but they failed to achieve even close to the same success as their successor.
 
The kind of engineering that allows Facebook to function every day simply wasn’t available back in the early days of the new millennium. But by 2004, internet speeds had increased and the coding that underpins websites had become more sophisticated. The technical limitations of earlier social networking sites like Friendster and Friends Reunited cleared the runway for Facebook.
 
But despite technical barriers, those other sites paved the way for Facebook at a time when people were still a little wary of putting too much of themselves out on the internet. In the 1990s, internet users were warned against even sharing their first name online, but now words like “oversharing” and “selfie” are so common they are recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary.
 
Facebook - bone or ban? Fact is, Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider. I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. But bear with me, most of the time, I spend being online on Facebook.
 
Once the mid-2000s rolled around, Facebook was also able to hire a lot of talented engineers from Silicon Valley, which helped it put together the kind of website infrastructure that could scale-up with an exponentially growing user base. Your Newsfeed doesn’t curate and customise itself – its launch needed engineers to cook up algorithms that picked the most valuable updates from your friends’ updates.
 
But Hwang points to another serendipitous factor in Facebook’s global rise: mobile phones. In a lot of developing countries, people only have cheap mobiles to access the internet. In fact, a lot of these users think Facebook is the internet.
 
“We can’t discount the power of mobile,” says Hwang. It’s made “social networks much, much more pervasive. You have social media at all times in your pocket, which makes it this powerful platform for news and conversation that operated in a slower way in the desktop-only era.”
 
For starters, it has become so ingrained and intertwined in the digital ecosystem of the 21st Century that it is hard to now untangle it. Oxford’s Hogan points to a concept he calls “interoperability.” This is where a Facebook login is often required to use and operate other online services.
 
“Just today I went out to buy concert tickets,” Hogan says. “I had to log into Facebook. I don’t use Facebook, but I had to dust off my login. Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider.” I am sure you experienced the same, my dear readers.
 
Facebook also taps into basic human needs, according to psychologists. Even with social media movements like #DeleteFacebook, mass privacy concerns or even just calls to leave the site on the back of pedestrian design tweaks, people just can’t stay away.
 
“Almost everybody comes back,” says Catalina Toma, associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin. “Social networking sites tap into what makes us human: we like to connect with others.” Yes, we don't go out and meet friends somewhere for a chat or a beer or coffee. We are connected with them via Facebook. Especially since the pandemic didn't allow us to go out and meet people personally.
 
But there are tangible benefits beyond those that keep people hooked.
 
“Lots of studies show the more people use Facebook, the more social capital they derive – resources that we get from just being connected to other people,” says Toma. “There’s emotional support, asking for advice, asking for recommendations.”
 
For many Facebook users, the pros outweigh the cons: tracking down long-lost friends, getting leads to a job, expanding their business. They can deal with the glamorized glimpses. All this keeps people coming back for more, despite the onslaught of what Toma calls “glamorized glimpses”. These are the carefully curated peeks into the lives of everyone else, who all seem to be doing better than you. “They feel worse, but they cannot stop,” Toma says. I strongly have to agree!
 
Facebook is bound to have a grip on our lives. “Social media companies seek to exploit one’s attention for profit,” Hogan says. “It’s not even ambiguous. It’s exactly what Zuckerberg said in Congress: ‘Where do you get your money?’ ‘We get it from ads.’”
 
Right place, right time: the rise of internet-connected mobile devices in turn fueled the rise of Facebook.
 
“Facebook’s business is still going to accelerate,” says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University who wrote The Big Four, a book about how powerful a tiny handful of technology companies are becoming. “Consumers talk a big game but where is the first place they go to express their rage? Facebook and Instagram. And with 2.2 billion monthly active users, advertisers have no choice but to be on Facebook.” That could change, though, as advertising dollars follow young users who abandon the platform.
 
Still, there’s plenty of stability with older people – even among senior citizens. The site’s true future could boil down to what world governments decide to do, if anything, about Facebook’s growing influence.
 
“I don’t think the question is [what is] ‘killing Facebook’,” says Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think the question is what would get people to an appropriate use of Facebook. To the extent that we ‘knew’ about it before, we found ways to put it out of mind. Now, we can no longer do this.” We’re now all too familiar with the dangers of data leaks and fake news.
 
Let's face it: there’s also the simple fact that Facebook has a monopoly. “Facebook’s sheer size and cash on hand means that they can either acquire or effectively shut down any competition,” says Galloway, pointing to examples like WhatsApp and Instagram, which were eventually absorbed into the Facebook behemoth.
 
For now, Facebook is still so entrenched in our daily lives, there’s not going to be an immediate escape.“What’s more likely to happen is that people start to realize the markets and economy might be better off – by stimulating innovation, creating new jobs – if we were to break it up and have multiple firms instead of just one,” Galloway says. That’s the more likely outcome than Facebook just crashing, burning and disappearing altogether, according to the experts.
 
Rest in peace, Facebook? Surely a big NO!

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Does our social media betrays our mood?

My column in MINDANAO DAILY -
the Mindanao-wide published newspaper.

Clues to the state of your mental health may be hiding in plain sight – in the tweets you send and the Facebook updates you post. There it is in your Facebook timeline or Instagram gallery – a digital footprint of your mental health.

I was shocked but - on the other way also very interested checking out more on BBC. This February, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. 

One thing is really clear: it’s not hidden in the obvious parts: the emojis, hashtags and inspirational quotes. Instead, it lurks in subtler signs that, unbeknownst to you, may provide a diagnosis as accurate as a doctor’s blood pressure cuff or heart rate monitor.

For those who see social media mainly as a place to share the latest cat video or travel snap, this may come as a surprise. It also means the platform has important – and potentially life-saving – potential. Following the BBC:  in the US alone, there is one death by suicide every 13 minutes. Despite this, our ability to predict suicidal thoughts and behavior has not materially improved across 50 years of research. Forecasting an episode of psychosis or emerging depression can be equally challenging.

But data mining and machine learning are transforming this landscape by extracting signals from dizzying amounts of granular data on social media. These methods already have tracked and predicted flu outbreaks. Now, it’s the turn of mental health.

Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them.

Even then, these patterns are hardly robust enough in isolation to diagnose or predict depression. Still, they could be crucial in constructing models that can. This is where machine learning comes in.

While checking out all these details, I try to recall my last posts and reactions in social media. Maybe at this moment, you think about yours too.

Allow me to share more with you, my dear readers: researchers from Harvard University and the University of Vermont used these techniques in their recent analysis of almost 44,000 Instagram posts. Their resulting models correctly identified 70% of all users with depression. compared to a rate of 42% from general practitioners. They also had fewer false positives (although this figure drew from a separate population, so may be an unfair comparison). Depressive signals were evident in users’ feeds even before a formal diagnosis from psychiatrists – making Instagram an early warning system of sorts.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists have long linked language and mental health, listening for the disjointed and tangential speech of schizophrenia or the increased use of first-person singular pronouns of depression. For an updated take, type your Twitter handle into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles. From my 1017 most recent words on Twitter, I’m apparently average for being angry and worried but below average on being upbeat – I have been pretty pessimistic about the state of the world recently. Enter @realdonaldtrump into AnalzyeWords and you’ll see he scores highly on having an upbeat emotional style, and is less likely than average to be worried, angry, and depressed.

The behaviour we exhibit online can be used to inform diagnostic and screening tools – so the opinion of Chris Danforth, University of Vermont.

But far beyond this quick and sometimes amusing scan of emotional and social styles (AnalyzeWords tells you if you’re more “Spacy/ValleyGirl” than average), researchers are exploring profound questions about mental health.

Telling signals of depression include an increase in negative words (“no”, “never”, “prison”, “murder”) and a decrease in positive ones (“happy”, “beach”, and “photo”), but these are hardly definitive. Taking it a step further, researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Vermont extracted a wider range of features (mood, language and context) from almost 280,000 tweets. The resulting computational model scored highly on identifying users with depression; it also was correct in about nine of every 10 PTSD predictions.


The ratio of positive to negative words was a key predictor within the model, says Chris Danforth, one of the researchers and Flint professor of mathematical, natural and technical sciences at the University of Vermont. Other strong predictors included increased tweet word count.

What to do with all this information? Empowerment would be a good start. 

Reservations persist more broadly in this field, though, especially around privacy. What if digital traces of your mental health become visible to all? You might be targeted by pharmaceutical companies or face discrimination from employers and insurers. In addition, some of these types of projects aren’t subject to the rigorous ethical oversight of clinical trials. Users are frequently unaware their data has been mined. Yes, include me in. And -maybe- you too!

As privacy and internet ethics scholar Michael Zimmer once explained, “Just because personal information is made available in some fashion on a social network, does not mean it is fair game for capture and release to all”.

BBC news made me very thoughtful: Data mining and machine learning offer the potential for earlier identification of mental health conditions. Currently, the time from onset of depression to contact with a treatment provider is six to eight years; for anxiety, it’s nine to 23 years. In turn, hopefully we’ll see better outcomes. Two billion users engage with social media regularly – these are signals with scalability. As Mark Zuckerberg wrote recently while outlining Facebook’s AI plans, “there have been terribly tragic events – like suicides, some live streamed – that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner.”

Quoting BBC again - and here, I really strong agree: mental health exists between clinic appointments. It ebbs and flows in real time. It lives in posts and pictures and tweets. Perhaps prediction, diagnosis and healing should live there, too.

See you in Facebook and Twitter. Or email me: doringklaus@gmail.com. And you can also follow me in LinkedIn - or just visit my www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or -my relaxing place- www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com .

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Hate Speech


Hate speech


IN MY OPINIONKlaus Doring
Besides fake news, hate speech is the second big problem in social media.
It has been longtime overdue, but finally German lawmakers have approved a controversial law that would impose high fines on social media companies like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube for failing to swiftly delete posts deemed to exhibit hate speech.
Under the new legislation, social media companies have 24 hours to remove posts that obviously violate German law and have been reported by other users. In cases that are more ambiguous, Facebook and other sites have seven days to deal with the offending post. If they don’t comply with the new legislation, the companies could face a fine of up to 50 million Euro ($57.1 million).
The law was passed with votes from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – Social Democratic Party (SPD) government coalition. The Left Party in the Bundestag voted against it, while members of the Greens abstained.
The new rules are supposed to drastically reduce the number of posts containing hate speech, fake news and terror propaganda on social media. In January and February 2017, YouTube deleted 90 percent of hate speech videos reported by users – but Twitter only deleted one percent. Facebook did a little better at 39 percent.
Skeptics criticize, however, that under the new rules social media managers are the ones who have to decide whether content complies with German law. They also worry that freedom of speech will suffer since, in their opinion, companies are likely to delete many posts just to be on the safe side and avoid fines.
It’s in-deed a Land-mark legislation in Europe and should be adopted worldwide.
In addition to the strict new rules about deletion, the law forces networks to reveal the identity of those behind the hateful posts and to offer users “an easily recognizable, directly reachable, and constantly available” complaint process for “prosecutable content,” which includes libel, slander, defamation, incitement to commit a crime, hate speech against a particular social group, and threats.
Germany is the first country in Europe to introduce such clear legal guidelines against online hate speech.
+++
Email: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or visit www. germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com.