Facebook - Wikipedia. Facebook is an American for- profit corporation and an online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN.com.Most of the stories I was shown while I played were things I had already seen pop up on Facebook. I like to consider myself pretty good at being able to tell whether. George Church is a real-life Dr. Frankenstein. The inventor of CRISPR and one of the minds behind the Human Genome Project is no longer content just reading and. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2. Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Mc. Collum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to high school students as well. Since 2. 00. 6, anyone who claims to be at least 1. Facebook, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement, depending on applicable local laws. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Users can add other users as . Additionally, users may join common- interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as . In groups, editors can pin posts to top. Additionally, users can complain about or block unpleasant people. Because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for its privacy policies. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements which appear onscreen. Facebook, Inc. On July 1. Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor's 5. Index to reach a market cap of $2. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not and used . Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. He uploaded all art images to a website, each of which was featured with a corresponding comments section, then shared the site with his classmates, and people started sharing notes. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week. They claimed that he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. They later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling in 2. In March 2. 00. 4, Facebook expanded to the universities of Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. This website last appeared on April 8, 2. A high- school version of the site was launched in September 2. Zuckerberg called the next logical step. These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned. Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international advertisements on the social networking site. The company announced 5. July 2. 01. 0. A company representative called the milestone a . The company had slightly surpassed e. Bay to become the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon. The company was valued at $1. The company applied for a $5 billion IPO, one of the biggest offerings in the history of technology. The store was to be available on i. Phones, Android devices, and mobile web users.! Finance website reported that Facebook's lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley (MS), JP Morgan (JPM), and Goldman Sachs (GS), cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO process. HTC announced the HTC First, a smartphone with Home pre- loaded. The letter F moved closer to the edge of the box. The campaign highlighted content promoting domestic and sexual violence against women, and used over 5. Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK. The social media website initially responded by stating that . The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average weekly wage in the county was US$3,2. It noted the wages were . The A4. AI is a coalition of public and private organizations that includes Google, Intel and Microsoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners- Lee, the A4. AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 3. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income. The meeting occurred after Zuckerberg participated in a Q& A session at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 2. Mandarin—although Facebook is banned in China, Zuckerberg is highly regarded among the people and was at the university to help fuel the nation's burgeoning entrepreneur sector. According to Reuters, such content is . Facebook maintained that . His speech outlined his vision, which was centered around three main pillars: artificial intelligence, increased connectivity around the world and virtual and augmented reality. Users can create profiles, see updates from co- workers on their news feed, stream live video and participate in secure group chats. In a virtual and shared space, users can access a curated selection of 3. Users can also access their own photos and videos, and any media shared on their Facebook newsfeed. According to Business. Week. com, banner advertisements on Facebook have generally received one- fifth the number of clicks compared to those on the Web as a whole. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (8. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet. Magid and Associates found that the percentage of teens aged 1. Facebook fell to 8. During the same time, independent market research firm e. Marketer released data in which Facebook accounted for 5. Google's share was 3. Mobile advertising revenue accounted for around 6. Number of advertisers. In February 2. 01. Facebook announced that it had reached two million active advertisers with most of the gain coming from small businesses. An active advertiser is an advertiser that has advertised on the Facebook platform in the last 2. On January 1. 1, 2. Farm Bureau disclosed $8. Crowd. Tangle confirmed the acquisition in a message at their website, but company didn't disclosed financial terms of the deal. This allows Facebook to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay just about 2–3% corporation tax on all international revenue. In November 2. 01. Facebook opened a fourth data center in Altoona, Iowa, US. Facebook has roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic analogue VK has around 3. The facility, opened in June 2. A Facebook spokesperson explained that the intention of the facility is to encourage employees to think in an innovative manner because of the different environment, and also serves as an attractive perk for prospective employees. New headquarters will be in Fitzrovia in central London at a site that is currently undergoing redevelopment. Facebook's London- based executive, Nicola Mendelsohn said . According to an interview in 2. Chuck Rossi, a build engineer at Facebook, Facebook compiles into a 1. GB binary blob which is then distributed to the servers using a custom Bit. Torrent- based release system. Rossi stated that it takes approximately 1. The build and release process is zero downtime and new changes to Facebook are rolled out daily. Using a tailing architecture, new events are stored in log files, and the logs are tailed. The system rolls these events up and writes them into storage. The User Interface then pulls the data out and displays it to users. Facebook handles requests as AJAX behavior. These requests are written to a log file using Scribe (developed by Facebook). It tails the log files and pulls data out (thus the name). Ptail data is separated out into three streams so they can eventually be sent to their own clusters in different data centers (Plugin impression, News feed impressions, Actions (plugin + news feed)). Puma is used to manage periods of high data flow (Input/Output or IO). Data is processed in batches to lessen the number of times needed to read and write under high demand periods (A hot article will generate a lot of impressions and news feed impressions which will cause huge data skews). Batches are taken every 1. The backend is written in Java and Thrift is used as the messaging format so PHP programs can query Java services. Caching solutions are used to make the web pages display more quickly. The more and longer data is cached the less realtime it is. The data is then sent to Map. Reduce servers so it can be queried via Hive. This also serves as a backup plan as the data can be recovered from Hive. Raw logs are removed after a period of time. Prior to public release, a large portion of Facebook was already running and . The Mini- Feed and Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an effort was made to create a . Users could personally fundraise using the categories education, medical and pet health, public crisis, natural disasters, emergencies and funerals. In May 2. 01. 7, Facebook added the categories community and sports and announced anyone in the U. S. Users can also set which set of gender- specific pronoun should be used in reference to them throughout the site. If a user does not provide key information, such as location, hometown, or relationship status, other users can use a new . Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent user- set categories of friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends. The patent covers News Feeds in which links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 6. As of May 2. 00. 9, this limit has been increased to 2. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to . For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. Why Bringing Back a Wooly Mammoth Is No Longer Science Fiction. Dr. George Church is a real- life Dr. Frankenstein. The inventor of CRISPR and one of the minds behind the Human Genome Project is no longer content just reading and editing DNA—now he wants to make new life. In Ben Mezrich’s latest book, Wooly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures, Church and his Harvard lab try to do the impossible, and clone an extinct Woolly mammoth back into existence. Mezrich, author of the books that would become the feature films 2. The Social Network, seems to have graduated from college to a bioengineering Ph. D with his latest work, which is chock- full of scientific explanation detailing every aspect of the Church lab’s efforts to rewrite the DNA of an elephant to look like a wooly mammoth. But Mezrich is even more interested in telling the stories of the people trying to make the mammoth a reality, dramatizing the lives of Church, his wife, Harvard Professor Dr. Ting Wu, their fellow scientists, researchers working for a competing cloning lab in Korea, and the conservationists at the Siberian preserve where the mammoths will finally reside. While at times his predictions feel too good to be true, Mezrich’s prose rarely fails to engage. Gizmodo sat down with Mezrich to talk about a few of the themes present in his book, as well as the future of de- extinction and scientific breakthroughs in general. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of the interview. Gizmodo: What brought you to extinct species revival in particular? Mezrich: I’ve been interested in mammoths since I was a kid, basically, and I’ve always been a fan of Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park, so it’s always been on my mind to tell a story like that. Then a couple years ago, I started hearing about Dr. George Church and the Mammoth Revival project, and I decided I just needed to tell this story. He let me embed myself in his lab, so I spent a while just living there seeing what was going on, and just getting really into it. Gizmodo: An early chapter of the book opens four years in the future, when humans have succeeded in bringing mammoths back to life. What makes you think the project will succeed so soon? Mezrich: Even at this moment, right now, there are three prehistoric woolly mammoth . I was talking to George . Even though he doesn’t put a date on it, I put the four year date, but he sees that as totally possible. The slowest part of the process right now is the gestation period of an elephant. Whether we’ll have a woolly mammoth in three years or just be very close in three years, I don’t know, but a lot depends on the money and on the elephant. The initiative is how they work on it, but it is feasible. Gizmodo: Let’s talk about the money. That’s a huge motivating factor behind the project, but it seems like the wealthy are the ones funding scientific efforts a lot of the time (Editor’s Note: The Church Lab’s Genome Sequencing project is funded mainly by private computing and biotechnology companies). Is this a good thing? How do you feel about science funded on the whims of oligarchs? Mezrich: Well it’s interesting, you look at this marriage between incredibly wealthy people and science, and in some ways it’s a very good thing. You know, in some ways it pushes science forward. You’re not gonna see (and I wish you would) Donald Trump pouring money into the woolly mammoth revival project, you’re not seeing the government doing these things. So whatever his personal goal, it’s good for everybody. I look at it as a positive thing, I think big money has always influenced outside- the- box science, look at what Elon Musk does or what’s going on at Amazon, Facebook or Google. It’s very very wealthy people throwing money at crazy ideas, and hopefully we all benefit from it. Peter Thiel put in $1. Gizmodo: This book and The Accidental Billionaires both had the protagonists receive additional funding from Peter Thiel. How do you feel about his involvement in particular in such immediately relevant work? Mezrich: Yeah, I’ve written about him twice. Thiel said tell me your craziest projects, and he listed a couple of them, and . Also, his student Ken Esfeld at MIT is working on transgenic mice to beat lyme disease. The goal is to release 1. Lyme disease onto the island of Nantucket, which is kind of a wild story. In his lab, they’re also working on the pigs with human- compatible livers. They’ve a couple of pig embryos with livers that can be used in humans. You’re looking at the future of transplantation, which is incredible. They’re working on projects to extend lifespans. Gizmodo: Do you think meddling with ecosystems and reviving lost species could have negative effects on living ones? Mezrich: You have to be very ethical and responsible because you’re working with technology that is very powerful. The same technology that allows you to create a woolly mammoth or an extinct species allows you to eliminate a species if you want. You could eliminate mosquitos (Editor’s Note: Scientists are discussing the possibility of doing this with a controversial and speculative technology called gene drive), but that brings up enormous issues in ecology. I think bringing back an extinct species like the mammoth is generally a good thing, I think that the people who don’t want Church to do that are usually thinking what does it mean for the Asian elephant population, which is endangered. But it’s not a zero sum game—we’re not giving up on these endangered species . We now have the technology to bring back a species we mostly ate out of existence. It’s like a karmic righting of a wrong, and there’s been a lot of talk about the sixth extinction, species are going extinct all over the place, but the fact that we can bring one back is a huge moment, I think, in human history and our ability fix the things we were breaking. We have to live with our environment, but we also have to figure out ways to make it better, and if bringing back a woolly mammoth to help the environment is something we can do, it’s something we should do. We have to live with our environment, but we also have to figure out ways to make it better, and if bringing back a woolly mammoth to help the environment is something we can do, it’s something we should do. Gizmodo: Church isn’t the only one working to clone a mammoth. There’s also Hwang Woo- suk’s Korean dog- cloning lab, Soaam Technologies. Can you talk about how you got involved with them? Mezrich: This is a wild story—this is the story of a disgraced scientist. He was the one who claimed to clone human cells, but it turns out he had been forcing his students to donate their eggs, and secondly that his clone cells are fraudulent, so he’s trying to resurrect his reputation by being the first to clone a mammoth. So, he has supposedly got incredibly preserved frozen mammoths out of the ice . Church doesn’t believe that is something that’s going to work. Those materials have been in the ice too long and bombarded by radiation, there’s no reason that DNA should be clonable anymore. They’ve bought up tracts of land in Alberta, Canada, and the people think they want to build their own Jurassic Park up there.. It’s a very strange company, and it sounds to me what they’re chasing is impossible, but Church says nothing is impossible, so who knows? Gizmodo: The book makes mammoth cloning sounds like an arms race, but Sooam technologies only show up near the end of the book, was that on purpose? Mezrich: I think it is. Science is always an arms race, and when you get into bringing back the mammoth, I think Church’s team is leading, but they’re not the only ones trying to do it. Gizmodo: After the first wooly mammoths are born, the plan is for them to go to Siberia.. Mezrich: .. This is the cool is the cool part of the story. Yeah, the tundra has a permafrost that’s like a ticking time bomb that if it went off would be worse than if we burned all the forests on Earth three times, and this permafrost is always getting close to melting (Editor’s Note: Mezrich is talking about the potential for a catastrophic methane release from melting Arctic permafrost). These scientists, the Zimoffs, have been running this experiment since the 8. Pleistocene type herbivores. They’ve put bison in, reindeer reindeer, horses, a WWII- era tank that they drive to mimic a mammoth, knocking down trees. And they’ve discovered they can lower the temperature by as much as fifteen degrees, which is an incredible thought (Editor’s Note: This is a speculative idea that Mezrich describes in more detail in the book, in which Pleistocene herbivores might help transition forests and shrub lands into grasslands, which absorb less heat.) The idea is to repopulate the area with mammoths. Church’s goal is 8. Who should play Church in the movie? Mezrich: I love Tom Hanks for that character, Jeff Bridges is my other first choice. Hanks already grew that big beard in Castaway and Jeff Bridges has that great beard, so Hanks or Bridges.
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