Making Sense of Traffic Data
San Francisco — On the Internet, traffic is easily tracked. Google and Facebook have algorithms that know what users are searching for. Online retailers can monitor what shoppers are buying. Newspapers can see in real-time how many readers are viewing an article. The same hasn’t been true for traffic in the physical world, where data-gathering has been decidedly more low-tech. Want to know how many people are getting on at a certain...
Business of Agriculture: Winter Greens
We’re experimenting with growing greens like kale and spinach on our farm this winter, and right about now, I’m thinking I should have my head examined. If the door to the greenhouse isn’t frozen solid on a typical morning, I know my fingers soon will be. Despite an occasional frozen thumb, the experiment is showing signs of life, not just on our farm but on farms across the valley and the country. Primarily this is thanks to the...
Why People Quit Their ‘Beautiful’ Social Media Lives
In making her very public break with social media, Instagram model Essena O’Neill wrote that the drive for followers, likes and views “suffocated” her. “I would just spend hours looking at everyone else’s perfect lives,” she wrote, “and I strived to make mine look just as good.” Sounds familiar, right? That’s because it is. O’Neill’s social media use was sort of a heightened version of how most people engage with these platforms; she...
Pasta No Longer A Food Favorite
Washington — Behind closed doors, dinner tables are getting less doughy. Grains, still ubiquitous in diets around the globe, are losing favor as a result of a growing fear that they might be adding inches to our guts, or discomfort to our stomachs. And there is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than what’s happened to one of the world’s favorite foods: pasta. Simply, people are eating less of it. The data show that the...
Everyone Loses With Increase in Ad-Blocking Use
Ad blockers are growing in popularity, and that could be a big problem for any business that relies on online advertising to pay the bills. A study published last week by Adobe and the software company PageFair revealed that 45 million active users in the United States use ad-blocking software — an increase of 48 percent in one year as of June. That’s about 15 percent of U.S. Internet users. In other countries, such as Poland, the...
