Jack Daniel’s distillery is now revealing where its whiskey recipe really originated. (AP File Photo)

For its 150th birthday, Jack Daniels Whiskey is setting the record straight.

For years, the company tells distillery visitors– about 275,000 a year– that its founder, Jasper “Jack” Daniel learned the craft of whiskey-making from Dan Call, a white moonshine distiller who also happened to be a preacher.

Now, the brand has decided to embrace a more complicated telling of how its famous whiskey came to be– a story which was already well-known to local historians.

Jack Daniel didn’t learn how to make whiskey from Call, but rather it was Nearis Green– one of Call’s slaves– who taught the novice spirit-maker everything he knew.

Jack Daniel’s is now acknowledging an ingredient hidden for 150 years: Help from a slave https://t.co/b39xsPXbEo

The New York Times (@nytimes) June 27, 2016

Its taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves, Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniels in-house historian tells The New York Times. 

According to The Times the $2.9 billion whiskey industry has been framed as a “lily-white” affair with men like Jack Daniel and American settlers of Scottish, Irish and German settlers getting the credit for laying the foundation of a booming American spirits market. Stories involving slaves, like Green’s, can be difficult for historians to track as they rely on oral accounts and few hard documents. 

But some see adopting this updated history as a marketing tactic– a mere a ploy to attract socially conscious millennials, 

When you look at the history of Jack Daniels, its gotten glossier over the years, Peter Krass, the author of Blood and Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel” told the Times. In the 1980s, they aimed at yuppies. I could see them taking it to the next level, to millennials, who dig social justice issues.

But the company insists that its only motive is setting the record straight after 150 years in business. 

Call is quoted as saying, Uncle Nearest [sic] is the best whiskey maker that I know of, in a 1967 biography titled Jack Daniels Legacy by Ben A. Green.

Nearis Green was just one of many slaves that made up the majority of the workforce in the distilling industry and never received the credit due for their skills and labor.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2016/06/29/after-150-years-jack-daniels-acknowledges-origin-its-world-famous-whiskey/

Changes to the algorithm mean your friends posts will be prioritized, and publishers that rely on Facebook traffic will be gnashing their teeth

To paraphrase Archimedes, give me an algorithm, and I can move the world.

Facebook announced yet more changes to its news feed algorithm on Wednesday, the secret sauce that determines whose posts show up on your Facebook page, and whose remain unseen.

The winners: you and your friends, whose posts will receive more exposure than they have in the recent past.

The losers: publishers, who rely increasingly on Facebook to send traffic to their sites.

This is not the first time Facebook has tweaked its algorithms, which invariably results in agonized cries and the gnashing of teeth from those negatively affected. In April, after Facebook announced plans to move content posted by friends higher in the feed, traffic to some publishers sites plummeted by 25%, according to a report in Digiday.

Now Facebook is going further with that strategy, based on feedback from readers who say they would rather hear about grandmas recipe for fried pickles or see pictures of their nephews bar mitzvah than the fallout from Brexit or Donald Trumps latest gaffe.

In other words, Facebook is shifting back toward what it was originally designed to do before it stumbled into the news distribution business.

Joshua Benton, director of Harvards Nieman Journalism Lab, sees this as an incremental change, a continuation of policies Facebook has been pursuing for some time.

Its another step in the line of decisions Facebook has made centering around increasing user loyalty and keeping them on site, he says. Publishers need to recognize that Facebooks incentives are different than theirs. Its another sign that publications will have to rely more on direct reader revenue and less on advertising revenue.

Benton doesnt see publishers making radical changes in how they work with Facebook, besides having their social media editors spend less time maintaining publications Facebook pages and more time getting readers to share articles.

But they may also have to up their analytics game if they wish to avoid being crushed like a bug, says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor for NYU and author of the Press Think blog.

Its a case of the weak trying to figure out the strong, he says. Companies with great analytics tend to know a bit more about what Facebook is doing. I dont think BuzzFeed is wondering whats going on with its Facebook news feed. Other publishers who dont have very good analytics probably feel a little helpless.

On the other hand, the fact that Facebook admitted that internal values drive its news feed instead of impartial algorithms largely out of its control, as it has claimed in the past is a step in the right direction, Rosen says.

But its not just publishers who will be affected. The changes will also impact Facebook pages launched by businesses who hope to use the social network. Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages, explained Facebooks blogpost.

The specific impact on your Pages distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.

These changes make life even harder for the millions of brands and small businesses that have made Facebook pages one of their primary promotional tools, says Kari DePhillips, founder of The Content Factory, a social media marketing agency.

Brands already have to pay to play on Facebook, she says. If you have 10,000 Likes, a very small fraction ever see your updates, unless they specifically opt in to be alerted whenever you make a post and that rarely happens. So to reach the audience that has taken the initiative to Like your page, you already have to pay for advertising. This underscores that even more.

Ultimately, its another sign that when you sign a deal with the devil, eventually youre going to get burned.

Facebook has the power to send more or less traffic to publishers whenever it wants to, says Benton. They control the algorithm, whereas we have only a dim insight into it. They get to do what they want.

Its good to be the largest hoarder of content on the internet.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-news-feed-algorithm-change-traffic-publishing

Exclusive: Documents reveal Sidewalk Labs is offering cloud software Flow to Columbus, Ohio, to upgrade bus and parking services and bring them under Googles management

Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, wants to radically overhaul public parking and transportation in American cities, emails and documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

Its high-tech services, which it calls new superpowers to extend access and mobility, could make it easier to drive and park in cities and create hybrid public/private transit options that rely heavily on ride-share services such as Uber. But they might also gut traditional bus services and require cities to invest heavily in Googles own technologies, experts fear.

Sidewalk is initially offering its cloud software, called Flow, to Columbus, Ohio, the winner of a recent $50m Smart City Challenge organized by the US Department of Transportation.

Using public records laws, the Guardian obtained dozens of emails and documents submitted to Challenge cities by Sidewalk Labs, detailing many technologies and proposals that have not previously been made public.

Some will be controversial, including spending transport subsidies for low-income residents on ride-sharing services such as Uber, requiring cities to upgrade to Sidewalks mobile payments system, and modernizing public parking to boost city revenues.

Sidewalk Labs was spun out from Google last June with a mission to improve city life for everyone. Since then, it was part of a consortium that deployed several hundred free Wi-Fi kiosks in New York and is rumoured to be designing a city from the ground up for self-driving cars. Now, its offering Columbus a three-year demonstration project consisting of 100 Wi-Fi kiosks and free access to Flow.

When governments and technologists collaborate, there is an enormous potential to reimagine the way we approach urban mobility, said Anand Babu, COO of Sidewalk Labs, in a statement to The Guardian.

The emails and documents show that Flow applies Googles expertise in mapping, machine learning and big data to thorny urban problems such as public parking. Numerous studies have found that 30% of traffic in cities is due to drivers seeking parking.

Sidewalk said in documents that Flow would use camera-equipped vehicles, like Googles Street View cars, to count all the public parking spaces in a city and read roadside parking signs. It would then combine data from drivers using Google Maps with live information from city parking meters to estimate which spaces were still free. Arriving drivers would be directed to empty spots.

Only Google or Apple are in a position to track parking occupancy this way, without expensive sensors on poles or embedded in the tarmac, says Alexei Pozdnoukhov, director of the Smart Cities Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

Sidewalk also hopes to persuade private parking garages to add their spaces to Flows database, and even proposes something called virtualised parking. A bit like Airbnb for cars, this would allow retailers and offices to temporarily rent private parking spaces usually reserved for shoppers and workers. This module will be your public relations winner, Sidewalk claimed in a marketing document. It estimates each virtualised space will be worth $2,000 a year to the city.

Flow would also vary the cost of parking spaces according to demand. On weekends, prices might drop in business areas while they climb near music venues. Sidewalk claims this would increase income from parking by 10%.

However, Pozdnoukhov says that variable pricing is far from proven. A pilot project in San Francisco was not very well received, he says. If Sidewalk can show value to drivers, it could be a different game, but thats easier said than done.

Flow packs sticks as well as carrots. An optimised parking enforcement module would use AI algorithms to calculate the most lucrative routes for parking cops, earning a medium-sized city another $4m in fines.

Sidewalk also wants to redefine public transport. Flow Transit would integrate information and payment for almost every form of transport into Google Maps. Choose a destination and the app will estimate a journey price and duration using everything from buses and taxis to Uber, Lyft, car-share services like Zipcar and even bike-shares.

This idea makes sense in general, says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT. It is important however, that such a platform be open to multiple players. While Sidewalk did not rule out other partners, its documents focused on Google apps. One said, During the demo period, the [citys] data platform includes data exchange with one party – starting with Google.

For the demo, Sidewalk wants 90,000 low-income transit users, who might currently be given discounted or free bus passes, to be able to spend those subsidies on ride-share services instead.

Pozdnoukhnov worries that this would threaten traditional bus services: The problem is that this money will end up with Uber rather than the transit agencies, undermining their existence. The only public systems that will survive will be light rail and subways.

Columbus would receive 1% of the revenue from the app, earning about $2.25m annually according to Sidewalk. Sidewalk did not disclose its cut. Google owns about 5% of Uber.

For Flow to work, Sidewalk has to seamlessly charge and pay many different users and vendors. Sidewalks memorandum of understanding (MOU) contract, seen by the Guardian, requires that cities distribute transit subsidies through Sidewalk, and accept the companys mobile payments for all existing transit and parking services.

Cities like Columbus would be obliged to bring parking signs up to date, re-train enforcement officers and share parking and ridership information with Sidewalk in real time. The company also wants cities to share public transport data with ride-sharing companies, allowing Uber to direct cars to overcrowded bus stops.

All these conditions could mean expensive upgrades to existing technology. Not every city would be ready to do that, says Pozdnoukhnov. Plus, youve got a variety of transit operators. Small ones might have to change their entire payment systems.

The contract glosses over likely political resistance to Google transforming and managing city services. During the demo period, it reads, the City will be responsible for clearing policy hurdles in order to make implementations possible. For instance, Sidewalk requires cities signing it to establish policies allowing minimum parking requirements to be reduced for developers or businesses contributing to the transit fund. Demand-based pricing for parking could also require legislative action.

If Columbus signs up, Sidewalk wants to start swapping data with the city by August, implement dynamic parking by January and launch its shared mobility marketplace by next July.

Columbus now has to decide whether it wants all or any of Sidewalks services. The Flow system is definitely something we see real value in, says Rory McGuiness of the city of Columbus. But we have not [yet] signed any agreements with them.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/27/google-flow-sidewalk-labs-columbus-ohio-parking-transit