Day: January 15, 2018

“We need to refocus the system,” is how Mark Zuckerberg explained the dramatic changes he plans to make to Facebook’s News Feed in an interview with The New York Times yesterday. “We want to make sure that our products are not just fun, but are good for people.”

It’s as close to an admission as we’re likely to get from Zuckerberg about the negative effects his company has had on humanity. Of course, refocusing on “meaningful interaction” (that is, high impact posts from close friends) can only come at the cost of massively reducing the reach of publishers. A small price to pay, perhaps. But I think my own overhaul of Facebook might have Mark’s beat.

Since early December, I’ve been systematically clearing everyone and everything from my feed. Most days, nothing remains on the social network I joined 12 years ago except for this: “Welcome to Facebook. Get started by adding friends. You’ll see their videos, photos and posts here.” Occasionally, the site offers a more exhausted message: “There are no more posts to show right now.”

It’s blissful.

There are certainly more efficient methods to unfollow everyone on Facebook, but I opted to dismiss people and groups as they appeared on my feed to see how the platform would react to my rapid decoupling. Present coworkers were replaced by past ones, and close friends gave way to more distant ones I probably owed a call or an email to. I saw names that were familiar from high school next to faces that were now strange, then relatives of exes whose digital friendship merited neither the animosity of deletion nor the awkwardness of interaction. It was a slow, weeks-long journey to the outer reaches of my social circles, all the way out to people I had no recollection of, living in places I’ve never been.

As people disappeared from my timeline by the dozens, Facebook dutifully surfaced posts for me—although they were getting increasingly stale. Wishes of “happy birthday Tim!” directed at a musician I knew in college hung around for days after he’d turned, what, 29? 30 years old? At its most desperate, Facebook shoved week-old posts into my withering feed, starved for anything that would keep my eyes trained on its infamous blue and grey walled garden.

Certain that I would at least want to see posts from a page I managed, my Facebook feed became a deluge of Gizmodo links—so I revoked my administrative privileges.

By day three, the feed began visibly panicking.

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And a day later it gave up. Just like that, all my digital friendships were tucked neatly away. Unfollowed but not unfriended, even passive interactions with my Facebook relations became optional when I logged on. (Some of these steps, I should note, had to be repeated for Facebook’s mobile app, which seems, by design, to ignore your desire to receive fewer notifications.)

Keen to keep going, the next target on Facebook’s remarkably cluttered front page was the “shortcuts” menu—something I’ve never used and possibly never even noticed before launching this crusade to vanquish Zuckerberg’s UI for my own well-being. Like much of Facebook, these sidebar links appear to be automatically generated, and they can’t be deleted. But they can be hidden, manually, one at a time. When none remain, the shortcuts menu disappears.

The same holds true for the “stories” module—with no stories to fill it, it collapses into nothing. Only one person’s story appeared on my feed, and I didn’t recognize the name of the poster. Unfriended. Gone.

Trending topics can also be removed (one at a time) until there are none left, resulting in an eerie question mark, drifting too close to module’s border. But the topics refill so quickly that it’s hardly worth the effort. Functionally, nothing else on Facebook’s main page is optional. With the core product absent, a cavalcade of utterly useless features are all that remain, exposing the company’s ad hoc approach to harvesting time and data from users.

Similar to how I’ll open the fridge to stare at the same leftovers when I’m more bored than hungry, I used to check Facebook dozens of times a day. Call it emotional lethargy. It’s an unusual habit to break—one which hundreds of people a lot smarter than me worked very hard to make as difficult to quit as they could. Being greeted by nothing has provided powerful reinforcement.

Why not delete my account completely? I can justify Zuckerberg’s algorithmic nightmare as an invaluable tool for reporting, but it’s also undeniable that nothing holds more of my digital memories than Facebook. Many of them exist nowhere else. Photos of summer cookouts. Jokes between friends now passed away. Facebook lets people download their full user archive but, according to the company, “unfortunately, there’s no way to individually select which data you would like to download when you download your Facebook info.”

Not all of these memories need to remain stored on the servers of a company I (and much of America) no longer trusts, but I’d like some of them to be saved. Preserving what’s meaningful and deleting what isn’t will be an arduous project for another day. In another 12 years I’d like to relive a few of them again, with or without Facebook’s help.

All of its five confirmed planets are packed into a tight orbit in close proximity to the star, featuring orbital periods between 2.35 days to 12.76 days. The most distant planet, K2-138f, is one-tenth the distance that Earth is to the Sun. The planets, all rocky, range in size from 1.6 to 3.3 times the radius of Earth, qualifying them as super-Earths. Due to their close proximity to the star, these planets are almost certainly uninhabitable.

These planets are also in a really neat orbital configuration called a “resonance” in which each planet takes 50 percent longer to complete a full orbit than the next planet further in.

K2-138 is no TRAPPIST-1—a star system containing seven Earth-sized planets, including three located within the habitable zone—but it’s a cool discovery nonetheless. It shows us yet another way that star systems can be configured. But the story of how K2-138 was discovered is also pretty neat.

The multi-planet system was detected as part of the Exoplanet Explorers project, which uses the online Zooniverse platform and data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler works by measuring the brightness of stars. Astronomers, whether they be professionals or amateurs, look at these measurements in hopes of finding dips in a star’s luminosity. A dip typically indicates that a large object—namely an exoplanet—has passed in front of it. In the past three years, Kepler has logged data from 287,309 stars— a number that climbs another 10,000 every few months. Known as the C12 dataset, this represents a hideous amount of data for scientists to sift through. And that’s where Exoplanet Explorers—and the assistance of citizen scientists—comes in.

Exoplanet Explorers, founded by Caltech staff scientist Jessie Christiansen, was launched in 2017, and it has attracted thousands of citizen scientists to the cause. Recently, the Australia Broadcast Corporation featured a three-part program called Stargazing Live. Audience members were encouraged to participate by parsing through the data in search of candidate exoplanets.

“People anywhere can log on and learn what real signals from exoplanets look like, and then look through actual data collected from the Kepler telescope to vote on whether or not to classify a given signal as a transit, or just noise,” explained Christiansen in a statement. “We have each potential transit signal looked at by a minimum of 10 people, and each needs a minimum of 90 percent of ‘yes’ votes to be considered for further [study].”

During the Stargazing Live series, results from more than 10,000 viewers were collected by the Exoplanet Explorers. Christiansen, along with UC Santa Cruz astronomer Ian Crossfield and NASA astronomer Geert Barentsen, examined the incoming data, resulting in many new candidates, including 44 Jupiter-sized planets, 72 Neptune-sized, 44 Earth-sized, and 53 so-called super-Earths, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

“We wanted to find a new classification that would be exciting to announce on the final night, so we were originally combing through the planet candidates to find a planet in the habitable zone—the region around a star where liquid water could exist,” said Christiansen. “But those can take a while to validate, to make sure that it really is a real planet and not a false alarm. So, we decided to look for a multi-planet system because it’s very hard to get an accidental false signal of several planets.”

And that’s exactly what they did—detecting a star with four planets orbiting around it. Three of the four planets received “yes” votes from 100 percent of participants, while the remaining planet got “yes” votes from 92 percent. Following this stage, the scientists continued to study the system, finding a fifth planet, and hints of a sixth planet as well. It’s now the first multi-planet system discovered entirely through crowdsourcing.

Yay, citizen scientists! More of this, please. We need to find even more planets—and hopefully next time the planets will be a bit more… hospitable.

The ensuing paper has been accepted for publication at The Astronomical Journal, but a pre-print can be found at arXiv.