Mark Zuckerberg wants to add a little more “book” to Facebook.
The Facebook founder and CEO announced on his page recently that he has vowed to read a book every other week this year, with an emphasis on learning about different beliefs, cultures and technologies.
Zuckerberg created a page called “A Year of Books” and urged his friends to join him in the project. As of late Sunday afternoon, it had more than 100,000 likes.
“I’m excited for my reading challenge,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”
The first book in his program, Moises Naim’s The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What it Used to Be, was out of stock on Sunday on Amazon.com and had a sales ranking of No. 138.
The End of Power was listed among Amazon’s “movers & shakers” on Sunday for books making the biggest gains on the best-seller list.
The Venezuelan-born Naim is an award-winning columnist, author and television host, a former trade minister in his native country and currently a distinguished fellow in the International Economics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“It’s a book that explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The trend toward giving people more power is one I believe in deeply.”
Zuckerberg’s literary tastes include classics from ancient Greece and Rome, biographies, celebrity memoirs and science and science fiction. He has called Virgil’s The Aeneid his favorite book and has quoted from it during interviews. His “likes” range from Plato to Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. According to his Facebook page, books he has read include Jay-Z’s Decoded, Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Albert Einstein and science writer’s James Gleick’s The Information.
TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey remains the gold standard for choosing books, though clubs have been started by Good Morning America and the Today show, among others.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy