DATA: What makes an image NSFW, according to Yahoo? I explore this question with a clever new visualization technique by Nguyen et al.. Like Google's Deep Dream, this visualization trick works by maximally activating certain neurons of the classifier. Unlike deep dream, we optimize these activations by performing descent on a parameterization of the manifold of natural images.  

ECOMMERCE: eCommerce solutions builder Demac Media has released the results of its Q3 2016 Benchmark Report, a report the company releases every quarter examining the most effective ways that retailers can leverage ecommerce solutions — and how to take advantage of its insights. The data was collected through Google Analytics and the retailers included in the report have customers in over 100 countries. 

BRAND: For good reason: the brand had been in free fall for several years as parents and girls grew tired of Barbie's stereotypical stick figure, empty-headed reputation. In 2014, its stock was down 40 percent after experiencing 10 quarters of sales declines. To reverse the slump, Chugg and her team looked to Barbie's past: The doll's original purpose was to give girls an outlet to think about their future aspirations (the doll has had more than 180 careers over its history). 

RETAIL: Its strength is particularly notable considering the rest of the restaurant industry seems to be melting down like a McGriddle. In the second quarter, restaurants in the Bloomberg Intelligence restaurant index posted their worst sales performance since the recession. Shares in the index are down 12 percent in the past year, compared to a 6 percent rise in the S&P 500. McDonald's shares are up 8 percent so far this year, but the stock has been sinking ever since hitting an all-time intraday high in May. 

ECOMMERCE: Joymode is a single destination where you can rent all of this and more, without having to buy items outright and then dealing with storing them afterward. The company raised $3 million in funding led by Homebrew, with Lowercase, Founders Collective, Collaborative Fund, Slow Ventures, and Sherpa Ventures participating. The service, which is currently available to Los Angeles residents, requires users to buy a year’s membership for $99. They then get access to renting what Fernandez calls “experiences.”

MEDIA: Retailers are finding the ads to be far more effective than they were a year ago, Nanigans notes. For instance, the average click-through rate for Facebook ads for Nanigans’ retailer clients stood at 1.92% in the third quarter of 2016, up from 0.97% in the same period a year earlier. The cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions for the ads fell 9.8% to $4.97 in the third quarter compared with $5.51 a year earlier. The average cost per click fell to 26 cents in the third quarter, down 54.4% from 57 cents a year earlier.

DNS: Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.

MEDIA: Typically, fast-growing startups look to raise their valuations significantly when they receive follow-on rounds of funding. When they don’t, it can signal stress in their businesses or a change of expectations by the investor. BuzzFeed missed its revenue projection for 2015 by an amount in the range of about 20%.

ECOMMERCE: As Amazon continues to threaten department stores, luxury retailers are fighting back by intertwining purchasing options with editorial content, according to a new report from L2. While Amazon’s discounts help it appeal to the masses, it lacks in areas such as editorial content and an aesthetically pleasing shopping experience. Luxury department stores shine in this area and must effectively balance editorial content with purchasing capabilities to compete with the online giant.

ECOMMERCE: Singles Day was launched by Chinese college students in the 1990s as a version of Valentine's Day for people without romantic partners. The Nov. 11 timing was based on the four singles of 11.11. Unattached young people would treat each other to dinner or bestow gifts to woo someone and end their single status. It became a shopping bonanza as sellers of everything from necklaces to TVs moved to cash in on the marketing opportunity, and it is now China's answer to Cyber Monday in the United States.