Our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content such as social media feeds, recommendations and personalized search results. These algorithms have great power to shape users' experiences, yet users are often unaware of their presence. Whether it is useful to give users insight into these algorithms' existence or functionality and how such insight might affect their experience are open questions. To address them, we conducted a user study with 40 Facebook users to examine their perceptions of the Facebook News Feed curation algorithm. Surprisingly, more than half of the participants (62.5%) were not aware of the News Feed curation algorithm's existence at all. Initial reactions for these previously unaware participants were surprise and anger. We developed a system, FeedVis, to reveal the difference between the algorithmically curated and an unadulterated News Feed to users, and used it to study how users perceive this difference. Participants were most upset when close friends and family were not shown in their feeds. We also found participants often attributed missing stories to their friends' decisions to exclude them rather than to Facebook News Feed algorithm. By the end of the study, however, participants were mostly satisfied with the content on their feeds. Following up with participants two to six months after the study, we found that for most, satisfaction levels remained similar before and after becoming aware of the algorithm's presence, however, algorithmic awareness led to more active engagement with Facebook and bolstered overall feelings of control on the site.

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Practitioners in youth settings experience life on the ground as a tumble of events, shaped by a confluence of youth needs, institutional expectations, and other inputs. The quality of the setting is determined in part by practitioners' expertise in shaping and responding to these events. The situations that arise in practice, and how staff respond, can be turning points, good or bad, in youths' experience of the setting. They can also be opportunities for youth development. This article examines the wide-ranging events, situations, or "dilemmas of practice" that occur in the daily life of youth development programs. Research shows that these varied situations are shaped by the ecology of diverse people and systems that influence the setting. They involve considerations that may entail everything from the psychology of different youth, to how parents from a cultural group think, to the dynamics of government systems. Expert youth practitioners, it is found, are able to identify more considerations than novices in these situations, and they possess a wider repertoire of responses. They also formulate more responses that are youth centered and address multiple considerations. Expertise involves being able to balance diverse concerns, including how to create and sustain conditions for the development of young people. Researchers can contribute by helping us better understand this array of situations and how experts respond. Improvement in the quality of youth settings can be achieved through greater knowledge of the tumble of events that occur and by helping train practitioners in skills for responding to it.