HCRHS Media Lit

""After year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly no longer has same DNA as identical twin," the headline of a story on the Today Show's website, published Thursday, declared. Seven percent of his DNA, the story says, "has not returned to normal since he returned from space." Pretty amazing news, right? Too bad it's not true. This week, dozens of news organizations published stories with this or similar information. They cited a NASA study on the effects of space travel on the human body, with two subjects: astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly, identical twins. In 2015, Scott flew to the International Space Station and lived there for 340 days-a record for an American astronaut-while Mark stayed on Earth. Scientists examined the twins before, during, and after the mission. While the study certainly detected some interesting changes in Scott after his return, space did not alter 7 percent of Scott's DNA, the genetic code found in the cells in our bodies that makes us what we are. What the NASA study found was that some of Scott's genes changed their expression while he was in space, and 7 percent of those genes didn't return to their pre-flight states months after he came back. If 7 percent of Scott's genetic code changed, as some of the stories suggested, he'd come back an entirely different species."

"The Representation Project is excited to partner with Harry's on "A Man Like You." This short film tells the story of an alien who discovers how to be a man with the help of a young boy. As a result of the alien's many questions, the boy learns that traditional ideals of masculinity are sometimes too narrow for today's world. In the end, a real man is simply a good human."

"Can your child identify a cardinal? A holly tree? Queen Anne's lace? If not, "nature-deficit disorder" might be the diagnosis. It's not life-threatening, by any means. But it can be quality-of-life threatening. Research showing the mental and physical health benefits of being out in nature is mounting. One of the gurus of an international movement to get children back outside - away from their couches and screens   - is Richard Louv.  In 2006, he co-founded the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit aimed at reconnecting families and nature."

"The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant's biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica - a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon - used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on." The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook's "platform policy" allowed only collection of friends' data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook's role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert

" As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump's campaign in 2016."

"Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will notify the estimated 50 million people whose data was extracted from the social network and handed off to a tech firm working for the Trump campaign."

"From the filmmaker behind "Miss Representation" and "The Mask You Live In" comes an exploration of inequality and our cultural values."

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you've told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star's posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you've indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, that is what motivated the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to collect data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns. The company has worked for a political action committee started by John R. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, as well as for President Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. "We find your voters and move them to action," the firm boasts on its website."

"WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook Inc. last year. Now he's saying others should do the same. In a tweet Tuesday, Action said: "It is time. #deletefacebook," referencing the online movement that is gaining steam in the wake of revelations that the personal data of 50 million Facebook FB, -3.34%   users was used without their permission by political data company Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign."

"Technology helps us run our lives, do our jobs, get directions and keep track of our calendars. Right? Or, is technology taking control of our lives - stealing our time, and shattering our attention into a thousand pieces?"

"Cheering on your favorite sports team and snacking on junk food often go hand in hand in the United States, but a new study sheds light on just how intertwined sports and unhealthy foods really are. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, reveals that 76% of food products shown in ads promoting a sports organization sponsorship are unhealthy and that 52.4% of beverages shown in sports sponsorship ads are sugar-sweetened."

"Young consumers have lots of distractions these days. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, giving brands less time than ever to make an impression. Perhaps that's why Snapchat-best known for fleeting photos and videos that catch a pop-culture moment, then disappear-has emerged as the social media mirror to a generation's soul."

"Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong"

"In New York, I snapped a photo - and tweeted it - every time I spotted a kid with a meme-inspired sign. The unfaithful boyfriend meme recast with Trump staring at the NRA and ignoring "students lives." A Mocking Sponge with a "Make America Great Again" hat. Several Krusty Krab versus Chum Bucket riffs. "I don't get her sign," I overheard a woman in front of me saying to the man next to her, while we were waiting to march. "Hi, I can explain that," I said, breaking meme-rule No. 1: Never talk about a meme IRL. "It's a good versus bad comparison. The Krusty Krab is 'good,' and the Chum Bucket is 'bad.' So the NRA is bad here." "Oh, I guess I probably could have figured that out," the woman replied. "That makes sense." By the end of the day, I'd tweeted photos of a half-dozen meme signs I'd seen in New York City. Other protesters started sending me DMs and replying to my tweets with pictures of their signs from different cities. Twitter created an entire moment dedicated to SpongeBob signs alone. But for every like and fave - just look at the impressive shading on this Chum Bucket - Twitter, and my mentions, quickly filled with people barking about how stupid these kids were. About how cartoon-covered poster board is a terrible way to get people - voters, government representatives, "adults" - to pay attention."

"Want to freak yourself out? I'm going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realizing it."

"Cinematic VR allows viewers to live entirely inside a film. They put on goggles and look at the universe around them - behind, above, anywhere they turn their gaze - and still see the world of the movie. Some in the entertainment industry view it as perhaps the greatest advance in entertainment since the addition of sound to movies nearly a century ago, involving the senses in ways they're not involved when the real world is visible next to a screen. But while investors in Hollywood and elsewhere have poured in hundreds of millions of dollars, drawing top talent and yielding a creative explosion, cinematic VR has produced little in the way of commercial success or popular acceptance."

"Gorgeous, popular, sought-after by brands... but these models on Instagram aren't real. They're digitally created. And to a lot of people, that doesn't matter at all."

"How the new graphic iconography of memes, placards and posters is changing the way we communicate and protest"