“Overall, the iPhone is among the very best for exposure; it’s only in very low light when can’t keep up with devices with larger image sensors, such as the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.
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iPhone 11 Pro has just been defeated by Huawei's Google-less Mate 30 Pro | Express.co.uk - 0 views
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Even though DxOMark claims the Mate 30 Pro has a better camera system overall, the iPhone 11 Pro remains the only phone of the two you can buy right now.
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Although Huawei revealed the Mate 30 Pro at a glitzy hardware event in September, its European release remains elusive. There’s currently no word on when it’ll finally arrive.
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The US’s trade ban on Huawei is the most likely to blame for the delayed release. This prevents Google from granting the Mate 30 Pro an Android licence, therefore the device can’t come pre-installed with Google apps and services like the Play Store, Gmail, Chrome and Google Maps.
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Trump's absurd projection reveals his anxiety (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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Let's talk about projection, the psychological impulse to project on other people what you're actually feeling. Webster's dictionary defines it, in part, as: "the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety." Here's one recent, relevant example: "The one who's got the problem is Biden, because if you look at what Biden did, Biden did what they would like to have me do except there's one problem: I didn't do it."
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Cruz was pretty quick to diagnose the problem: "This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying."
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When Clinton raised questions about Trump's erratic and impulsive behavior, he called her unstable, unhinged, lacking the "judgment, temperament and moral character to lead this country." And who can forget his, "No puppet ... You're the puppet," response when she accused him in a debate of being a puppet for Vladimir Putin.
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Because tone comes from the top, you see the President's surrogates and even Cabinet officials echo it. But sometimes they go too far and give away the game. Case in point, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on "Face The Nation":
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"If there was election interference that took place by the Vice President, I think the American people deserve to know."
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An analysis by The Washington Post's Philip Bump found that his top five insults were "fake," "failed," "dishonest," "weak" and "liar."
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Coronavirus Cases Seemed to Be Leveling Off. Not Anymore. - The New York Times - 0 views
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On Thursday, health officials in China reported more than 14,000 new cases in Hubei Province alone. A change in diagnostic criteria may be the reason.
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The news seemed to be positive: The number of new coronavirus cases reported in China over the past week suggested that the outbreak might be slowing — that containment efforts were working.
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The sharp rise in reported cases illustrates how hard it has been for scientists to grasp the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, particularly inside the epicenter, where thousands of sick people remain untested for the illness.
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Hospitals in Wuhan, China — the largest city in Hubei Province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly. Other countries, too, have had such issues.
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In China, health officials have been under exceptional strain. Hospitals are overwhelmed, and huge new shelters are being erected to warehouse patients. Medical resources are in short supply. It’s never been clear who is being tested.
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The push to prioritize lung scans seems to have begun with a social media campaign by a physician in Wuhan, who last week called for using the scans to simplify the screening of patients and to accelerate their hospitalization and treatment.
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The new coronavirus is highly transmissible and will be difficult to squelch. A single infected “super-spreader” can infect dozens of others. Outbreaks can seem to recede, only to rebound in short order, as the weather or conditions change.
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In Hong Kong, people living 10 floors apart were infected, and an unsealed pipe was blamed. A British citizen apparently infected 10 people, including some at a ski chalet, before he even knew he was sick.
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Unlike MERS and SARS, both diseases caused by coronaviruses, the virus spreading from China appears to be highly contagious, though it is probably less often fatal.
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The country is so central to the world economy that it can easily “seed” epidemics everywhere, he said.
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White supremacists pose as Antifa online, call for violence - CNN - 0 views
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A Twitter account that tweeted a call to violence and claimed to be representing the position of "Antifa" was in fact created by a known white supremacist group, Twitter said Monday. The company removed the account.
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"This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. "We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules."
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The revelation of the account comes as President Donald Trump increasingly blames left-wing activists for violence occurring at protests across America.
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he fake account, @ANTIFA_US, tweeted Sunday, "ALERT Tonight's the night, Comrades Tonight we say "F**k The City" and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica."
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Though Twitter referred to the group as Identity Evropa when discussing the account's removal, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) states that the group dissolved and reformed under the name the American Identitarian Movement, which it also calls a white supremacist group.
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The phenomenon of people on the right creating fake Antifa accounts predates the current wave of protests. The takedown Monday is not the first time a fake Antifa account linked to white supremacists has been suspended by Twitter, the spokesperson confirmed.
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A blob of hot ocean water killed a million seabirds, scientists say - CNN - 0 views
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As many as one million seabirds died at sea in less than 12 months in one of the largest mass die-offs in recorded history -- and researchers say warm ocean waters are to blame.
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The birds, a fish-eating species called the common murre, were severely emaciated and appeared to have died of starvation between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016, washing up along North America's west coast, from California to Alaska.
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The heat wave created the Blob -- a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) stretch of ocean that was warmed by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 10.8 Fahrenheit). A high-pressure ridge calmed the ocean waters -- meaning heat stays in the water, without storms to help cool it down.
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Other animals that experienced mass die-offs include sea lions, tufted puffins, and baleen whales. But none of them compared to the murres in scale.
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The murres likely starved to death because the Blob caused more competition for fewer small prey. The warming increased the metabolism of predatory fish like salmon, cod, and halibut -- meaning they were eating more than usual. These fish eat the same small fish as the murres, and there simply wasn't enough to go around.
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During the 2015 breeding season, three colonies didn't produce a single chick. That number went up to 12 colonies in the 2016 season -- and in reality it could be even higher, since researchers only monitor a quarter of all colonies.
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It's especially rare to see a patch of warm ocean water over such a large area, but scientists say global climate change is making these phenomena more common. From 1982 to 2016, there was an 82% rise in the number of heat wave days on the global ocean surface, according to a 2018 study. That's because heat waves are increasing in both frequency and duration, with the highest level of maritime heat wave activity occurring in the North Atlantic
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'Willing to Do Everything,' Mothers Defend Sons Accused of Sexual Assault - The New Yor... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ampus-sex-assault-mothers.html
false-assault mothers-react maternal-perspective punishment-severity
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A few days before, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had rescinded tough Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault, saying they violated principles of fairness, particularly for accused students like their own sons.
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Women’s groups and victims’ advocates have deplored Ms. DeVos’s moves, saying they will allow colleges to wash their hands of the problem.
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But a growing corps of legal experts and defense lawyers have argued that the Obama rules created a culture in which accused students, most of them men, were presumed guilty.
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Away from the public eye, families have spent tens of thousands of dollars and dipped into retirement savings to hire lawyers and therapists for their sons.
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Their sons may not have been falsely accused, the mothers said, but they had been wrongly accused. They made a distinction.
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The most active mothers said they stepped forward because they often had more time than their husbands, and because they made a strategic decision that they could be effective on the issue of sexual assault precisely because they are women and, as some described themselves, feminists. “We recognized that power,” Ms. Seefeld said.
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They have not been shy about expressing their view of the mothers as “rape deniers” and misogynists who blame women for inviting male violence against them.
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“And pretty much the most significant weapon I had was the weapon of public opinion, so that was the weapon I was wielding the hardest.”
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The case for economics - by the numbers | MIT News - 0 views
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In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory.
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In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well.
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“If you ask me, economics has never been better,” says Josh Angrist, an MIT economist who led the study. “It’s never been more useful. It’s never been more scientific and more evidence-based.”
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As Angrist acknowledges, one impetus for the study was the wave of criticism the economics profession has faced over the last decade, after the banking crisis and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, which included the finance-sector crash of 2008. The paper’s title alludes to the film “Inside Job” — whose thesis holds that, as Angrist puts it, “economics scholarship as an academic enterprise was captured somehow by finance, and that academic economists should therefore be blamed for the Great Recession.”
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The study also details the relationship between economics and four additional social science disciplines: anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among these, political science has overtaken sociology as the discipline most engaged with economics. Psychology papers now cite economics research about as often as they cite works of sociology. The new intellectual connectivity between economics and psychology appears to be a product of the growth of behavioral economics, which examines the irrational, short-sighted financial decision-making of individuals — a different paradigm than the assumptions about rational decision-making found in neoclassical economics.
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“It really seems to be the diversity of economics that makes it do well in influencing other fields,” Ellison says. “Operations research, computer science, and psychology are paying a lot of attention to economic theory. Sociologists are paying a lot of attention to labor economics, marketing and management are paying attention to industrial organization, statisticians are paying attention to econometrics, and the public health people are paying attention to health economics. Just about everything in economics is influential somewhere.”
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Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Debate rages on - CNN - 0 views
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Ever since a huge crater was discovered off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in the early 1990s, scientists have been confident that an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs and most life on the planet.
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Now, a group of researchers at Yale University are putting the blame back solely on the asteroid. They say that any environmental impact from the eruptions and lava flows that occurred in the Deccan Traps (located in what is now India) happened well before the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, which scientists call K-Pg.
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Some researchers believe that emissions from the volcanoes, which released gases like sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, weakened the ecosystem so that dinosaurs went extinct more easily when the asteroid hit.
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The Yale-led study investigated the timing of this outgassing by modeling the effects of carbon dioxide and sulfur emissions on global temperatures and comparing them with paleotemperature records spanning the extinction. They found that at least 50% or more of the major outgassing from the Deccan Traps occurred well before the asteroid impact, and only the impact coincided with the mass extinction event.The volcanoes did "cause a warming event," but its effect had gone by the time extinction happened, said Michael Henehan, a former researcher at Yale who is now based at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.
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MSG in Chinese restaurants isn't unhealthy -- you're just racist, activists say - CNN - 0 views
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If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.
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Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.
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First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.
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As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.
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Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.
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Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.
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Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."
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"You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."
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Social media use may harm teens' mental health by disrupting positive activities, study... - 0 views
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The research, published Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, involved interviews with almost 10,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16 in England. The researchers found that social media may harm girls' mental health by increasing their exposure to bullying and reducing their sleep and physical exercise.
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In other words: Social media itself might not be to blame for mental health issues; rather, it takes away from girls' sleep quality and exercise while exposing users to cyberbullying, and that's what leads to lower well-being and problems with mental health.
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The researchers found that, in both sexes, very frequent social media use was associated with greater psychological distress. The effect was especially clear among girls: The more often they checked social media, the greater their psychological distress.But nearly 60% of the impact on psychological distress in girls could be accounted for by low sleep quality and greater exposure to cyberbullying, with decreased physical activity playing a lesser role. But for boys, those factors explained only 12% of the effects of very frequent social media use on psychological distress.
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"If the displacement of healthy lifestyles and cyberbullying can be attenuated, the positive effects of social media use, such as encouraging social interactions, can be more endorsed," she said in a statement.
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Trump touts success as US becomes world's coronavirus epicenter - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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As America became the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump downplayed the escalating national crisis.
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All the evidence of the virus's advance, seen in rising death tolls and infection figures, suggests the situation is getting worse and that normal life could be weeks or months away. Once, Trump minimized the looming impact of the crisis. Now his assessments conflict with the reality of its deadly march.
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A week ago, there were a total of 8,800 confirmed infections in the United States and 149 deaths. On Thursday, that figure reached more than 82,000 with nearly 1,200 deaths. Were those figures the result of a hurricane or a terrorist attack, their human toll would be more obvious, and it would be more difficult for the President to spin the situation. But as people die unseen in hospital wards and emergency rooms, the emotional impact of the accelerating tragedy is less obvious than it would be during a natural disaster.
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After it emerged that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had criticized the federal response on a call with governors and the President earlier Thursday, Trump blasted his critic as a "failed presidential candidate." And as officials in Michigan registered increasing concern about a building crisis in the Great Lakes State, the President hit out at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying "all she does is sit there and blame the federal government."
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"I think they think we're doing a really good job in terms of running this whole situation having to do with the virus," Trump said at the White House, referring to the American people. "I think they feel that myself and the administration are doing a good job. ... There was a lot of fear and a lot of good things are happening."
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With Joe Biden off the trail, Democratic super PACs race to fill the void - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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With traditional campaigning abandoned and the Democrats' presidential front-runner hunkered down at home, deep-pocketed Democratic groups are racing to hit President Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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"This crisis could be the defining issue of this election," Kyle Tharp, of the nonprofit group Acronym, said Wednesday. "Now more than ever, voters need to be made aware of how Trump's handling of this threat and downplaying of its impact has made it worse and has made Americans less safe."
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"Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it," the narrator says, before saying that Trump "let the virus spread unchecked across America."
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The pandemic, which had infected more than 64,000 and killed at least 900 in the US as of Wednesday evening, has upended American life and brought the economy to a halt a little more than seven months before the general election.
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A new Gallup poll shows 60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, while 38% disapprove. A Monmouth University survey shows a tighter margin: 50% say the President has done a good job; 45% say he has done a bad job.
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"There'll be plenty of time for voters to judge @realDonaldTrump & his handling of the Coronavirus crisis, including the first weeks when he sent dangerously misleading signals by downplaying the threat," David Axelrod, a CNN contributor and former aide to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter as the first round of coronavirus advertising began to emerge last week.
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Using Trump's own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential," Plouffe tweeted.
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You're Only as Old as You Feel - The New York Times - 0 views
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“I don’t know if she dropped something and had to pick it up, or if her shoe was untied,” Ms. Heller said, but she eagerly bounded over to help. The woman blamed old age for her incapacity, explaining that she was 70. But Ms. Heller was 71.“This woman felt every bit her age,” she recalled. “I don’t let age stop me. I think it’s a mind-set, really.”
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People with a healthy lifestyle and living conditions and a fortunate genetic inheritance tend to score “younger” on these assessments and are said to have a lower “biological age.” But there’s a much easier way to determine the shape people are in. It’s called “subjective age.”
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When scientists ask: “How old do you feel, most of the time?” the answer tends to reflect the state of people’s physical and mental health. “This simple question seems to be particularly powerful,” says Antonio Terracciano, a professor of geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee.Sign up for the Well NewsletterGet the best of Well, with the latest on health, fitness and nutrition.Sign Up* Captcha is incomplete. Please try again.Thank you for subscribingYou can also view our other newsletters or visit your account to opt out or manage email preferences.An error has occurred. Please try again later.You are already subscribed to this email.View all New York Times newsletters.
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Scientists are finding that people who feel younger than their chronological age are typically healthier and more psychologically resilient than those who feel older. They perform better on memory tasks and are at lower risk of cognitive decline.
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If you’re over 40, chances are you feel younger than your driver’s license suggests. Some 80 percent of people do, according to Dr. Stephan. A small fraction of people — fewer than 10 percent — feel older.
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At age 50, people may feel about five years, or 10 percent, younger, but by the time they’re 70 they may feel 15 percent or even 20 percent younger.
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In a 2018 German study, investigators asked people in their 60s, 70s and early 80s how old they felt, then measured their walking speed in two settings. Participants walked 20 feet in the laboratory while being observed and timed. They also wore belts containing an accelerometer while out and about in their daily lives. Those who reported feeling younger tended to walk faster during the lab assessment. But feeling younger had no impact on their walking speed in real life.
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Indeed, in cultures where elders are respected for their wisdom and experience, people don’t even understand the concept of subjective age, he said. When a graduate student of Dr. Weiss’s did research in Jordan, the people he spoke with “would say, ‘I’m 80. I don’t know what you mean by ‘How old do I feel?’”
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As we age, we tend to become generally happier and more satisfied, said Dr. Tracey Gendron, a gerontologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who questions the whole notion of subjective age research
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“Older age is a time that we can actually look forward to. People really just enjoy themselves more and are at peace with who they are. I would love for everyone to say their age at every year and celebrate it.”
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Father of 'Flow,' Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views
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Flow became an important element of positive psychology, a movement started in the early 2000s by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It focused not on the pathologies of the human mind but its everyday experiences.
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“Csikszentmihalyi was such a leader in our field it’s hard to do his contributions justice,” Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, wrote in an email. “I think in a world where it’s become harder and harder to focus, his work on flow has become even more important.”
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Dr. Csikszentmihalyi did not just explain “flow”; he offered a pointed critique of why so many people fail to achieve it. He cited countless studies showing that most people prefer meaningful work over mindless downtime, but argued that Americans in particular had been conditioned to hate their jobs and love passive relaxation.
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He blamed television, above all, for the decline in hobbies, avocations and lifelong education — activities that blend aspects of work and play and, he said, offer the best opportunity for flow and, through it, happiness.
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Some critics said his finger pointing smacked of snobbery, to which he had a response: “If holding that everyone should have a chance to get the highest quality of experience is an elitist notion, so be it,” he wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times in 1993. “It is better than resigning oneself to a life of mindless entertainment.”
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“We can’t afford to become trapped within ourselves, our jobs, and religions, and lose sight of the entire tapestry of life,” he said in a 1995 interview with Omni magazine. “When the self loses itself in a transcendent purpose — whether to write great poetry, craft beautiful furniture, understand the motions of galaxies, or help children be happier — the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence.”
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Opinion | What's Ripping American Families Apart? - The New York Times - 0 views
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At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.
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The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.
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the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event
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The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened.
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a more individualistic culture has meant that the function of family has changed. Once it was seen as a bond of mutual duty and obligation, and now it is often seen as a launchpad for personal fulfillment. There’s more permission to cut off people who seem toxic in your life.
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There’s a lot of real emotional abuse out there, but as Coleman put it in an essay in The Atlantic, “My recent research — and my clinical work over the past four decades — has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”
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Either way, there’s a lot of agony for all concerned. The children feel they have to live with the legacy of an abusive childhood. The parents feel rejected by the person they love most in the world, their own child, and they are powerless to do anything about it. There’s anger, grief and depression on all sides — painful holidays and birthdays — plus, the next generation often grows up without knowing their grandparents.
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there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.
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Becca Bland, founder of the British support and advocacy group Stand Alone, told the BBC: “Now I can put my needs first rather than trying to fix things beyond my control. But, yes, I’m angry I didn’t get the mother I wanted.”
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A 2012 survey from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture found that almost three-quarters of parents of school-age kids said they eventually want to become their children’s best friend.
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Some kids seem to think they need to cut off their parents just to have their own life. “My mom is really needy and I just don’t need that in my life,
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In other cases, children may be blaming their parents for the fact that they are not succeeding as they had hoped — it’s Mom and Dad who screwed me up.
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Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990,
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Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.
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political tribalism becomes a mechanism with which people can shore themselves up, vanquish shame, fight for righteousness and find a sense of belonging.
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Your Bosses Could Have a File on You, and They May Misinterpret It - The New York Times - 0 views
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The company you work for may want to know. Some corporate employers fear that employees could leak information, allow access to confidential files, contact clients inappropriately or, in the extreme, bring a gun to the office.
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But in spite of worries that workers might be, reasonably, put off by a feeling that technology and surveillance are invading yet another sphere of their lives, employers want to know which clock-punchers may harm their organizations.
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“There is so much technology out there that employers are experimenting with or investing in,” said Edgar Ndjatou
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Software can watch for suspicious computer behavior or it can dig into an employee’s credit reports, arrest records and marital-status updates. It can check to see if Cheryl is downloading bulk cloud data or run a sentiment analysis on Tom’s emails to see if he’s getting testier over time. Analysis of this data, say the companies that monitor insider risk, can point to potential problems in the workplace.
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Organizations that produce monitoring software and behavioral analysis for the feds also may offer conceptually similar tools to private companies, either independently or packaged with broader cybersecurity tools.
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But corporations are moving forward with their own software-enhanced surveillance. While private-sector workers may not be subjected to the rigors of a 136-page clearance form, private companies help build these “continuous vetting” technologies for the federal government, said Lindy Kyzer of ClearanceJobs. Then, she adds, “Any solution would have private-sector applications.”
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“Can we build a system that checks on somebody and keeps checking on them and is aware of that person’s disposition as they exist in the legal systems and the public record systems on a continuous basis?” said Chris Grijalva
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But the interest in anticipating insider threats in the private sector raises ethical questions about what level of monitoring nongovernmental employees should be subject to.
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“People are starting to understand that the insider threat is a business problem and should be handled accordingly,” said Mr. Grijalva.
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The linguistic software package they developed, called SCOUT, uses psycholinguistic analysis to seek flags that, among other things, indicate feelings of disgruntlement, like victimization, anger and blame.
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There’s not enough information, in other words, to construct algorithms about trustworthiness from the ground up. And that would hold in either the private or the public sector.
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Even if all that dystopian data did exist, it would still be tricky to draw individual — rather than simply aggregate — conclusions about which behavioral indicators potentially presaged ill actions.
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“Depending too heavily on personal factors identified using software solutions is a mistake, as we are unable to determine how much they influence future likelihood of engaging in malicious behaviors,” Dr. Cunningham said.
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“I have focused very heavily on identifying indicators that you can actually measure, versus those that require a lot of interpretation,” Dr. Cunningham said. “Especially those indicators that require interpretation by expert psychologists or expert so-and-sos. Because I find that it’s a little bit too dangerous, and I don’t know that it’s always ethical.”
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Opinion | The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity - The New York Times - 0 views
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In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”
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Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.
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traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us
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Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.
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Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.
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If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.
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Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.
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But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness
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Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.
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Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”
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Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.
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I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.
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One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”
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Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.
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shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 22
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Why Didn't the Government Stop the Crypto Scam? - 0 views
mattstoller.substack.com/...-didnt-the-government-stop-the
crypto government regulation capture agency history crisis corruption
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By 1935, the New Dealers had set up a new agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and cleaned out the FTC. Yet there was still immense concern that Roosevelt had not been able to tame Wall Street. The Supreme Court didn’t really ratify the SEC as a constitutional body until 1938, and nearly struck it down in 1935 when a conservative Supreme Court made it harder for the SEC to investigate cases.
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It took a few years, but New Dealers finally implemented a workable set of securities rules, with the courts agreeing on basic definitions of what was a security. By the 1950s, SEC investigators could raise an eyebrow and change market behavior, and the amount of cheating in finance had dropped dramatically.
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It’s a lesson to remember as we watch the crypto space melt down, with ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried
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It’s not like perfidy in crypto was some hidden secret. At the top of the market, back in December 2021, I wrote a piece very explicitly saying that crypto was a set of Ponzi schemes. It went viral, and I got a huge amount of hate mail from crypto types
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one of the more bizarre aspects of the crypto meltdown is the deep anger not just at those who perpetrated it, but at those who were trying to stop the scam from going on. For instance, here’s crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who just a year ago was fighting regulators vehemently, blaming the cops for allowing gambling in the casino he helps run.
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FTX.com was an offshore exchange not regulated by the SEC. The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors (and 95% of trading activity) went offshore. Punishing US companies for this makes no sense.
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many crypto ‘enthusiasts’ watching Gensler discuss regulation with his predecessor “called for their incarceration or worse.”
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Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged
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Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players
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But the legal wrangling to just get the courts to treat crypto as a set of speculative instruments regulated under securities law made the law moot
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In May of 2022, a year after Gensler began trying to do something about Terra/Luna, Kwon’s scheme blew up. In a comically-too-late-to-matter gesture, an appeals court then said that the SEC had the right to compel information from Kwon’s now-bankrupt scheme. It is absolute lunacy that well-settled law, like the ability for the SEC to investigate those in the securities business, is now being re-litigated.
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Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”
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it wasn’t just the courts who were an impediment. Gensler wasn’t the only cop on the beat. Other regulators, like those at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, or the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, not only refused to take action, but actively defended their regulatory turf against an attempt from the SEC to stop the scams.
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Behind this was the fist of political power. Everyone saw the incentives the Senate laid down when every single Republican, plus a smattering of Democrats, defeated the nomination of crypto-skeptic Saule Omarova in becoming the powerful bank regulator at the Comptroller of the Currency
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Instead of strong figures like Omarova, we had a weakling acting Comptroller Michael Hsu at the OCC, put there by the excessively cautious Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Hsu refused to stop bank interactions with crypto or fintech because, as he told Congress in 2021, “These trends cannot be stopped.”
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It’s not just these regulators; everyone wanted a piece of the bureaucratic pie. In March of 2022, before it all unraveled, the Biden administration issued an executive order on crypto. In it, Biden said that virtually every single government agency would have a hand in the space.
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And behind all of these fights was the money and political prestige of some most powerful people in Silicon Valley, who were funding a large political fight to write the rules for crypto, with everyone from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to former SEC Chair Mary Jo White on the payroll.
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(Even now, even after it was all revealed as a Ponzi scheme, Congress is still trying to write rules favorable to the industry. It’s like, guys, stop it. There’s no more bribe money!)
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Moreover, the institution Gensler took over was deeply weakened. Since the Reagan administration, wave after wave of political leader at the SEC has gutted the place and dumbed down the enforcers. Courts have tied up the commission in knots, and Congress has defanged it
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Under Trump crypto exploded, because his SEC chair Jay Clayton had no real policy on crypto (and then immediately went into the industry after leaving.) The SEC was so dormant that when Gensler came into office, some senior lawyers actually revolted over his attempt to make them do work.
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In other words, the regulators were tied up in the courts, they were against an immensely powerful set of venture capitalists who have poured money into Congress and D.C., they had feeble legal levers, and they had to deal with ‘crypto enthusiasts' who thought they should be jailed or harmed for trying to impose basic rules around market manipulation.
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The bottom line is, Gensler is just one regulator, up against a lot of massed power, money, and bad institutional habits. And we as a society simply made the choice through our elected leaders to have little meaningful law enforcement in financial markets, which first became blindingly obvious in 2008 during the financial crisis, and then became comical ten years later when a sector whose only real use cases were money laundering
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, Ponzi scheming or buying drugs on the internet, managed to rack up enough political power to bring Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to a conference held in a tax haven billed as ‘the future.’
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shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22
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An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...671816
social media musk trump oligarchs ego grievance conflict free speech tech
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Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.
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An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required).
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The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy
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the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.
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With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power
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On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power).
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the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts
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Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.
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one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.
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Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad
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Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues.
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They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers
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for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.
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Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they wan
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the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base
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they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying
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These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict