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Javier E

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...twitter-whistleblower-sec-spam

twitter whistleblower security social media technology

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
  • The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
  • Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
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  • The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
  • the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.
  • Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.
  • Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.
  • “I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.
  • “Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.
  • A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.
  • Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”
  • Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.
  • This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.
  • Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.
  • “Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,
  • Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.
  • After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.
  • In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.
  • But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.
  • Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.
  • Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.
  • Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.
  • This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.
  • After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.
  • But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.
  • “If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”
  • The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.
  • One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.
  • The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”
  • For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure
  • As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.
  • In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.
  • Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.
  • “Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”
  • The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.
  • Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.
  • Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.
  • For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.
  • Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.
  • Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.
  • Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.
  • A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.
  • “It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio
  • Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.
  • Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.
  • “A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”
  • The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.
  • The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.
  • An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.
  • The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.
  • Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.
  • The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.
  • When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.
  • Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”
  • On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.
  • Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.
  • Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.
  • Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.
  • “I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”
runlai_jiang

A New Antidote for Noisy Airports: Slower Planes - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-for-noisy-airports-1520429994

technology airplane noise

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220
  • It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.
  • Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.
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  • The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.
  • . A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.
  • New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.
  • “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”
  • “The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.
  • In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.
  • With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.
  • The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.
  • Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.
anonymous

Creator of 'All Rise' on CBS Is Fired After Writers' Complaints - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...se-greg-spottiswood-fired.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Creator of ‘All Rise’ on CBS Is Fired After Writers’ Complaints
  • Greg Spottiswood had faced numerous complaints over the way issues of race and gender were addressed on the show, a rare prime-time CBS drama with a Black woman as a protagonist.
  • Warner Bros. Television has fired the showrunner and creator of the CBS show “All Rise,” Greg Spottiswood, after a second investigation into allegations regarding how he dealt with the show’s writers, including in conversations involving race.
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  • “We remain committed, at all times, to providing a safe and inclusive working environment on our productions and for all employees.”
  • Mr. Spottiswood had previously been investigated for his treatment of the writing staff during the first season of the CBS procedural
  • “All Rise” has been celebrated by CBS after its prime-time lineup had been criticized for its lack of diversity
  • Five of the original seven members of the “All Rise” writing staff left the show because of his treatment of them and the way the show, under his direction, depicted race and gender,
  • “We had to do so much behind the scenes to keep these scripts from being racist and offensive,”
  • Mr. Spottiswood said he was aware of the problems with his leadership and pledged to do better.
  • The studio kept Mr. Spottiswood, who is white, in charge of the show, and provided him a corporate coach to advise him.
  • claiming he was interested only in having Mr. Nayar appear at public events with the title of executive producer but did not give him the duties to match that position.
  • The most recent investigation was again focused on statements Mr. Spottiswood was said to have made in the writers’ room.
katherineharron

The national security adviser says there's no systemic racism in policing. Studies sugg... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • When a Trump administration official said he doesn't think systemic racism exists in policing, many were stunned -- especially after studies have shown different races are often treated differently.
  • "There is no doubt that there are some racist police," O'Brien added. "I think they're the minority. I think they're the few bad apples, and we need to root them out."
  • "Of course there is" systemic racism, St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell said. "It's not just in police departments across this country. My goodness, there's systemic racism within pretty much everything in this country."
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  • frican-Americans are at greater risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement, according to research by Northeastern University Professor Matt Miller.
  • Among those who were "unarmed and appeared to show no objective threat to police, nearly two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic or Black," the researchers found.
  • "there is profound racial disparity in the misdemeanor arrest rate for most -- but not all -- offense types,"
  • The 2017 study found that black residents were more likely to file complaints than white residents -- but "NCPD sustained complaints filed by Black residents only 31 percent of the time compared to sustaining complaints filed by White residents 50 percent of the time," the study says. "NCPD defines 'sustained' as 'the allegation is supported by sufficient evidence to justify a reasonable conclusion that the allegation is factual."
  • Latino youth are 65% more likely to be detained or committed than their white peers, according to a 2017 report from The Sentencing Project.
  • African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites, the NAACP said.
  • But they found that "blacks were 2.7 times more likely to be pulled over in an investigatory stop," NPR station KCUR reported. "Blacks were also subject to searches five times more often than white drivers."
  • But black drivers who had an infraction like a burnt out light were more often "questioned about what they were doing in a particular neighborhood, where they were heading, and whether they were carrying drugs," the report said. "Many were subject to vehicle searches."
  • "When you have the national security adviser saying he doesn't see systemic racism, well you know what? White folks also didn't see systemic racism even in the 1960s," Wise said.
  • "If white America didn't get it even when it was obvious in retrospect to everyone, what in the world would make the national security adviser believe that he or anyone else knows what they're talking about now? I think it probably stands to reason that black and brown folks know their reality better than we do."
  • "Especially after a tragedy like we saw in Minneapolis, we need to do two things -- take a hard look at our own actions and conduct, correct them where necessary, and to regain that trust by continuing to hold ourselves to the highest possible standard in a transparent way."
sissij

With Mass Protests, South Koreans Wield a Familiar Weapon in a New Era - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-korea-protests-history.html

new york times social media

shared by sissij on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Then as now, mass protest was a powerful weapon deployed by enraged citizens who felt they had nowhere else to turn but the streets. Thirty years later, it’s clear how far Korean democracy has advanced. Then, South Korea was a dictatorship, protests were outlawed and the threat of torture, imprisonment and martial law ever-present.
  • Students have long been at the vanguard of South Korea’s robust history of protest, drawing on deep-rooted Confucian traditions that elevated scholars as guardians of morality.
  • Yonsei produced its own martyr, 21-year-old Lee Han-yol, who died after a tear-gas canister hit him in the head.
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  • I saw an older woman, hair neatly coifed, beat a policeman with her handbag. A young father hoisted his little girl on his shoulder, carefully affixing a surgical mask to her face, an imperfect shield from the gas. A student in Kwangju bit his finger and wrote protest slogans in his own blood.
  • At the trial, his father lunged at the three policemen, small and scared now, protected by more than 50 guards. Screams broke out and a purse flew through the air at the judges as the light sentence was read. Women whose sons were still in jail stormed the bus carrying the policemen, throwing bottles against the windows. Plainclothes police shoved the four of them onto the concrete, where they lay unconscious.
  • Laws are still on the books that can be used as tools to stifle dissent. South Korea remains shadowed by legitimate fears of North Korean aggression and espionage, but those were and are exploited by the government.
  • This is not a tame society, for all the comforts its public has won in the years since. This may be the land of Psy and Gangnam style, a country so wired that some of its children are sent to boot camps to wean them from internet addiction.
  • Politicians buck the popular will at their peril.
  • sissij on 12 Dec 16
     
    This article talks about the protests in South Korea. I found that there are deep conflict between the police and the the people. It makes me think of the police brutality we talked about recently. I think the police should protect the people but now they are using martial arts and tear-gas canisters. To what extent should the police yield the protest from the people? I also found it interesting that students are often more eager to attend those protest than adults. They are usually more radical than adults. Is it a good thing to always let out all their complaints? --Sissi (12/11/2016)
Javier E

Revelations That Ikea Spied on Its Employees Stir Outrage in France - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-privacy-issues-in-france.html

workplace data analytics spying employment privacy

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • kea’s investigations were conducted for various reasons, including the vetting of job applicants, efforts to build cases against employees accused of wrongdoing, and even attempts to undermine the arguments of consumers bringing complaints against the company. The going rate charged by the private investigators was 80 to 180 euros, or $110 to $247, per inquiry, court documents show. Between 2002 and 2012, the finance department of Ikea France approved more than €475,000 in invoices from investigators.
  • the spying cases occurred in a country that, in the digital age, has elevated privacy to a level nearly equal to the national trinity of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.
  • Last month, the company’s current chief, Stefan Vanoverbeke, and financial director, Dariusz Rychert, were questioned along with Mr. Baillot for 48 hours by the judicial police before being placed under formal investigation. That set in motion a process in which the next step, if it comes, would be the filing of criminal charges.
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  • Very little of the surveillance yielded information Ikea was able to use against the targets of the data sweeps. But court documents indicate that investigators suspect that Ikea may have occasionally used knowledge of personal information to quell workplace grievances or to prompt a resignation.
  • In transcripts of police interviews, Mr. Paris and his colleagues in the risk management department acknowledged receiving frequent requests from Ikea store managers across France for criminal background checks, driving records and vehicle registrations — though only a fraction of those inquiries uncovered a notable offense. Usually the requests were limited to one or two people after a theft or a complaint of harassment among employees. But sometimes lists containing dozens of names of employees or job applicants were submitted for vetting, and then forwarded to one of a handful of trusted private investigators for processing.
anonymous

A Bad Review Is Forever: How to Counter Online Complaints - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iness-counter-bad-reviews.html

social media technology online complaints review

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • One of his new Slapfish restaurants, serving sustainable seafood, was hit this year with dozens of bad reviews that complained about its prices (too high) and portions (too small).
  • “You can get buried by bad reviews,” said Mr. Gruel, whose fast-casual restaurants serve food like fish tacos and lobster burgers. “So it’s a race to stop the bleeding.”
  • “Star ratings persist forever,”
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  • “Meanwhile, actual reviews can fall off the first pages of review sites. And consumers rarely read reviews older than three months.”
  • Your customers are already talking about you,” Mr. Campbell said. “So you can’t just ignore them. Anyway, businesses that engage with their customers are growing.”
  • He fears using “canned responses that aren’t personal.”
  • “The minute you see a bad review, look for a shard of truth,”
  • “I want people to know my true heart,” said Ms. Piercy, who doesn’t want to outsource her review scans either. “And I’m thankful for their feedback.”
  • “I look at the quality of the review,” she said.
aprossi

Kevin Seefried, seen carrying Confederate flag inside Capitol during riot, arrested - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...e-flag-man-kevin-seefried-trnd

capitol knowledge social media trump

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Man carrying Confederate flag inside the US Capitol during riot arrested, identified as Kevin Seefried
  • The FBI has arrested Kevin Seefried, seen carrying a Confederate flag inside Capitol Hill, according to a federal criminal complaint.
  • Seefried had been a focus of the FBI's efforts to get the public to help them identify riot participants. The complaint identifies him as the man seen in the photos, widely circulated online, carrying a large Confederate flag inside the US Capitol during the January 6 siege.
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  • Kevin Seefried told the FBI he had brought the Confederate flag with him to Washington from his home in Delaware, where he normally displays it outside.
  • Seefried was charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
  • Some people who stormed the Capitol have already come forward or have been identified by CNN and other news organizations. Many face criminal charges, and some have lost or left their jobs because of their participation.
caelengrubb

Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language | Language | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ecline-of-the-english-language

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Now imagine that something even more fundamental than electricity or money is at risk: a tool we have relied on since the dawn of human history, enabling the very foundations of civilisation to be laid
  • I’m talking about our ability to communicate – to put our thoughts into words, and to use those words to forge bonds, to deliver vital information, to learn from our mistakes and build on the work done by others.
  • “Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.
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  • Although it is at pains to point out that it does not believe language can be preserved unchanged, it worries that communication is at risk of becoming far less effective. “Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning
  • “Without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing.”
  • At the same time, our laziness and imprecision are leading to unnecessary bloating of the language – “language obesity,”
  • That’s five writers, across a span of 400 years, all moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet the period also encompasses some of the greatest works of English literature.
  • Since then, the English-speaking world has grown more prosperous, better educated and more efficiently governed, despite an increase in population. Most democratic freedoms have been preserved and intellectual achievement intensified.
  • Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up
  • Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to.
  • But the problem is that writers at that time also felt they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue
  • Seventy-odd years ago, people knew their grammar and knew how to talk clearly. And, if we follow the logic, they must also have been better at organising, finding things out and making things work.
  • Hand-wringing about standards is not restricted to English. The fate of every language in the world has been lamented by its speakers at some point or another.
  • “For more than 2,000 years, complaints about the decay of respective languages have been documented in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an example of a ‘decayed language’.” He has a point.
  • One common driver of linguistic change is a process called reanalysis.
  • Another form that linguistic change often takes is grammaticalisation: a process in which a common phrase is bleached of its independent meaning and made into a word with a solely grammatical function
  • One instance of this is the verb “to go”, when used for an action in the near future or an intention.
  • Human anatomy makes some changes to language more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound (m or n) to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in between
  • The way our brain divides up words also drives change. We split them into phonemes (building blocks of sound that have special perceptual significance) and syllables (groups of phonemes).
  • ound changes can come about as a result of social pressures: certain ways of saying things are seen as having prestige, while others are stigmatised. We gravitate towards the prestigious, and make efforts to avoid saying things in a way that is associated with undesirable qualities – often just below the level of consciousnes
  • The problem arises when deciding what might be good or bad. There are, despite what many people feel, no objective criteria by which to judge what is better or worse in communication
  • Though we are all capable of adaptation, many aspects of the way we use language, including stylistic preferences, have solidified by our 20s. If you are in your 50s, you may identify with many aspects of the way people spoke 30-45 years ago.
  • The irony is, of course, that the pedants are the ones making the mistakes. To people who know how language works, pundits such as Douglas Rushkoff only end up sounding ignorant, having failed to really interrogate their views
Javier E

Nepal Bans TikTok, Saying It Disturbs 'Social Harmony' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...sturbs-social-harmony-760e99b2

nepal harmony tiktok ban social media technology

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • NEW DELHI—Nepal is banning TikTok over concerns that the video platform is “disturbing social harmony,
  • “Through social-media platform TikTok, there’s a continuous dissemination of content disturbing our social harmony and family structures,” said Sharma.
  • Nepal has faced increasing problems with TikTok, including cases of cyberbullying,
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.
  • Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.
  • India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.
  • Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.
Javier E

Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...so-much-more-than-hearing.html

sense perception hearing listening attention brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense.
  • hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal
  • The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain.
  • Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes
  • This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
  • But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.
  • Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.
  • we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics.
  • “You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.
Javier E

Grand Old Planet - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-grand-old-planet.html

science bias partisan motivated reasoning knowledge evidence

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
  • Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
  • that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe.
  • What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs
  • it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
  • We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
  • then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
Javier E

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_print.html

science research fraud bias

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”
  • The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.
  • Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975. The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Fang said retractions may be rising because it is simply easier to cheat in an era of digital images, which can be easily manipulated. But he said the increase is caused at least in part by the growing competition for publication and for NIH grant money.He noted that in the 1960s, about two out of three NIH grant requests were funded; today, the success rate for applicants for research funding is about one in five. At the same time, getting work published in the most esteemed journals, such as Nature, has become a “fetish” for some scientists, Fang said.
  • many observers note that universities and journals, while sometimes agreeable to admitting small mistakes, are at times loath to reveal that the essence of published work was simply wrong.“The reader of scientific information is at the mercy of the scientific institution to investigate or not,” said Adam Marcus, who with Ivan Oransky founded the blog Retraction Watch in 2010. In this case, Marcus said, “if Hopkins doesn’t want to move, we may not find out what is happening for two or three years.”
  • The trouble is that a delayed response — or none at all — leaves other scientists to build upon shaky work. Fang said he has talked to researchers who have lost months by relying on results that proved impossible to reproduce.Moreover, as Marcus and Oransky have noted, much of the research is funded by taxpayers. Yet when retractions are done, they are done quietly and “live in obscurity,” meaning taxpayers are unlikely to find out that their money may have been wasted.
Emily Horwitz

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_OSCARS_FACT_OR_FICTION

historical movies truth fiction

shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.
  • they've caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.
  • And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?
  • In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)
  • Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."
  • "Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."
  • Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."
  • No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.
  • Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.
  • "This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.
  • Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.
  • Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.
  • Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.
  • have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.
  • screenwriters have a double responsibility: to the material and to the audience.
  • The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.
  • "When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    This article reaffirmed my feelings that we can't trust everything that we see or hear through the media, because it is often skewed to better captivate the target audience. As the article stated, there appears to be a fine line in catering to the attention span of the audience, and respecting the known facts of a given event that is portrayed by a movie.
proudsa

Here's What We Know So Far About The Sexual Assaults At Cologne's Train Station - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...tacks_568e88b7e4b0cad15e639ee2

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The mass sexual assaults outside the central train station in Cologne, Germany, on New Year's Eve are currently the subject of ongoing police investigations in the country and heated debate throughout Europe. 
  • The report also concedes authorities' failure to control the situation, describing a chaotic scene in which “security forces were unable to get all of the incidents, assaults, crimes, etc. under control. There were simply too many happening at the same time.”
  • no official statements have confirmed the nationality or residence status of the suspects.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • One example that a police officer provided for the document quoted a man as saying: "I'm a Syrian! You have to treat me kindly! Mrs. Merkel invited me," referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
  • "We must examine again and again whether we have already done what is necessary in terms of ... deportations from Germany in order to send clear signals to those who are not prepared to abide by our legal order."
  • More than 100 complaints have been filed, including several for rape.
Javier E

Fact Check: This Pizzeria Is Not a Child-Trafficking Site - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-a-child-trafficking-site.html

fake news disinformation discourse history culture communications social media

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • images, pilfered from the restaurant’s social media pages and the personal accounts of friends who had “liked” Comet Ping Pong online. Those photos have been used across dozens of websites. Parents, who declined to talk publicly for fear of retribution, have hired lawyers to get the photos removed.
  • Musicians who have performed at Comet Ping Pong have been pulled in, too. Amanda Kleinman, whose band, Heavy Breathing, has performed there several times, deleted her Twitter account after the abusive comments became overwhelming. Similar comments have flooded her YouTube music clips
  • “We are at a dangerous place in American culture where a good percentage of people aren’t distinguishing what is a real news source based on real reporting and fact-checking and only reinforcing pre-existing ideas they have,” Ms. Kleinman said.
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  • The frustration has been compounded by the lack of recourse for Mr. Alefantis, his friends and employees. Yelp blocked the comments sections of Comet Ping Pong’s review page after reports of abusive comments and fake news in reviews. YouTube said it prohibits threats, harassment and hate speech and has tools for flagging violations and filing complaints for the site to take further action, but has largely not blocked comments on these videos. Twitter declined to comment, and Facebook did not have any further comment.
  • After employees and Mr. Alefantis complained to Reddit about how Comet Ping Pong was being targeted on the site, the #pizzagate discussion thread posted a warning that revealing personal information about individuals was prohibited.“We know that we have more work to do and we take our responsibility to address online abuse seriously,” Reddit said in a statement
Javier E

How Keeping Up Appearances Ruined a Former Dallas Banker - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-a-former-dallas-banker.html

financial crisis insider trading appearances personal finance psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • “He, of all people, should have known better.”
  • But the annals of insider trading are filled with people who knew better, from Ivan Boesky to Rajat Gupta. What’s perplexing is their motives. Like Mr. Davis, they were already rich and successful beyond most people’s dreams.
  • At his plea hearing last month, Mr. Davis said he knew that his actions were “wrong and unlawful” but otherwise shed little light on why he turned to insider trading. But clearly, he needed money, despite his years of bonuses as a highly paid investment banker and his lucrative directors’ fees.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • According to the S.E.C.’s complaint, by April 2010 Mr. Davis was in “desperate” financial straits. He owed the I.R.S. $78,000. His brokerage account was heavily margined, and he had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt. He owed $550,000 to one of his investment funds.
  • The government has shed little light on Mr. Davis’s motive, other than that he needed money. The S.E.C. said he did little to adjust his expensive lifestyle after leaving Credit Suisse in 2001. He experienced a sharp drop in his income, went through an expensive divorce soon after and suffered big investment reversals during the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Mr. Davis is hardly alone in trying to maintain the illusion of wealth and prosperity even as his personal finances veered out of control.
  • But after a lifetime of success, Mr. Davis was too proud and too embarrassed to admit any of this and turn to his wealthy friends and fellow golf club members, though many would have been willing to help, according to a person close to him
  • “Some people would risk anything rather than suffer that kind of personal embarrassment,” Professor Coffee said. “And once you’ve decided you’re willing to risk anything, you can get into deep, deep trouble.”
sissij

Keeping the Boardroom Out of the Bedroom - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rdroom-out-of-the-bedroom.html

new york times social media education

shared by sissij on 25 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • I never allowed myself to be vulnerable with my husband because I didn’t realize that it was a requirement for an intimate, connected relationship. Back then, I didn’t even know what an intimate, connected relationship was. I only thought in terms of tasks and achievements.
  • Surely, I had thought, my firefighter boyfriend would wait an hour or two for me without complaint. But if he had, would we still be together today?
  • It has been said that we teach people how to treat us.
  • sissij on 25 Mar 17
     
    I found this article very interesting. The author was a strong woman and she wasn't able to switch her mode between her role as a successful businesswoman and a wife. People always tend to be eccentric. Although everybody knows that we have to stand from the perspective of other to make a better decision. It reminded me of that my mom complained to me many times that I didn't followed the time that she was going to pick me up. However, I was only thinking in my perspective and even think about how tired my mom was after a day of work. People should contribute equally to maintain a good relationship. --Sissi (3/24/2017)
Javier E

'The Death of Expertise' Explores How Ignorance Became a Virtue - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ignorance-became-a-virtue.html

knowledge democracy reason information information literacy rationality anti-intellectualism

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • a larger wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.
  • “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,”
  • “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • iterating arguments explored in more depth in books like Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason,” Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason,” Robert Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint” and, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Nichols’s source notes are one of the highlights of the volume, pointing the reader to more illuminating books and articles.
  • “resistance to intellectual authority” naturally took root in a country, dedicated to the principles of liberty and egalitarianism, and how American culture tends to fuel “romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the gumption of the self-educated genius.”
  • the “protective swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students,”
  • today’s populism has magnified disdain for elites and experts of all sorts, be they in foreign policy, economics, even science.
  • Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.” Worse, he goes on, some of these voters “not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of knowledge.
  • While the internet has allowed more people more access to more information than ever before, it has also given them the illusion of knowledge when in fact they are drowning in data and cherry-picking what they choose to read
  • it becomes easy for one to succumb to “confirmation bias” — the tendency, as Nichols puts it, “to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we accept as truth.”
  • When confronted with hard evidence that they are wrong, many will simply double down on their original assertions. “This is the ‘backfire effect,’” Nichols writes, “in which people redouble their efforts to keep their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the indications that they’re wrong.” As a result, extreme views are amplified online, just as fake news and propaganda easily go viral.
  • Today, all these factors have combined to create a maelstrom of unreason that’s not just killing respect for expertise, but also undermining institutions, thwarting rational debate and spreading an epidemic of misinformation. These developments, in turn, threaten to weaken the very foundations of our democracy.
  • “Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”
markfrankel18

Why Waiting in Line Is Torture - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...aiting-in-line-is-torture.html

psychology waiting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • the experience of waiting, whether for luggage or groceries, is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait. “Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” notes the M.I.T. operations researcher Richard Larson, widely considered to be the world’s foremost expert on lines.
  • This is also why one finds mirrors next to elevators. The idea was born during the post-World War II boom, when the spread of high-rises led to complaints about elevator delays. The rationale behind the mirrors was similar to the one used at the Houston airport: give people something to occupy their time, and the wait will feel shorter.
  • Professors Carmon and Kahneman have also found that we are more concerned with how long a line is than how fast it’s moving. Given a choice between a slow-moving short line and a fast-moving long one, we will often opt for the former, even if the waits are identical. (This is why Disney hides the lengths of its lines by wrapping them around buildings and using serpentine queues.)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Surveys show that many people will wait twice as long for fast food, provided the establishment uses a first-come-first-served, single-queue ordering system as opposed to a multi-queue setup. Anyone who’s ever had to choose a line at a grocery store knows how unfair multiple queues can seem; invariably, you wind up kicking yourself for not choosing the line next to you moving twice as fast. But there’s a curious cognitive asymmetry at work here. While losing to the line at our left drives us to despair, winning the race against the one to our right does little to lift our spirits. Indeed, in a system of multiple queues, customers almost always fixate on the line they’re losing to and rarely the one they’re beating.
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