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ilanaprincilus06

A Single Fire Killed At Least 10% Of The World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...rlds-giant-sequoias-study-says

Sequoia fire

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year,
  • a copy of the report that describes catastrophic destruction from the Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.
  • Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world's mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.
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  • These trees have lived for thousands of years. They've survived dozens of wildfires already,"
  • The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be felt for decades, forest managers said.
  • Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world's most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
  • "I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won't be as bad, but that's hope — that's not science," she said.
  • The newspaper said the extent of the damage to one of the world's most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoias themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire.
  • The old-growth trees — some of which are more than 2,000 years old and 250 feet (76 meters) tall — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.
  • Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.
  • rhysrademaker22 on 07 Jun 21
     
    Wildfires destroy forests all the time, what surprised me the most about this article was the fact that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire that is just mind-blowing to me.
Javier E

The Upside of Being Ruled by the Five Tech Giants - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...five-tech-giants-upside.html

tech corporations monopoly giant technology

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • ever since I started writing about what I call the Frightful Five, some have said my very premise is off base. I have argued that the companies’ size and influence pose a danger. But another argument suggests the opposite — that it’s better to be ruled by a handful of responsive companies capable of bowing to political and legal pressure. In other words, wouldn’t you rather deal with five horse-size Zucks than 100 duck-size technoforces?
  • Given all the ways that tech can go wrong — as we are seeing in the Russia influence scandal — isn’t it better that we can blame, and demand fixes from, a handful of American executives when things do go haywire?
  • Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank, and co-author of “Big Is Beautiful,” a coming book that extols the social and economic virtues of big companies.
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  • This does not mean they will succeed in fixing every problem their tech creates — and in some cases their fixes may well raise other problems, like questions about their power over freedom of expression. But at least they can try to address the wide variety of externalities posed by tech, which may have been impossible for an internet more fragmented by smaller firms.
  • One benefit of having five giant companies in charge of today’s tech infrastructure is that they provide a convenient focus for addressing those problems.
  • “As long as their innovation rents are recycled into research and development that leads to new products, then what’s to complain about?”
  • At the same time, they are all locked in intense battles for new markets and technologies. And not only do they keep creating new tech, but they are coming at it in diverse ways — with different business models, different philosophies and different sets of ethics.
  • it was perhaps inevitable that we would see the rise of a handful of large companies take control of much of the modern tech business.
  • But it wasn’t inevitable that these companies would be based in and controlled from the United States. And it’s not obvious that will remain the case — the top tech companies of tomorrow might easily be Chinese, or Indian or Russian or European. But for now, that means we are dealing with companies that feel constrained by American laws and values.
Javier E

Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebook's Secret Extraction Operation - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-privacy.html

surveillance capitalism facebook extraction secret data

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data
  • Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.
  • These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.
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  • The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon
  • The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.
  • The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
  • These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.
  • There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u
  • All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.
  • Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?
  • Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.
  • By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”
  • Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.
  • Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.
  • Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors
  • User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.
  • When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,
  • “Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
  • Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data
  • Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.
  • As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.
  • This is the economic context in which disinformation wins
  • In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
  • A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained
  • The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”
  • Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.
  • Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.
  • In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.
  • As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information
  • Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.
  • Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic
  • The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.
  • Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.
  • With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.
  • The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.
  • Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement
  • Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.
  • Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.
  • when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.
  • All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.
  • We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications
  • The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.
  • Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.
  • like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.
  • Where does that leave us?
  • Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.
  • instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.
  • We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes
  • This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces
  • Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
  • Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.
  • No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests
  • the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:
  • How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?
  • What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?
  • What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?
  • The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.
Javier E

The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...disrupt-internet-industry.html

chatbot AI industry effects business internet companies technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • He cleared his calendar and asked employees to figure out how the technology, which instantly provides comprehensive answers to complex questions, could benefit Box, a cloud computing company that sells services that help businesses manage their online data.
  • Mr. Levie’s reaction to ChatGPT was typical of the anxiety — and excitement — over Silicon Valley’s new new thing. Chatbots have ignited a scramble to determine whether their technology could upend the economics of the internet, turn today’s powerhouses into has-beens or create the industry’s next giants.
  • Cloud computing companies are rushing to deliver chatbot tools, even as they worry that the technology will gut other parts of their businesses. E-commerce outfits are dreaming of new ways to sell things. Social media platforms are being flooded with posts written by bots. And publishing companies are fretting that even more dollars will be squeezed out of digital advertising.
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  • The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.
  • The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?
  • The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,
  • As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.
  • Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.
  • “The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,
  • “They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”
  • Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.
  • Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.
  • “The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”
  • Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.
  • As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.
  • “It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”
  • In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text
  • t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”
  • When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.
  • He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”
  • Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.
  • , strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.
  • The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.
  • Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.
  • In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.
maxwellokolo

Italy Just Handed the Global Economy Another Giant Variable - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...my-another-giant-variable.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Dec 16
     
    The widening spread between lower-yielding German bonds and those issued by debt-saturated European countries amounts to a flashing indicator that investors see risks for the southern periphery. These market moves were muted because the results had been anticipated. Indeed, for Europe and the rest of the world, this dynamic was uncomfortably familiar.
Javier E

Google's new media apocalypse: How the search giant wants to accelerate the end of the ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...the_end_of_the_age_of_websites

publishing social media tech information public opinion knowledge

shared by Javier E on 02 May 16 - No Cached
  • Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.
  • Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.
  • Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did.
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  • Facebook just opened up its Instant Articles feature to all publishers. The feature allows external outlets to publish their content directly onto Facebook’s platform, eliminating that pesky journey to their actual website. They can either place their own ads on the content or join a revenue-sharing program with Facebook. Facebook has touted this plan as one which provides a better user experience and has noted the ability for publishers to create ads on the platform as well.
  • The benefit to Facebook is obvious: It gets to keep people inside its house. They don’t have to leave for even a second. The publisher essentially has to accept this reality, sigh about the gradual death of websites and hope that everything works out on the financial side.
  • It’s all part of a much bigger story: that of how the internet, that supposed smasher of gates and leveler of playing fields, has coalesced around a mere handful of mega-giants in the space of just a couple of decades. The gates didn’t really come down. The identities of the gatekeepers just changed. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon
Javier E

How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-the-giants-of-economics.html

science social science economics rivalry

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • it is a reflection of a broader shift in the study of economics, in which the most cutting-edge work increasingly relies less on a big-brained individual scholar developing mathematical theories, and more on the ability to crunch extensive sets of data to glean insights about topics as varied as how incomes differ across society and how industries organize themselves.
  • “Who wouldn’t want to be where the future of the world is being made?” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and regular contributor to The New York Times) who often blogs about trends in academic economics. Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”
  • In economics, Stanford has frequently been ranked just behind Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and the University of Chicago, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey
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  • In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.
  • The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
  • the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.
  • The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. M.I.T.’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policy makers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.
  • “There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”
  • “My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”
Javier E

I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html

facebook google Big data privacy advertising

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads
  • With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information
  • Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.
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  • During his testimony, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly said Facebook has a tool for downloading your data that “allows people to see and take out all the information they’ve put into Facebook.”
  • Most basic information, like my birthday, could not be deleted. More important, the pieces of data that I found objectionable, like the record of people I had unfriended, could not be removed from Facebook, either.
  • “They don’t delete anything, and that’s a general policy,” said Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, which offers internet privacy tools. He added that data was kept around to eventually help brands serve targeted ads.
  • When you download a copy of your Facebook data, you will see a folder containing multiple subfolders and files. The most important one is the “index” file, which is essentially a raw data set of your Facebook account, where you can click through your profile, friends list, timeline and messages, among other features.
  • Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Facebook had stored my entire phone book because I had uploaded it when setting up Facebook’s messaging app, Messenger.
  • Facebook also kept a history of each time I opened Facebook over the last two years, including which device and web browser I used. On some days, it even logged my locations, like when I was at a hospital two years ago or when I visited Tokyo last year.
  • what bothered me was the data that I had explicitly deleted but that lingered in plain sight. On my friends list, Facebook had a record of “Removed Friends,” a dossier of the 112 people I had removed along with the date I clicked the “Unfriend” button. Why should Facebook remember the people I’ve cut off from my life?
  • Facebook said unfamiliar advertisers might appear on the list because they might have obtained my contact information from elsewhere, compiled it into a list of people they wanted to target and uploaded that list into Facebook
  • Brands can obtain your information in many different ways. Those include:
  • ■ Buying information from a data provider like Acxiom, which has amassed one of the world’s largest commercial databases on consumers. Brands can buy different types of customer data sets from a provider, like contact information for people who belong to a certain demographic, and take that information to Facebook to serve targeted ads
  • ■ Using tracking technologies like web cookies and invisible pixels that load in your web browser to collect information about your browsing activities. There are many different trackers on the web, and Facebook offers 10 different trackers to help brands harvest your information, according to Ghostery, which offers privacy tools that block ads and trackers.
  • ■ Getting your information in simpler ways, too. Someone you shared information with could share it with another entity. Your credit card loyalty program, for example
  • I also downloaded copies of my Google data with a tool called Google Takeout. The data sets were exponentially larger than my Facebook data.
  • For my personal email account alone, Google’s archive of my data measured eight gigabytes, enough to hold about 2,000 hours of music. By comparison, my Facebook data was about 650 megabytes, the equivalent of about 160 hours of music.
  • In a folder labeled Ads, Google kept a history of many news articles I had read, like a Newsweek story about Apple employees walking into glass walls and a New York Times story about the editor of our Modern Love column. I didn’t click on ads for either of these stories, but the search giant logged them because the sites had loaded ads served by Google.
  • In another folder, labeled Android, Google had a record of apps I had opened on an Android phone since 2015, along with the date and time. This felt like an extraordinary level of detail.
Javier E

Google Has Picked an Answer for You-Too Bad It's Often Wrong - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867

google search engines search information bias social media knowledge

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Google became the world’s go-to source of information by ranking billions of links from millions of sources. Now, for many queries, the internet giant is presenting itself as the authority on truth by promoting a single search result as the answer.
  • Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., handles almost all internet searches. Featured snippets appear on about 40% of results for searches formed as questions
  • They give Google’s secret algorithms even greater power to shape public opinion, given that surveys show people consider search engines their most-trusted source of information, over traditional media or social media.
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  • Google’s featured answers are feeding a raging global debate about the ability of Silicon Valley companies to influence society. Google and other internet giants are under intensifying scrutiny over the power of their products and their vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
  • Featured snippets are “generated algorithmically and [are] a reflection of what people are searching for and what’s available on the web,” the company said in an April blog post. “This can sometimes lead to results that are unexpected, inaccurate or offensive.”
  • The promoted answers, called featured snippets, are outlined in boxes above other results and presented in larger type, often with images. Google’s voice assistant sometimes reads them aloud
  • An algorithm chooses featured snippets from websites in part by how closely they appear to satisfy a user’s question, factoring in Google’s measure of a source’s authority and its ranking in the search results.
  • By answering questions directly, Google aims to make the search engine more appealing to users and the advertisers that chase them. The answers’ real estate is so attractive that there is a budding marketing industry around tailoring content so it becomes a featured snippet.
  • as Google expanded the use of featured snippets, it has relied more often on less authoritative sources, such as purveyors of top-10 lists and gossipy clickbait.
  • “For them to wield their algorithm like this is very worrisome,” she said. “This is how people learn about the world.”
anonymous

This Is Your Brain on Junk Food: In 'Hooked,' Michael Moss Explores Addiction - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hooked-junk-food.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
  • Yet after writing the book, Mr. Moss was not convinced that processed foods could be addictive.
  • In a legal proceeding two decades ago, Michael Szymanczyk, the chief executive of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, was asked to define addiction.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • “My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”
  • Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.
  • In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
  • Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
  • In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.
  • Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.
  • “The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”
  • “I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”
  • The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.
  • In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.
  • “I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”
  • Witness
  • But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed
  • In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.
  • The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.
  • That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch
  • : Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.
  • But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,
  • This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.
  • Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.
  • One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.
  • As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.
  • It may have been on to something.
  • “Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
  • But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.
  • For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.
  • Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent
  • Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.
  • Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.
  • “It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    Really interesting!! How food affects your brain:
cvanderloo

Race To Free Giant Ship From Suez Canal Continues : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...ship-from-suez-canal-continues

suez canal trade race ship news

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The push to free the container ship stuck in the Suez Canal continued into a fifth day Saturday as more than 300 ships on either side wait to pass through the blockage.
  • But low tides quashed authorities' hopes of refloating the 1,300-foot vessel before the weekend.
  • While traffic remains closed, other vessels in the canal are weighing whether to continue to wait for the ship to be freed or to take a chance on costly alternate routes, like going around Africa.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Some experts estimate that the traffic jam — which is holding up cargo like food, oil and consumer goods — is costing close to $10 billion per day.
  • Meanwhile, the 25 crew members on board, all of them Indian nationals, were safe and accounted for Saturday and remained in "good health and spirits," according to BSM.
  • White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a briefing Friday that the United States had offered assistance to Egyptian authorities to help reopen the canal. "We are consulting with our Egyptian partners about how we can best support their efforts," she said.
anonymous

Opinion | The Scary Power of the Companies That Finally Shut Trump Up - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...witter-facebook-trump-ban.html

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Complaining of “radical left” censorship, Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, wrote, “This is not China, this is United States of America, and we are a free country.”
  • In fact, Twitter and Facebook’s ejection of Trump is pretty much the opposite of what happens in China; it would be inconceivable for the Chinese social media giant Weibo to block President Xi Jinping.
  • Trump’s social media exile represents, in some ways, a libertarian dream of a wholly privatized public sphere, in which corporations, not government, get to define the bounds of permissible speech.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I find myself both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case, and disturbed by just how awesome their power is.
  • But it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.
  • In banning Trump, the big social media companies simply started treating him like everyone else.
  • There’s no First Amendment problem with taking these privileges away; Americans don’t have a constitutional right to have their speech disseminated by private companies.
runlai_jiang

Probing the Secrets of Jupiter's Great Red Spot - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/jupiter-great-red-spot-4156733

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In technical terms, the Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm lying in a high-pressure zone high in Jupiter's clouds. It rotates counter-clockwise and takes about six Earth days to make one complete trip around the planet. It has clouds embedded within it, which often tower many kilometers above the surrounding cloud decks. Jet streams to its north and south help keep the spot at the same latitude as it circulates.
  • Observers have studied the gas giant planet Jupiter since antiquity. However, they've only been able to observe such a giant spot for a few centuries since it was first discovered. Ground-based observations allowed scientists to chart the motions of the spot, but a true understanding was only made possible by spacecraft flybys. The Voyager 1 spacecraft raced by in 1979 and sent back the first close-up image of the spot. Voyager 2, Galileo, and Juno also provided images.
  • Scientists have been able to measure the spot's depth using specialized instruments on the Juno spacecraft. It appears to be some 300 kilometers deep. That's much deeper than any of Earth's oceans, the deepest of which is just over 10 kilometers. Interestingly, the "roots" of the Great Red Spot are warmer at the bottom (or the base) than at the top. This warmth feeds the incredibly strong and fast winds at the top of the spot, which can blow more than 430 kilometers per hour. Warm winds feeding a strong storm is a well-understood phenomenon on Earth, particularly in massive hurricanes. Above the cloud, temperatures rise again, and scientists are working to understand why this is happening. In that sense, then, the Great Red Spot is a Jupiter-style hurricane.
Emily Horwitz

Can you spot the fake objects among the real ones? | Unplugged - Yahoo! Games - 0 views

games.yahoo.com/...among-real-ones-195357959.html

sense perception knowledge optical illusions

shared by Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12
     
    A cool video of an optical illusion that shows that our sense perception is not always correct; using the technique of anamorphosis, images are distorted so that they only appear correct from a certain angle.
  • Emily Horwitz on 29 Nov 12
Lindsay Lyon

Largest Prime Discovered | Mathematics | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/t-prime-number-discovered.html

TOK mathematics

shared by Lindsay Lyon on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.
  • The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers
  • "It's analogous to climbing Mt. Everest," said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • mathematicians have devised a much cleverer strategy, that dramatically reduces the time to find primes. That method uses a formula to check much fewer numbers.
  • the number is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found, including the most recent discovery. [The Most Massive Numbers in the Universe]
  • mber is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found
  • the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1
  • Emily Horwitz on 06 Feb 13
     
    An interesting article that reminded me of the discussions we had last year on whether math was invented or discovered. With regard to prime numbers, could we ever stop finding "new" ones? Can we ever find a formula to pinpoint every single prime number without dividing it by other numbers?
Sean Kirkpatrick

Conflicts between science and religion - 0 views

www.iep.utm.edu/s-rel

science knowledge

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Nov 12
     
    I found another article that highlighted the clear conflict between science and religion as the author reflects on the work of all the scientists we studied, including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, three of the most famous scientists in history. The author highlights the struggle between church and the findings of these scientists. For example, in the Steven Hawkings movie, the narrator talked about how Newton's discovery of gravity and his laws of motion went against what the church believed. In the article, the author highlights this conflict when he says, "Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On the one hand, many people saw the success of Newton (and many people see the continued success of physics to the present day) as an argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain the behavior of the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on mechanical principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that God even exists. There are no explanatory gaps left for God to fill. Newton himself would have rejected this. He considered God to have a vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe."
katieb0305

Your happiness type matters - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...happy-genes

shared by katieb0305 on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • You feel happiness all the way down to your genes, scientists say. But the kind of happiness you're feeling matters, as different kinds can have wildly different effects on your physical well-being.
  • he happiness you get from instant gratification -- eating that giant cupcake or buying that fabulous pair of shoes -- may have the same physical impact on your genes as depression or stress,
  • The experts divide well-being into two different types: hedonic and eudaimonic. These are fancy words to describe happiness that comes from two different sources.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Hedonic well-being comes from an experience a person seeks out that gives them pleasure.
  • Eudaimonic well-being is a kind of happiness that comes not from consuming something but from a sustained effort at working toward something bigger than you.
  • they can and do influence each other, so it has been hard for scientists to measure which kind has had a greater positive influence on someone's physical or psychological well-being.
  • there is an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased antiviral response. People who are subjected to long periods of stress have white blood cells that make slightly more pro-inflammatory proteins on a constant basis.
  • Bottom line? Happiness that comes from working for the greater good has a much more positive genetic impact.
  • The people who found happiness by pursuing a greater good had a lower level of this inflammatory gene expression and strong antiviral and antibody gene expression.
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
aliciathompson1

Apple backed by more online giants in FBI iPhone unlock battle - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-35722996

technology ethics

shared by aliciathompson1 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The FBI has a court order demanding Apple helps unlock an iPhone used by the gunman behind the San Bernardino terror attack, Syed Rizwan Farook.
  • Apple has argued that the move would jeopardise the trust it has with its customers and create a backdoor for government agencies to access customer data.
  • Apple has appealed against the court order, arguing that it should not be forced to weaken the security of its own products.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Twitter, AirBnB, Ebay, LinkedIn and Reddit are among a group of 17 major online companies to have formally backed Apple in its court dispute with the FBI.
Megan Flanagan

The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-out-where-dogs-come-from.html

science research dogs

shared by Megan Flanagan on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated
  • agree that they evolved from ancient wolves
  • he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented themselves.
  • gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings
  • researchers question whether dogs experience feelings like love and loyalty, or whether their winning ways are just a matter of instincts that evolved because being a hanger-on is an easier way to make a living than running down elk.
  • dogs and wolves interbreed easily and some scientists are not convinced that the two are even different species
  • generally agree that there is good evidence that dogs were domesticated around 15,000 years ago
  • “Maybe dog domestication on some level kicks off this whole change in the way that humans are involved and responding to and interacting with their environment,
  • most dog breeds were invented in the 19th century during a period of dog obsession that he called “the giant whirlwind blender of the European crazy Victorian dog-breeding frenzy.
  • “There’s hardly a person working in canine genetics that’s not working on that project
  • Almost every group has a different origination hypothesis
  • jaws and occasionally nearly complete skulls from old and recent dogs, wolves and canids that could fall into either category.
  • will be able to determine whether the domestication process occurred closer to 15,000 or 30,000 years ago,
  • major achievement in the world of canine science, and a landmark in the analysis of ancient DNA to show evolution, migrations and descent,
  • based on DNA evidence and the shape of ancient skulls, that dog domestication occurred well over 30,000 years ago.
  • he became fed up with the lack of ancient DNA evidence in papers about the origin of dogs.
  • identified a skull about 32,000 years old from a Belgian cave in Goyet as an early dog.
  • arguing that the evidence just wasn’t there to call the Goyet skull a dog,
  • claims are controversial and is willing, like the rest of the world of canine science, to risk damage to the fossils themselves to get more information on not just the mitochondrial DNA but also the nuclear DNA.
  • geneticists try to establish is how different the DNA of one animal is from another. Adding ancient DNA gives many more points of reference over a long time span.
  • will be able to identify changes in the skulls or jaws of those wolves that show shifts to more doglike shapes, helping to narrow the origins of domestication
  • the project will publish a flagship paper from all of the participants describing their general findings
  • a group in China was forming with the goal of sequencing 10,000 dog genomes
  • growing increasingly confident that they will find what they want, and come close to settling the thorny question of when and where the tearing power of a wolf jaw first gave way to the persuasive force of a nudge from a dog’s cold nose.
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