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Obamacare will, in some form or another, redistribute wealth.

Our upbringing, background, and wealth clearly influence whether we support redistributive policies, but interesting new research shows that, when it comes to supporting social welfare programs, not just our ideologies, but our physiologies, play a role.

past research has actually shown that Republicans and Democrats have striking similar ideas of how wealth should be distributed.

THE LIFE MADISON projected on her own Instagram feed was filled with shots that seemed to confirm everyone's expectations: Of course she was loving her first year of college. Of course she enjoyed running. Her mom remembers looking at a photo on her feed and saying, "Madison, you look like you're so happy at this party.""Mom," Madison said. "It's just a picture."

Everyone presents an edited version of life on social media. People share moments that reflect an ideal life, an ideal self. Hundreds of years ago, we sent letters by horseback, containing only what we wanted the recipient to read. Fifty years ago, we spoke via the telephone, sharing only the details that constructed the self we wanted reflected.

She seemed acutely aware that the life she was curating online was distinctly different from the one she was actually living. Yet she could not apply that same logic when she looked at the projected lives of others.

“Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual

“No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

What if the scourge of false news on the internet is not the result of Russian operatives or partisan zealots or computer-controlled bots? What if the main problem is us?

People are the principal culprits

people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.

In 2015, the social network began testing a revenue-sharing program with a limited group of creators, and last November, it rolled out Facebook Creator, a special app designed for professional users. Recently, the social network announced that it was testing some additional tools for creators, including a way for users to purchase monthly subscriptions to their favorite creators’ pages.But some of these features are still not widely available, and many influencers say that Facebook’s charm campaign amounts to too little, too late.

“It feels like they’ve pulled the biggest bait-and-switch of all time,” said Dan Shaba, a co-founder of The Pun Guys, a Facebook page with 1.2 million followers. “They’ve been promising monetization from the moment we got in.”Mr. Hamilton, he of the hot-pepper thong video, said, “I did 1.8 billion views last year. I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.”

While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals.

Before I jump back into the conversation about sexual ethics that has unfolded on the Web in recent days, inspired by Emily Witt's n+1 essay "What Do You Desire?" and featuring a fair number of my favorite writers, it's worth saying a few words about why I so value debate on this subject, and my reasons for running through some sex-life hypotheticals near the end of this article.

As we think and live, the investment required to understand one another increases. So do the stakes of disagreeing. 18-year-olds on the cusp of leaving home for the first time may disagree profoundly about how best to live and flourish, but the disagreements are abstract. It is easy, at 18, to express profound disagreement with, say, a friend's notions of child-rearing. To do so when he's 28, married, and raising a son or daughter is delicate, and perhaps best avoided

I have been speaking of friends. The gulfs that separate strangers can be wider and more difficult to navigate because there is no history of love and mutual goodwill as a foundation for trust. Less investment has been made, so there is less incentive to persevere through the hard parts.

five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population

With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.

To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census

“Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting” – the fake news website the Science Post has racked up a healthy 127,000 shares for the article which is almost entirely lorem ipsum filler text.

Twitter’s solution is not to ban such retweets, but to inject “friction” into the process, in order to try to nudge some users into rethinking their actions on the social network.

In May, the company began experimenting with asking users to “revise” their replies if they were about to send tweets with “harmful language” to other people.

Social platforms let us stay in touch with friends and forge new relationships like never before, but those increases in communication and social connection may come at a cost. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers showed that those who documented and shared their experiences on social media formed less precise memories of those events.

n a series of three studies led by Diana Tamir of Princeton University, researchers explored how taking photos and videos for social media affects people’s enjoyment, engagement and memory of those experiences.

Tamir and her team found that sharing experiences on social media did not seem to affect how much people felt that they had enjoyed the experience or were engaged. However, those who wrote down, recorded or shared their experiences performed about 10% worse on memory tests across all experiments.

In the age of blogging and social media, everyone wants to share their opinion. However, it has become abundantly clear to me that many people simply do not or cannot argue a point in a meaningful way

But, if you are going to disagree or debate a blog post, Facebook post or any of the other mediums we now have to share our opinions, there is a wrong way and a right way to present your ideas. I hope these 5 points will help you share your ideas in a more meaningful way. If you do not like these ideas, share your own ideas below

Someone states their opinion and it makes your blood curdle. You immediately want to attach this person. Honestly, do you think this person cares what you think of them? Do you think that others in the line of comments really care what you think of this person? That is not a way to win an argument or even how to defend your position. If you want to score points, you have to hit where it counts and that is against their position. Argue why their point is wrong and your point is right.

the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage

The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years

During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face

Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.

Psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz published their work in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They sampled 623 Internet users (all white, 70 percent students), asking them to indicate the frequency of their Facebook usage. The group then read one of three versions of a Facebook Notes page they were told was written by a 26-year-old named Jack Brown. "Jack" was white and male. The first version of Jack's message contained what the researchers call a "superiority message": It "contrasted the behaviors of black and white individuals, only to find consistent superiority of the whites."

The researchers then asked participants, for each version of the post, to rate factors like "how much they agreed with the message," "how accurate they found it," "how much they liked the writer," and, significantly, how likely they were to share the post with others

Their findings? "Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages." The group of more-frequent Facebook users didn't differ from others in their reaction to the egalitarian message. But those users "were more positive toward the messages with racist content -- particularly the superiority message." 

They come and go, changing like the weather in April: sunny, rainy, stormy, mild or thunderous. Usually we find a reason why we’re happy or sad, embarrassed, or proud.

Although most people feel that emotions are one of the most personal, intimate, private expressions, an evolutionary understanding implies that they are, instead, impersonal mechanisms that we all share.

The basic emotions—fear, sorrow, disgust, anger, and joy—evolved as mechanisms to instigate behaviors appropriate to the environments of our distant ancestors.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

If you bothered to read the fine print when you created your Facebook account, you would have noticed just how much of yourself you were giving over to Mark Zuckerberg and his $340 billion social network.

In exchange for an admittedly magical level of connectivity, you were giving them your life as content — the right to run ads around video from your daughter’s basketball game; pictures from your off-the-chain birthday party, or an emotional note about your return to health after serious illness. You also gave them the right to use your information to help advertisers market to you

at the heart of the relationship is a level of trust and a waiving of privacy that Facebook requires from its users as it pursues its mission to “make the world more open and connected.”

When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.

lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.

corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations.

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.

Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.