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Javier E

A Super-Simple Way to Understand the Net Neutrality Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-net-neutrality-debate.html

net-neutrality

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?
  • For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.
  • One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.
  • just as your electric utility has no say in how you use the electricity they sell you, the Internet should be a reliable way to access content produced by anyone, regardless of whether they have any special business arrangement with the utility.
  • Those arguing against net neutrality, most significantly the cable companies, say the Internet will be a richer experience if the profit motive applies, if they can negotiate deals with major content providers (the equivalent of cable channels) so that Netflix or Hulu or other streaming services that use huge bandwidth have to pay for the privilege.
  • It would also give your Internet provider considerably more economic leverage. It would, in the non-net-neutrality world, be free to throttle the speed with which you could access services that don’t pay up, or block sites entirely, as surely as you cannot watch a cable channel that your cable provider chooses not to offer (perhaps because of a dispute with the channel over fees).
Javier E

People of the Internet: 1, Cable Industry: 0 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385185

net-neutrality regulation internet cable

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • This is a staggering turn. When I last wrote about the topic in mid-May, it seemed the FCC would permit a limited fast and slow lane scheme. Then the winds began to shift.
  • In June, John Oliver exhorted his viewers to write to the FCC in defense of net neutrality, and they did so in droves, crashing the agency’s servers. By the fall, more than 4 million people had submitted public comments on the topic, overwhelmingly in support of stronger rules to protect net neutrality.
  • now there is today’s promise, from the FCC chair, that cable industry lobbyist himself: that the Internet should be regulated as the landline phone system was. That Internet service is a utility. “It was a combination of everything: good legal arguments coupled with popular and political support—and public outcry any time it looked like the FCC hadn't quite gotten the message yet,”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • one of the most fascinating aspects of the net-neutrality fight is how often it has remained non-partisan. Indeed, its advocates seem to have pulled off one of the more fascinating feats in recent American politics. They have created great public interest, formed a massive coalition, in and around a rules change by a federal regulatory agency.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
aniyahbarnett

Lizzo criticized body positivity. What is body neutrality? - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...7317015002

body Culture

shared by aniyahbarnett on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • body neutrality.
  • "celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls."
  • "we're still getting talked about, memed, shamed," but "no one cares anymore." 
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Imagine just not thinking about your body. You're not hating it. You're not loving it. You're just a floating head. I'm a floating head wandering through the world."
  • "The body positive movement urges people to love their bodies no matter what they look like, whereas body neutrality focuses on what your body can do for you rather than what it actually looks like
  • She noted body neutrality's focus on how a body functions as opposed to how it looks comes with some able-bodied privilege.
  • "the idea that we can still care for our bodies even if we don't regard them positively."
  • "I don't have to be happy with my body, I don't have to love my body, but I can still acknowledge that this is the one body that I have... and so I need to be caring for tha
  • "But I can hold a space for you to learn to sort of accept your body as it is or find gratitude in what your body can do for you."
  • The body positivity movement has roots in the fat acceptance movement from the '60s
  • "commercialized" and "commandeered by smaller-bodied influencers,
  • "People can benefit from body neutrality and body positivity at different times in their lives or for different reasons
  • "definitely a step in the right direction for people who are experiencing body image concerns, and even for the general public."
  • There are also options beyond positivity and body neutrality, including "body acceptance" and "body liberation."
Javier E

History News Network | Hard Truths about Britain's Entry into World War I - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...157821

WWI origins UK history crisis policy intervention

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many still imagine that Britain’s decision-makers were all decently reluctant to plunge into war, and that they did so only at the last moment. According to the long-lived legend, Britain went to war only for high ideological goals, to face down German authoritarianism and to stand up for democracy. The British government and people, some insist, were instantly united behind a war that was embarked upon essentially to protect Belgium’s neutrality.
  • The private papers of the major players reveal that in 1914 the Cabinet of Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was deeply divided. While the Cabinet’s Radicals struggled to keep Britain focussed upon diplomatic mediation, the inner executive, dominated by Liberal Imperialists, forced the pace, manipulated the Cabinet and parliament toward war, and rushed to a premature choice for war – before Belgium’s invasion. There was intense opposition.
  • It is hardly realized today that Britain’s decision for war in 1914 was a very close-run thing. Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, was the leader of the powerful faction of neutralists inside the nineteen-man Cabinet. His cabinet journal has only recently become available. It reveals that on Monday 27 July, at the beginning of the crisis, Harcourt listed eleven ministers as pledged disciples with him in a “Peace party which if necessary shall break up the Cabinet in the interest of our abstention.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The German invasion of Belgium was unleashed on the morning of Tuesday 4 August. Britain declared war upon Germany later that evening, the very instant her short ultimatum expired. London waited least. In this sense, the German invasion was the occasion of Britain’s intervention – but not the cause. It arrived as a gift from Mars for British politicians and propagandists. It provided political cover for a prior commitment to war. It squeezed Russia, and the invasion of Eastern Europe, out of the national consciousness and made war much easier to sell to the British public.
  • In the Cabinet, as in the Liberal Party, the call for neutrality undoubtedly had the support of the majority. Beyond the ranks of Liberals, neutralism was strong among a wide circle of internationalists and socialists. 20,000 people filled Trafalgar Square on Sunday 2 August demanding neutrality and peace. Had a credible active neutral diplomacy been pursued single-mindedly during the crisis, it might have averted war. Most importantly, the defeat of the peace activists in 1914 testifies not to the hopelessness of their cause but to the rapidity of the crisis. 
qkirkpatrick

Poll: Ukrainians support neutrality, disagree on war - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...24620853

ukraine

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • L, Ukraine — Several residents in this city in far eastern Ukraine said they want a united country, but they're split on the use of force to solve Ukraine's war with Russian-backed separatists.
  • The survey authors did not define neutrality other than to point out that European countries have urged Ukraine to move closer to the EU, while Russia wants Ukraine aligned with former Soviet republics.
  • It comes as more of President Obama's advisers have voiced support for providing military aid to Ukraine's military. A slight 52% majority of Ukrainians support this move, with three-quarters of respondents supportive in the west, and three-fifths supportive in the north. In the east 62% opposed U.S. military support, and the South is evenly divided.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The results show that 63% of Ukrainians would find neutrality tolerable, while 31% find it unacceptable. Support for the idea was least strong in Ukraine's west, where 48% said they could tolerate the notion, and the same percentage said neutrality would be unacceptable.
  • Carrying flowers and portraits, tens of thousands of people somberly marched Sunday in Moscow to mourn opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, whose slaying on the streets of the capital has shaken Russia's beleaguered opposition. (Mar. 1) A
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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Javier E

Republicans are trying to destroy the very idea of neutral judgment - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-very-idea-of-neutral-judgment

neutral judgment gop trump objectivity bias legitimacy policy truth fact

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • What’s the larger context here? This is straight out of President Trump’s playbook, one that tries to convince everyone that there’s no such thing as a neutral authority on anything.
  • If the CBO might say your bill will have problematic effects, then the answer is not to rebut its particular critique, but to attack the institution itself as fundamentally illegitimate. If the news media report things that don’t reflect well on you, then they’re “the enemy of the American People.” If polls show you with a low approval rating, then “any negative polls are fake news.” If a court issues a ruling you don’t like, then it’s a “so-called judge” who has no right to constrain you.
  • To Trump and increasingly to his Republican allies, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the ones who agree with them (who are the best people, fantastic, believe me) and the ones who don’t (who are losers and haters). There is no in-between and no such thing as neutrality.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When the CBO score of the Republican health-care bill finally arrives, Republicans will turn up the volume on their attack, barely bothering to deal with the score’s specifics but just saying that the CBO is a bunch of dishonest Washington bureaucrats who can’t be trusted. The message will be reinforced on Fox News, conservative talk radio and right-wing websites. The GOP’s base will adopt that position as its own.
  • Republicans might not persuade most people to go along with them. But they’ll probably have some measure of success in their larger project of undermining the basic idea that there is such a thing as nonpartisan information we as a country can use when we decide what direction we want to move in.
Javier E

Political Neutrality Is What Made American Newspapers Great - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...n-newspapers-great-11594418000

newspaper neutrality news media US history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • much of the press’s power to influence public opinion came from what was, perhaps, Bennett’s greatest journalistic idea of all: He made the Herald politically neutral, printing opinion columns only on the editorial page.
  • In his news pages he printed what he thought the readers would want to know, not what he wanted to tell them. Bennett realized that a newspaper that was the mouthpiece of one party would be read only by that party’s adherents. He wanted everyone to read the Herald.
  • The idea spread quickly through the journalism industry, greatly enhancing its influence and prestige. Its abandonment may have the opposite effect.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Many of America’s great newspapers have moved away from even the pretense of political neutrality. That tradition dates to 1835, when a Scottish immigrant named James Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald
hannahcarter11

Japan's New Leader Sets Goal of Being Carbon Neutral by 2050 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-carbon-neutral.html

japan climate emissions

shared by hannahcarter11 on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 26 Oct 20
       
      Even if they're just doing this in competition, whatever it takes to clean up the planet!
  • Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan’s economy and global standing
  • Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees
  • Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.
  • reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter
  • decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures
  • As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”
  • he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage
  • The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters
  • By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.
  • Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.
  • Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa
  • The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise
  • Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel
  • Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.
  • Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”
  • Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.
  • But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort
  • Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”
  • Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday
  • The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.
gaglianoj

Exclusive: White House says net neutrality legislation not needed | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...xclusive-idUSKBN0KO2JO20150115

net neutrality

shared by gaglianoj on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Republicans in Congress are trying to drum up support for a bill that would counter the FCC's upcoming new rules. The Obama administration's comments, while not entirely rebuffing the legislative effort, could make some Democrats wary of joining it.
  • Obama has urged the FCC to regulate ISPs more strictly under a section of communications law known as Title II, which would treat them more like public utilities.
  • Republican chairmen of the Senate and House commerce committees, John Thune and Fred Upton, have been working to strike a legislative deal with Democrats that would adopt some of the same net neutrality principles but without resorting to Title II.
Javier E

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

algorithm disinformation russia election 2016 politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
Javier E

Hoping Llamas Will Become Coronavirus Heroes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ma-coronavirus-antibodies.html

Covid-19 treatment antibody research

shared by Javier E on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • Winter is a 4-year-old chocolate-colored llama with spindly legs
  • Winter was simply the lucky llama chosen by researchers in Belgium, where she lives, to participate in a series of virus studies involving both SARS and MERS. Finding that her antibodies staved off those infections, the scientists posited that those same antibodies could also neutralize the new virus that causes Covid-19. They were right, and published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell.
  • Scientists have long turned to llamas for antibody research. In the last decade, for example, scientists have used llamas’ antibodies in H.I.V. and influenza research, finding promising therapies for both viruses.
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  • This more diminutive antibody can access tinier pockets and crevices on spike proteins — the proteins that allow viruses like the novel coronavirus to break into host cells and infect us — that human antibodies cannot. That can make it more effective in neutralizing viruses.
  • The llama’s antibody still forms a Y, but its arms are much shorter because it doesn’t have any light-chain proteins.
  • Humans produce only one kind of antibody, made of two types of protein chains — heavy and light — that together form a Y shape. Heavy-chain proteins span the entire Y, while light-chain proteins touch only the Y’s arms. Llamas, on the other hand, produce two types of antibodies
  • They can be linked or fused with other antibodies, including human antibodies, and remain stable despite those manipulations.
  • Llamas’ antibodies are also easily manipulated
  • researchers looked to llamas — and, specifically, Winter — to find a smaller llama antibody “that could broadly neutralize many different types of coronavirus,” Dr. McLellan said.
  • They injected Winter with spike proteins from the virus that caused the 2002-03 SARS epidemic as well as MERS, then tested a sample of her blood. And while they couldn’t isolate a single llama antibody that worked against both viruses, they found two potent antibodies that each fought separately against MERS and SARS.
  • They immediately realized that the smaller llama antibodies “that could neutralize SARS would very likely also recognize the Covid-19 virus,” Dr. Saelens said.
  • It did, the researchers found, effectively inhibiting the coronavirus in cell cultures.
  • While the treatment’s protection would be immediate, its effects wouldn’t be permanent, lasting only a month or two without additional injections.
  • This proactive approach is at least several months away, but the researchers are moving toward clinical trials. Additional studies may also be needed to verify the safety of injecting a llama’s antibodies into human patients.
krystalxu

The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545048

french gender-neutral culture

shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.
  • It’s not that speaking French makes it impossible for you to conceive of something as gender-neutral, he suggested
  • those studies are limited in that they can’t control for outside factors like culture, which are extremely important in determining sexist attitudes.
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  • The statement also warned that inclusive writing would “destroy” the promises of the Francophonie (the linguistic zone encompassing all countries that use French at the administrative level, or whose first or majority language is French).
  • this subject is still on the margins of cognitive science and linguistics research, and critics of inclusive writing say that not enough work has been done to prove conclusively that changing a language will improve gender equality.
  • also the speakers of minority languages in France (like Catalan, Occitan, and Gascon), who have always used the median-period as a phonetic marker.
  • So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.
Javier E

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-repeal-net-neutrality.html

internet net-neutrality oligopoly

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life.
  • When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.
  • The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.
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  • the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.
  • the order “would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground.” This, they said, was “the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers.”
  • They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.
  • The internet’s singular power, in its early gold-rush days, was its flexibility. People could imagine a dazzling array of new uses for the network, and as quick as that, they could build and deploy them
  • You didn’t need permission for any of this stuff; some of these innovations ruined traditional industries, some fundamentally altered society, and many were legally dubious. But the internet meant you could just put it up, and if it worked, the rest of the world would quickly adopt it.
  • The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.
  • a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.
Javier E

Giving Ukraine heavy weapons does not mean NATO is at war with Russia | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21808835

ukraine heavy weapons nato war russia casus belli neutrality collective self-defence

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The charter recognises that states have a right to self-defence, and that other countries can join in “collective self-defence” to help them. States are allowed to give military support to victims of aggression, or to impose sanctions on the aggressor, without affecting their own neutral status.
  • this law of neutrality was designed for a world where war was an accepted tool of statecraft. That changed with the adoption of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, which made it illegal to attack another country unprovoked—a principle later enshrined in the UN’s charter.
  • International law, as it developed in Europe beginning in the 17th century, required countries that wanted to stay out of others’ wars to observe strict neutrality. That meant they had to trade equally with both sides of a conflict, as Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, professors at Yale Law School, explained in a recent article. Supplying arms to one side only, or favouring its trade, could make their ships fair game for attack by the other.
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  • In Ukraine no such Security Council resolution has been adopted—but only because Russia, a permanent member, vetoed it. The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the invasion
  • when the UN Security Council condemns an act of aggression, that resolution is legally binding on all member states.
  • As for states becoming co-belligerents, the bar is even higher, argues Michael Schmitt of the United States Military Academy at West Point. German supplies of arms to Ukraine do not make Germany a party to the conflict with Russia because “there are no hostilities between the States concerned”—their soldiers are not killing each other.
  • “If Russia wants to feel provoked and attack NATO it will do it, independently of whether we have delivered tanks,”
  • thers think that if supplying heavy weapons increases the risk of a direct conflict, it is mainly because they make more inviting targets
  • it is wrong to dismiss the legal aspects of co-belligerency entirely: they help prevent a conflict escalating to nuclear war. When America and other NATO countries rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, they emphasise such a step would make them parties to the conflict. This, Mr Haque thinks, is a useful way to draw red lines between nuclear powers. “America is using these rules of international law to signal to Russia that we will come up to a clear red line but not cross it. I think Russia understands that signalling,”
  • “But they will try to contest the American interpretation of those rules and invent their own red lines—not based on law—to serve their aims.”
  • America never accused the Soviets or Chinese of being co-belligerents, and the nuclear powers never came close to direct conflict. American bombers avoided Soviet freighters: when US Air Force pilots accidentally strafed one in 1967, they were court-martialled. America was restrained not by international law but by the fact that bringing the Soviets or Chinese into the war would not have been in its interests.
  • That will be the decisive factor for Russia in Ukraine, too. “If Russia wanted the conflict to spill over and drag us in, it would have already succeeded in doing that,”
julia rhodes

At Neutral Site, Syrians Feel Free to Confront the Other Side - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-confront-the-other-side.html

psychology language bias truth history syria percpetion politics policy crisis culture

shared by julia rhodes on 28 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The ones that really nettle them come from Syrians.
  • Opposition activists and citizen journalists pop up everywhere: in hotel lobbies, on sidewalks, even at a breakfast table overlooking snowcapped mountains.
  • Here in neutral and secure Switzerland, Syrian government delegates used to meeting journalists only inside a government-controlled bubble are finding that almost anyone can come up to them anytime, anywhere, and ask anything.
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  • New encounters — some cordial, some not — have swept Syrians of all stripes out of their comfort zones. That could make a difference eventually, in a war so polarized that opposing sides do not even agree on basic facts, let alone on how to solve the conflict and on who is most responsible.
  • With a cameraman, they asked them if they would accept Mr. Assad’s ouster through negotiations. Many protesters answered politely, but others yelled “God, Bashar and nothing else!” and began shoving and shouting. A man grabbed Mr. Hadad’s phone and threw it.
  • “We agreed on one thing,” Ms. Maala said. “The killing in Syria needs to stop.”
  • a reporter from Al Manar introduced himself by saying, “I’m Hezbollah.”
  • “Do you think we’re happy you’re slaughtering the Syrians?” Mr. Hadad said he answered. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, has intervened on the government’s side. The man replied that Hezbollah was fighting to protect a revered shrine near Damascus.“You killed half of Syria for the sake of a shrine,” Mr. Hadad said, and anger flickered across the man’s face.“If I were in an Arab country, I wouldn’t dare,” Mr. Hadad recalled. He said he then relented and told the man that dialogue between them would help.
Javier E

F.C.C., in a Shift, Backs Fast Lanes for Web Traffic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-new-net-neutrality-rules.html

net-neutrality

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • the regulations could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.
  • The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes,
  • “Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.”
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  • big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter.
  • Under the proposal, broadband providers would have to disclose how they treat all Internet traffic and on what terms they offer more rapid lanes, and would be required to act “in a commercially reasonable manner,” agency officials said. That standard would be fleshed out as the agency seeks public comment.
  • The proposed rules would also require Internet service providers to disclose whether in assigning faster lanes, they have favored their affiliated companies that provide content.
  • Opponents of the new proposed rules said they appeared to be full of holes, particularly in seeking to impose the “commercially reasonable” standard.
  • “The very essence of a ‘commercial reasonableness’ standard is discrimination,” Michael Weinberg, a vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, said in a statement. “And the core of net neutrality is nondiscrimination.”
  • it could be commercially reasonable for a broadband provider to charge a content company higher rates for access to consumers because that company’s service was competitively threatening.
Javier E

Italians Find Promise of Antibodies Remains Elusive, for Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-antibodies-italy.html

pandemic testing immunity

shared by Javier E on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • nfected people develop different quantities of antibodies, and researchers are still studying the level that offers protection, and for how long.“We don’t know how long they last,” Dr. Venturi said. ‘‘This is the central point.”
  • Many businesses in the region have been paying for employees to get the tests, so that they could go back to work if they tested negative for the virus or positive for the antibodies.
  • His Humanitas research hospital near Milan treated Italy’s first known coronavirus patient and has deep experience with the virus. It has been examining the 2 or 3 percent of people in the region who swab tests show are actively infected but whose blood also contains the antibodies — known as immunoglobulin G, or IgG, antibodies — that should neutralize the virus. In other words, these people are no longer contagious.
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  • Dr. Venturi said those tests were essentially “useless” because they did not describe whether a person had the right level of antibodies and because no one knew yet how long they lasted.
  • Results will take weeks more, but if confirmed, he said, it would show that people who test positive for an adequate level of neutralizing IgG antibodies do not pose a danger of contagion.
  • In theory, even those lucky few would not need to wait for two consecutive negative swab tests — which sometimes take months — before being released from quarantine and allowed back to work. “It would be like a negative test result,” he said.
  • In the meantime, though, Dr. Venturi said it was impossible to consider a work force made up only of people showing neutralizing antibodies.
  • Instead, he said, Italy’s reopening phase needs to rely on uninfected people, which he considered to be 90 percent of the population, and on social distancing and other protective measures.
  • “I did it to free myself of this doubt,” said Mr. Passaggio, who last month showed Covid-19 symptoms, including a low fever. Unable to get tested for the virus, as swabs are generally reserved for the hospitalized, he took precautions to avoid contaminating others, including staying isolated for weeks.
  • Last Tuesday he got the results: high levels of immunoglobulin G, or IgG, antibodies. Mr. Passaggio said he understood from doctors on television that it meant a degree of immunity, confidence he was not a danger to others and that he could possibly “go to work before someone else.”
  • Mr. Francese said that a month ago, 50 people in the town showed clear symptoms of the virus, but that the health authorities failed to test them. They got sick, and then their relatives got sick and cases kept building.
  • The town, out of desperation, tracked down serological tests offered by a Chinese factory that the mayor said had an 96 percent accuracy rate, and which he said Italy’s national research center had approved.
  • Robbio has already tested about half of its residents and found and isolated many positive cases, about half of whom had symptoms, he said. He also said that the tests had shown 12 percent had IgG antibodies.
  • He said he considered those people “immune and thus would be eligible” for an eventual immunity license, despite health experts’ doubts.
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