"BAT CHILD ESCAPES!"

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media (NYT) "For all the suspicions about social media companies’ motives and ethics, it is the interaction of the technology with our common, often subconscious psychological biases that make so many of us vulnerable to misinformation, and this has largely escaped notice. Social media algorithms function at one level like evolutionary selection: Most lies and false rumors go nowhere, but the rare ones with appealing urban-myth 'mutations' find psychological traction, then go viral. Stopping to drill down and determine the true source of a foul-smelling story can be tricky, even for the motivated skeptic, and mentally it’s hard work."

BUSINESS/ECONOMY:

- Piketty's Inequality Theory Gets Dinged (Bloomberg) " His [Piketty] thesis was...unusually simple -- instead of a complex theory of social class or the vagaries of human culture, he merely predicted that the rich get richer until a big war or revolution resets things. His reams of historical data purported to bear this pattern out... Richard Sutch of the University of California-Riverside has a new paper arguing that Piketty’s measurement of the share of wealth owned by the richest Americans is deeply flawed and unreliable. The scant quantity and unreliability of the 19th century data, and the heroic assumptions Piketty makes in order to fit that data, drive Sutch to exasperation. That doesn’t mean Piketty is wrong. His theory could still be valid."

CLIMATE CHANGE:

- Study: NYC could see bad flooding every 5 years (AP) "The study, performed by researchers at several universities and published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, primarily blames the predicted change on sea-level rise caused by global warming. ...rising sea levels could mean that floods of 7.4 feet (2.25 meters) or more that struck the New York city area roughly once every 500 years before 1800, and which occur roughly every 25 years now, could happen once every five years between 2030 and 2045. The researchers said there is scientific consensus that global sea level will rise in the coming centuries, although it is not certain how high."

LIFE:

- In a Distracted World, Solitude Is a Competitive Advantage (HBR) "Research by the University of London reveals that our IQ drops by five to 15 points when we are multitasking. In his book, Your Brain at Work, David Rock explains that performance can decrease by up to 50% when a person focuses on two mental tasks at once. There is no silver bullet to solving the complex problems ushered in by the information age. But there are some good places to start, and one of them is counterintuitive: solitude. Having the discipline to step back from the noise of the world is essential to staying focused."

NEWS:

- Reading This While Walking? In Honolulu, It Could Cost You (NYT) "Honolulu has passed a law, which will take effect Wednesday, that allows the police to fine pedestrians up to $35 for viewing their electronic devices while crossing streets in the city and surrounding county. But critics say engineering and redesigning streets would be more effective."

- How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets (NYT) "In order to work with more writing systems than ASCII was able to handle, technology companies like Apple, Xerox, IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard and even Kodak created their proprietary encodings. Joe Becker gathered like-minded computer scientists to bring order to the chaos, arguing that cooperation was needed among companies. Unicode unified all the numerical identifiers and made sure they were reliable and up-to-date. Unicode’s idealistic founders intended to bring the personal-computing revolution to everyone on the planet, regardless of language. Twenty years after its first version, Unicode had become the default text-data standard, adopted by device manufacturers and software companies all over the world. The end was finally in sight — at one point the consortium had barely more than 50 writing systems to add. All that changed in October 2010, when that year’s version of the Unicode standard included its first set of emojis. As the demand for new emojis surged, so, too, did the criticisms. White human figures didn’t reflect the diversity of real skin colors. Millions of users wanted to communicate using the language of emoji, and as consumers, they expected change to be swift. One thing appeared to be slowing things down: the Unicode Consortium."

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- Men photographed in crocodile trap dubbed 'idiots of the century' (Guardian) "The pictures show the men frolicking in the water and sitting in the mouth of the trap at the marina, not far from where a 4.3m croc took 79-year-old dementia sufferer Anne Cameron. “You can’t make everything that’s stupid illegal"..."

TODAY'S SONG:

- Gold Rays (Vinyl Pinups)

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