- He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse. (BuzzFeed) "...Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet... The web and the information ecosystem that had developed around it was wildly unhealthy, Ovadya argued. The incentives that governed its biggest platforms were calibrated to reward information that was often misleading and polarizing, or both. Today Ovadya and a cohort of loosely affiliated researchers and academics are anxiously looking ahead — toward a future that is alarmingly dystopian. But it’s what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you. That future, according to Ovadya, will arrive with a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality, for which terms have already been coined — 'reality apathy,' 'automated laser phishing,' and 'human puppets.' Technologies that can be used to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it. Ovadya’s premonitions are particularly terrifying given the ease with which our democracy has already been manipulated by the most rudimentary, blunt-force misinformation techniques."
- Inside Facebook's Two Years of Hell (Wired) "...the ensuing battle over Trending Topics did more than just dominate a few news cycles. In ways that are only fully visible now, it set the stage for the most tumultuous two years of Facebook’s existence—triggering a chain of events that would distract and confuse the company while larger disasters began to engulf it. ...most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds. And—in the tale’s final chapters—of the company’s earnest attempt to redeem itself. It appears that Facebook did not...carefully think through the implications of becoming the dominant force in the news industry. The most important consequence of the Trending Topics controversy...was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might look like stifling conservative news. While Facebook grappled internally with what it was becoming...Donald Trump’s presidential campaign staff faced no such confusion. Facebook was the way to run the most effective direct-marketing political operation in history. Trump’s candidacy also proved to be a wonderful tool for a new class of scammers pumping out massively viral and entirely fake stories. It’s not easy to recognize that the machine you’ve built to bring people together is being used to tear them apart... As 2017 wore on...the company began to realize it had been attacked by a foreign influence operation. So what is it: publisher or platform? Facebook seems to have finally recognized that it is quite clearly both."
- Why Your Brain Clings To False Beliefs (Even When It Knows Better) (FastCompany) "...our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true. The bigger risk is in failing to update our beliefs when new information arises... ...we still form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- Context Matters. The Stock Market Drop Is Less Scary Than It Seems (NYT) "There is an important idea to keep in mind at a time like this: Take the long view.The last 18 months have been one of the least volatile periods for the stock market in modern times. But 2017 was weird. There were five such days in 2016, six in 2015 and four in 2014. In 2011, there were 21 trading days in which the S.&P. fell by more than 2 percent, nearly two per month."
HEALTH:
- The Flu is Killing Up to 4,000 Americans a Week (Fortune) "Deaths from influenza and pneumonia, which are closely tied to each other in the winter months, were responsible for 1 of every 10 deaths last week, and that’s likely to rise... There were 40,414 deaths in the U.S. during the third week of 2018, the most recent data available, and 4,064 were from pneumonia or influenza, according to the CDC data."
- The flu and airports: Here’s how to stay healthy in these disgusting germ havens (FastCompany) "A recent study by insurancequotes.com tested 18 surfaces inside airplanes and terminals at three major U.S. airports, and there was one item that was more disgusting than any other: self-help ticketing kiosks. ...other places to avoid in the airport include drinking fountain buttons and the locks on the bathroom stalls. In general, though, bathrooms were cleaner than many other places in the airport, probably because they’re regularly swabbed down. Still, wash your hands when you’re done in there."
MORE #METOO:
- The White House Response to Rob Porter’s Resignation Is Sickening (National Review) "The domestic-violence accusations against Rob Porter are credible and despicable... These weren’t just random, baseless accusations, as some detractors would have you believe. President Trump thinks 'you have to remember that' Porter denies the allegations, but I think you’d be better off remembering that there is a mountain of actual evidence supporting their claims. These women did not just flippantly accuse Porter. Not only did one produce a photo, and another produce an order of protection (note: they don’t just hand out orders of protection for no reason!), but both of these women also detailed their abuse to the FBI."
- A Reckoning with Women Awaits Trump (New Yorker) "Sooner or later, Trump’s satraps and lieutenants, present and former, come to betray a vivid sense of just how imperilled and imperilling this Presidency is. 'You watch. The time has come,' he [Steve Bannon] said. 'Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward... The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.'"
NEWS:
- Former Senior FBI Official Is Leading BuzzFeed’s Effort to Verify Trump Dossier (Foreign Policy) "For the last six months, a team led by a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official has been traveling the globe on a secret mission to verify parts of the Trump dossier... Their client: BuzzFeed, the news organization that first published the dossier on U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, which is now being sued over its explosive allegations. With the special counsel probe under wraps, the BuzzFeed court case could represent the first public airing of an investigation into the veracity of some of the dossier’s claims."
- The Dumb Controversy over the Schiff Memo (National Review) "Aware that they are firing blanks, committee Democrats evidently threaded the Schiff memo with some highly classified information. In essence, they are willing to play high-stakes poker with intelligence secrets, including sources and methods for gathering national-defense information, in order to induce Republicans to demand that the memo be suppressed. Then, of course, they bank on the Democrat-friendly media to shift the narrative from the vapidity of the Schiff memo’s contentions to the suggestion that Republicans must have something to hide."
- I Read the Grassley Memo, and I’m Still Not Outraged at the FBI (National Review) Editorial comment: This is the finest analysis of this issue I have read to date. "I’m with Trey Gowdy on the most consequential issue. Nothing revealed so far should impact the Mueller investigation. As he said very clearly, 'There is a Russia investigation without a dossier.' He’s right. He’s clearly articulated at least some of the reasons why — the dossier had nothing to do with George Papadopoulos, nothing to do with Donald Jr.’s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, and nothing to do with obstruction of justice. But the list could go on. The dossier had nothing to do with with the existence of an apparent Russian effort to help Donald Trump. It had nothing to do with Trump’s decisions to surround himself with advisers like Papadopoulos, Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — people who each proved to have problematic ties to the Kremlin or Kremlin allies."
- Trump’s favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still retain his trust? (WaPo) "These days, Mattis’s influence radiates across the government. In places such as Afghanistan and Somalia, he has been a force for stability, resisting the president’s instincts to withdraw. In Iran and North Korea, he has curbed Trump’s desire for a show of military strength. In his first year in the Pentagon, Mattis has been one of the least visible and most consequential members of Trump’s foreign policy team. In Situation Room meetings, he has established himself as a commanding voice, reining in discussions before they devolve into chaos. State Department ambassadors say they have spent more face-to-face time with him than they have their own boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson."
- The only certainty in Trump's budget: Oceans of red ink (Politico) "After Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s, deficits exploded in the same range as Trump’s now, when calculated as a percentage of the economy, or gross domestic product. But Reagan’s famous 'riverboat' gamble came when the total national debt was a fraction of what it is today. Trump is pushing the envelope when debt is already near 80 percent of GDP, leaving far less room to maneuver if the economy turns downward.Budget director Mick Mulvaney has all but conceded that next year’s deficit will top $1 trillion, a tipping point Republicans loudly denounced when it happened under Obama. Down the road, Mulvaney sees the picture improving by the end of the decade. But his chances of success rest very much on two planks: robust economic growth and persuading Republicans in Congress to backtrack on recent deals to raise domestic spending."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Facebook lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. 2018 won’t be much better. (Re/code) "Facebook has been losing its 'cool' factor for years, and young people have more options than ever for staying in touch with friends and family. Facebook’s service also serves as a digital record keeper — but many young people don’t seem to care about saving their life online, at least not publicly. That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer popular features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic. Take the numbers with a grain of salt — eMarketer is an outside research firm so it doesn’t have the full picture that, say, Facebook has. But the fact that eMarketer is predicting declines across the board is a bad sign for Facebook regardless. Young people offer a good barometer for what is popular, but more importantly for Facebook, losing out on the next generation of internet users in the U.S. is troubling for the company’s long-term dominance."
- Sorry, Bedtime Readers: iPads Keep You Awake Even With Night Shift On (FastCompany) "A new study by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State shows that Night Shift’s effect on melatonin is negligible, although the color change could have a psychological effect."
WINTER OLYMPICS:
- This might be the last Olympics without AI judges (Quartz) "Japanese company Fujitsu is developing software that uses data from 3D sensors to analyze gymnastics events like the pommel horse and floor routines... While it’s possible these measurements could take some bias out of the scoring process, experts warned...that increased reliance on technology could introduce new risks of digital tampering with algorithms."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- This Prolific Nerd Is Shaping the Future of Wikipedia (Ozzy) "Time magazine recently named Pruitt one of the 25 most influential people on the internet... ...Pruitt...[is] by far the most prolific English language Wikipedian — as the site’s editors are known — with more than 2.2 million edits pixeled into history (the next closest has completed a mere 1.8 million edits). ...Pruitt has created 30,000 articles on his own... On average, Pruitt says he spends three hours per day on Wikipedia..."
- 14 worms pulled from woman's eye after rare infection (USAToday) "Two other types of Thelazia eye worm infections had been seen in people before, but never this kind, according to Richard Bradbury of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
TODAY'S SONG:
- Walls (Wingtip ft Delacey)
- Inside Facebook's Two Years of Hell (Wired) "...the ensuing battle over Trending Topics did more than just dominate a few news cycles. In ways that are only fully visible now, it set the stage for the most tumultuous two years of Facebook’s existence—triggering a chain of events that would distract and confuse the company while larger disasters began to engulf it. ...most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds. And—in the tale’s final chapters—of the company’s earnest attempt to redeem itself. It appears that Facebook did not...carefully think through the implications of becoming the dominant force in the news industry. The most important consequence of the Trending Topics controversy...was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might look like stifling conservative news. While Facebook grappled internally with what it was becoming...Donald Trump’s presidential campaign staff faced no such confusion. Facebook was the way to run the most effective direct-marketing political operation in history. Trump’s candidacy also proved to be a wonderful tool for a new class of scammers pumping out massively viral and entirely fake stories. It’s not easy to recognize that the machine you’ve built to bring people together is being used to tear them apart... As 2017 wore on...the company began to realize it had been attacked by a foreign influence operation. So what is it: publisher or platform? Facebook seems to have finally recognized that it is quite clearly both."
- Why Your Brain Clings To False Beliefs (Even When It Knows Better) (FastCompany) "...our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true. The bigger risk is in failing to update our beliefs when new information arises... ...we still form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- Context Matters. The Stock Market Drop Is Less Scary Than It Seems (NYT) "There is an important idea to keep in mind at a time like this: Take the long view.The last 18 months have been one of the least volatile periods for the stock market in modern times. But 2017 was weird. There were five such days in 2016, six in 2015 and four in 2014. In 2011, there were 21 trading days in which the S.&P. fell by more than 2 percent, nearly two per month."
HEALTH:
- The Flu is Killing Up to 4,000 Americans a Week (Fortune) "Deaths from influenza and pneumonia, which are closely tied to each other in the winter months, were responsible for 1 of every 10 deaths last week, and that’s likely to rise... There were 40,414 deaths in the U.S. during the third week of 2018, the most recent data available, and 4,064 were from pneumonia or influenza, according to the CDC data."
- The flu and airports: Here’s how to stay healthy in these disgusting germ havens (FastCompany) "A recent study by insurancequotes.com tested 18 surfaces inside airplanes and terminals at three major U.S. airports, and there was one item that was more disgusting than any other: self-help ticketing kiosks. ...other places to avoid in the airport include drinking fountain buttons and the locks on the bathroom stalls. In general, though, bathrooms were cleaner than many other places in the airport, probably because they’re regularly swabbed down. Still, wash your hands when you’re done in there."
MORE #METOO:
- The White House Response to Rob Porter’s Resignation Is Sickening (National Review) "The domestic-violence accusations against Rob Porter are credible and despicable... These weren’t just random, baseless accusations, as some detractors would have you believe. President Trump thinks 'you have to remember that' Porter denies the allegations, but I think you’d be better off remembering that there is a mountain of actual evidence supporting their claims. These women did not just flippantly accuse Porter. Not only did one produce a photo, and another produce an order of protection (note: they don’t just hand out orders of protection for no reason!), but both of these women also detailed their abuse to the FBI."
- A Reckoning with Women Awaits Trump (New Yorker) "Sooner or later, Trump’s satraps and lieutenants, present and former, come to betray a vivid sense of just how imperilled and imperilling this Presidency is. 'You watch. The time has come,' he [Steve Bannon] said. 'Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward... The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.'"
NEWS:
- Former Senior FBI Official Is Leading BuzzFeed’s Effort to Verify Trump Dossier (Foreign Policy) "For the last six months, a team led by a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official has been traveling the globe on a secret mission to verify parts of the Trump dossier... Their client: BuzzFeed, the news organization that first published the dossier on U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, which is now being sued over its explosive allegations. With the special counsel probe under wraps, the BuzzFeed court case could represent the first public airing of an investigation into the veracity of some of the dossier’s claims."
- The Dumb Controversy over the Schiff Memo (National Review) "Aware that they are firing blanks, committee Democrats evidently threaded the Schiff memo with some highly classified information. In essence, they are willing to play high-stakes poker with intelligence secrets, including sources and methods for gathering national-defense information, in order to induce Republicans to demand that the memo be suppressed. Then, of course, they bank on the Democrat-friendly media to shift the narrative from the vapidity of the Schiff memo’s contentions to the suggestion that Republicans must have something to hide."
- I Read the Grassley Memo, and I’m Still Not Outraged at the FBI (National Review) Editorial comment: This is the finest analysis of this issue I have read to date. "I’m with Trey Gowdy on the most consequential issue. Nothing revealed so far should impact the Mueller investigation. As he said very clearly, 'There is a Russia investigation without a dossier.' He’s right. He’s clearly articulated at least some of the reasons why — the dossier had nothing to do with George Papadopoulos, nothing to do with Donald Jr.’s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, and nothing to do with obstruction of justice. But the list could go on. The dossier had nothing to do with with the existence of an apparent Russian effort to help Donald Trump. It had nothing to do with Trump’s decisions to surround himself with advisers like Papadopoulos, Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — people who each proved to have problematic ties to the Kremlin or Kremlin allies."
- Trump’s favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still retain his trust? (WaPo) "These days, Mattis’s influence radiates across the government. In places such as Afghanistan and Somalia, he has been a force for stability, resisting the president’s instincts to withdraw. In Iran and North Korea, he has curbed Trump’s desire for a show of military strength. In his first year in the Pentagon, Mattis has been one of the least visible and most consequential members of Trump’s foreign policy team. In Situation Room meetings, he has established himself as a commanding voice, reining in discussions before they devolve into chaos. State Department ambassadors say they have spent more face-to-face time with him than they have their own boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson."
- The only certainty in Trump's budget: Oceans of red ink (Politico) "After Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s, deficits exploded in the same range as Trump’s now, when calculated as a percentage of the economy, or gross domestic product. But Reagan’s famous 'riverboat' gamble came when the total national debt was a fraction of what it is today. Trump is pushing the envelope when debt is already near 80 percent of GDP, leaving far less room to maneuver if the economy turns downward.Budget director Mick Mulvaney has all but conceded that next year’s deficit will top $1 trillion, a tipping point Republicans loudly denounced when it happened under Obama. Down the road, Mulvaney sees the picture improving by the end of the decade. But his chances of success rest very much on two planks: robust economic growth and persuading Republicans in Congress to backtrack on recent deals to raise domestic spending."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Facebook lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. 2018 won’t be much better. (Re/code) "Facebook has been losing its 'cool' factor for years, and young people have more options than ever for staying in touch with friends and family. Facebook’s service also serves as a digital record keeper — but many young people don’t seem to care about saving their life online, at least not publicly. That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer popular features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic. Take the numbers with a grain of salt — eMarketer is an outside research firm so it doesn’t have the full picture that, say, Facebook has. But the fact that eMarketer is predicting declines across the board is a bad sign for Facebook regardless. Young people offer a good barometer for what is popular, but more importantly for Facebook, losing out on the next generation of internet users in the U.S. is troubling for the company’s long-term dominance."
- Sorry, Bedtime Readers: iPads Keep You Awake Even With Night Shift On (FastCompany) "A new study by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State shows that Night Shift’s effect on melatonin is negligible, although the color change could have a psychological effect."
WINTER OLYMPICS:
- This might be the last Olympics without AI judges (Quartz) "Japanese company Fujitsu is developing software that uses data from 3D sensors to analyze gymnastics events like the pommel horse and floor routines... While it’s possible these measurements could take some bias out of the scoring process, experts warned...that increased reliance on technology could introduce new risks of digital tampering with algorithms."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- This Prolific Nerd Is Shaping the Future of Wikipedia (Ozzy) "Time magazine recently named Pruitt one of the 25 most influential people on the internet... ...Pruitt...[is] by far the most prolific English language Wikipedian — as the site’s editors are known — with more than 2.2 million edits pixeled into history (the next closest has completed a mere 1.8 million edits). ...Pruitt has created 30,000 articles on his own... On average, Pruitt says he spends three hours per day on Wikipedia..."
- 14 worms pulled from woman's eye after rare infection (USAToday) "Two other types of Thelazia eye worm infections had been seen in people before, but never this kind, according to Richard Bradbury of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
TODAY'S SONG:
- Walls (Wingtip ft Delacey)
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