According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the ProblemTake it from the internet’s chief myth busters: The problem is the failing media.

By Jessi Hempel

Nov 16 2016

https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not-the-problem-4ca4852b1ff0

The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment?

Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff.

Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightistsdoesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist.

Verdict: FALSE.

This is the state of truth on the internet in 2016, now that it is as easy for a Macedonian teenager to create a website as it is for The New York Times, and now that the information most likely to find a large audience is that which is most alarming, not most correct. In the wake of the election, the spread of this kind of phony news on Facebook and other social media platforms has come under fire for stoking fears and influencing the election’s outcome. Both Facebook and Google have taken moves to bar fake news sites from their advertising platforms, aiming to cut off the sites’ sources of revenue.

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Warning: social media could harm your career (but not in the way you think)

[Note: This item comes from friend Judi Clark. DLH]
Warning: social media could harm your career (but not in the way you think)

By Cal Newport

Nov 21 2016 

http://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/warning-social-media-could-harm-your-career-20161120-gstl7h

I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog. Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account.

At the moment, this makes me an outlier, but I think many more people should follow my lead and quit these services. There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness, but the argument I want to make here is more pragmatic: You should quit social media because it can hurt your career.

This claim, of course, runs counter to our current understanding of social media’s role in the professional sphere. We’ve been told that it’s important to tend to your so-called social media brand, as this provides you access to opportunities you might otherwise miss and supports the diverse contact network you need to get ahead. Many people in my generation fear that without a social media presence, they would be invisible to the job market.

In a recent New York magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan recalled when he started to feel obligated to update his blog every half-hour or so. It seemed as if everyone with a Facebook account and a smartphone now felt pressured to run their own high-stress, one-person media operation, and “the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone,” he wrote.

I think this behaviour is misguided. In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flimflam in business.

Professional success is hard, but it’s not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about. This is a philosophy perhaps best summarised by the advice Steve Martin used to give aspiring entertainers: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you do that, the rest will work itself out, regardless of the size of your Instagram following.

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The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight

The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain SightBy Ryan Gallagher & Henri Moltke

Nov 16 2016

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/

They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.

But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.

The building was designed by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates, whose grand vision was to create a communication nerve center like a “20th century fortress, with spears and arrows replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”

Excerpt from “Project X,” a short film by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, screening at the IFC Center starting Nov. 18. This article is the product of a joint reporting project between The Intercept and Field of Vision.

Construction began in 1969, and by 1974, the skyscraper was completed. Today, it can be found in the heart of lower Manhattan at 33 Thomas Street, a vast gray tower of concrete and granite that soars 550 feet into the New York skyline. The brutalist structure, still used by AT&T and, according to the New York Department of Finance, owned by the company, is like no other in the vicinity. Unlike the many neighboring residential and office buildings, it is impossible to get a glimpse inside 33 Thomas Street. True to the designers’ original plans, there are no windows and the building is not illuminated. At night it becomes a giant shadow, blending into the darkness, its large square vents emitting a distinct, dull hum that is frequently drowned out by the sound of passing traffic and wailing sirens.

For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street — known as the “Long Lines Building” — has been a source of mystery for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s weirdest and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose.

It is not uncommon to keep the public in the dark about a site containing vital telecommunications equipment. But 33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data.

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The Kind of Car Insurer That Give Consumers the Best Value

[Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH]
The Kind of Car Insurer That Gives Consumers the Best Value

By Gretchen Morgenson

Nov 18 2016

Are people better off when they buy things from companies that don’t have public shareholders they need to please?

The answer, at least in the nearly $200 billion auto insurance industry, appears to be yes.

That’s the conclusion of a new and comprehensive study examining the claims-paying histories of more than 300 auto insurers in the last five years. The analysis was conducted by ValChoice, a data analytics company that aims to bring some transparency to the opaque insurance market.

Unlike many lines of business, auto insurance has two types of companies serving buyers. One group consists of publicly traded companies that must satisfy both shareholders and policyholders. The other kind of operation — known as a mutual company — is owned by its policyholders and so does not have to serve two masters.

Many businesses try to benefit a wide array of stakeholders — investors as well as customers and employees. But the potential for conflicts in these operations has become a hot issue recently as companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals International have been attacked for pricing policies that hurt consumers while enriching executives. (One of Valeant’s former executives was charged with criminal fraud on Thursday by prosecutors in New York.)

Conflicts that exist among insurance companies are less obvious to consumers, industry experts say, in part because of the complexity of the business.

The ValChoice study sheds light on this problem. It found that the car insurers providing the best value to consumers were mutual insurance companies owned by their policyholders and paying them dividends. Over a five-year period from 2011 through 2015, these companies paid out an average 72.6 percent of their premiums in claims; publicly held insurers with shareholders to satisfy paid 62.8 percent of their premiums in claims.

Dan Karr, a former technology executive who founded ValChoice, said it was hard to know exactly why such disparities exist. But a central factor, he hypothesized, is the difficulty of having to please both policyholders who want generous payments when they have an accident and shareholders who expect sizable profits.

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The mystery of why you can’t remember being a baby

The mystery of why you can’t remember being a babyBabies are sponges for new information – so why does it take so long for us to form your first memory? BBC Future investigates.

By Zaria Gorvett

Jul 26 2016

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160726-the-mystery-of-why-you-cant-remember-being-a-baby

You’re out to lunch with someone you’ve known for a few years. Together you’ve held parties, celebrated birthdays, visited parks and bonded over your mutual love of ice cream. You’ve even been on holiday together. In all, they’ve spent quite a lot of money on you – roughly £63,224. The thing is: you can’t remember any of it.

From the most dramatic moment in life – the day of your birth – to first steps, first words, first food, right up to nursery school, most of us can’t remember anything of our first few years. Even after our precious first memory, the recollections tend to be few and far between until well into our childhood. How come?

This gaping hole in the record of our lives has been frustrating parents and baffling psychologists, neuroscientists and linguists for decades. It was a minor obsession of the father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, who coined the phrase ‘infant amnesia’ over 100 years ago.

Probing that mental blank throws up some intriguing questions. Did your earliest memories actually happen, or are they simply made up? Can we remember events without the words to describe them? And might it one day be possible to claim your missing memories back?

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Apple Abandons Development of Wireless Routers

Apple Abandons Development of Wireless RoutersBy Mark Guzman

Nov 19 2016

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/apple-said-to-abandon-development-of-wireless-routers-ivs0ssec

Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn’t been publicly announced.

Apple hasn’t refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn’t currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s plans.

Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers.

The products, which cost $99, $199, and $299, respectively, make up a small slice of Apple’s revenue and are part of Apple’s “other products” category on its financial statements. The category, which includes the Apple Watch and Apple TV, generated $11.1 billion in fiscal 2016, or about 5 percent of total sales.

Exiting the router business could make Apple’s product ecosystem less sticky. Some features of the AirPort routers, including wireless music playback, require an Apple device like an iPhone or Mac computer. If the company no longer sells wireless routers, some may have a reason to use other phones and PCs.

The core of the technology in routers comes from chipmakers such as Broadcom Ltd. that advance Wi-Fi technology through developing the fundamental components. While router makers can differentiate the design of their products, the number of antennas and the software that controls them, they reliant on advances first made by chipmakers to be able to offer new, higher-performing models.

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U.S. launches next-generation weather satellite that will revolutionize forecasting

U.S. launches next-generation weather satellite that will revolutionize forecastingBy Angela Fritz

Nov 19 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/11/19/u-s-launches-next-generation-weather-satellite-that-will-revolutionize-forecasting/

At 6:42 on Saturday evening, the United States launched a revolutionary new weather satellite into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

When GOES-R arrives at orbit, it will see hurricanes and blizzards with higher resolution than any other U.S. satellite of its kind. The scans will take less time and be transmitted faster. Severe storms will be more predictable through breakthrough lightning mapping.

The weather satellites that silently monitor the atmosphere over North America are approaching the end of their life spans. If they fail, the United States will be left without critical weather data. Scientists at NOAA and NASA have been warning of this risk for years. In the late 1990s, they began designing instruments for the next generation of satellites.

GOES-R, the first in the new series to launch, will join a large constellation of U.S. satellites — operated by NOAA, NASA and the Department of Defense — that observe our planet’s weather and environment.

It is a game-changer for weather forecasting, but it’s also part of a bigger picture. GOES-R joins an international network of satellites that share data freely among nearly 200 countries. The United States provides data to other nations so they can generate precise forecasts and alert people to prepare for weather events. In turn, those countries share their data with the U.S. National Weather Service.

Advance notice of crippling blizzards, long-range hurricane forecasts — even a severe thunderstorm outlook — is possible because of the freely-provided weather data from Europe, China and Russia. It is a mutual understanding based on an unspoken tenet: Our well-being is important, and so is yours, and we can’t do this without one another.

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