Tuesday, December 17, 2019

THE ONLY END OF DECADE LIST YOU’LL EVER NEED

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol



Strippers, yachts and lunches with the 'Black Hand Gang' all part of MP's allowance 'abuse'

 New York Times, The I.R.S. Sent a Letter to 3.9 Million People. It Saved Some of Their Lives.:
Three years ago, 3.9 million Americans received a plain-looking envelope from the Internal Revenue Service. Inside was a letter stating that they had recently paid a fine for not carrying health insurance and suggesting possible ways to enroll in coverage.
New research concludes that the bureaucratic mailing saved lives.
Three Treasury Department economists have published a working paper finding that these notices increased health insurance sign-ups [Jacob Goldin (Stanford), Ithai Z. Lurie (U.S. Treasury Department,  Office of Tax Analysis) & Janet McCubbin (U.S. Treasury Department,  Office of Tax Analysis), Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence From Taxpayer Outreach]. Obtaining insurance, they say, reduced premature deaths by an amount that exceeded any of their expectations. Americans between 45 and 64 benefited the most: For every 1,648 who received a letter, one fewer death occurred than among those who hadn’t received a letter.
In all, the researchers estimated that the letters may have wound up saving 700 lives.

  1. Opinion: I received a bill for $1,900 that I never owed. Then my three-year nightmare began

    I never imagined I would become one of thousands of Australians chased by debt collectors — but that's exactly what happened, writes Ben Lenzo.

    Michelangelo was unmarried and lived with a motley bunch of "housemates." Scholars have been left to puzzle over the precise nature of these relationships...  housemates  

    99 good news stories you probably didn't hear about in 2019
    Angus Hervey, via Future Crunch
    If we want to change the story of the human race in the 21st century, we have to change the stories we tell ourselves.







    FastCompany – The future of Google is post-phone, post-Internet, ambient computing all around you. “…The news of today is that Google is repositioning an open source technology it developed called Flutter to have a bigger scope. It’s a software development kit that allows designers to build an app UI just once, and then use that UI on platforms like Android, iOS, or the web without needing to rebuild it or recode it. Flutter allows rich, animated interfaces to be transferred between devices—which has led a million developers to adopt it since 2018. If you’ve played the New York Times crossword puzzle on a phone, or tried Realtor.com’s app, you’ve experienced Flutter without even realizing it…”


    Joel Slemrod (Michigan), Tax Compliance and Enforcement, 57 J. Econ. Lit. 904 (2019):
    This paper reviews recent economic research in tax compliance and enforcement. After briefly laying out the economics of tax evasion, it focuses on recent empirical contributions. It first discusses what methodologies and data have facilitated these contributions, and then presents critical summaries of what has been learned. It discusses a promising new development—the analysis of randomized controlled trials mostly delivered via letters from the tax authority—and then reviews recent research using various methods about the impact of the principal enforcement tax policy instruments: audits, information reporting, and remittance regimes. I also explore several understudied issues worthy of more research attention. The paper closes by outlining a normative framework based on the behavioral response elasticities now being credibly estimated that allow one to assess whether a given enforcement intervention is worth doing.
    2.

  2. — THE WORST TAKES OF THE 2010S — THE PAST DECADE HAD A LOT OF PIECES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT UNPUBLISHED.

     







    Fake ‘Likes’ Remain Just a Few Dollars Away, Researchers Say


    The New York Times – Despite Big Tech’s attempts to combat manipulation, companies that sell clicks, likes and followers on social media are easy to find. “Companies like Facebook and Twitter are poorly policing automated bots and other methods for manipulating social media platforms, according to a report released on Friday by researchers from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence. With a small amount of money, the researchers found, virtually anyone can hire a company to get more likes, comments and clicks. The group, an independent organization that advises the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, tested the tech companies’ ability to stop paid influence campaigns by turning to 11 Russian and five European companies that sell fake social media engagement. For 300 euros, or about $330, the researchers bought over 3,500 comments, 25,000 likes, 20,000 views and 5,000 followers, including on posts from prominent politicians like Ms. Vestager and Ms. Jourova…”

    Anti-vaxxers are adopting new tactics

    In May, Instagram announced that it would block hashtags that promote "verifiably false" information about vaccines. The move came after similar efforts from other social media platforms to restrict vaccine misinformation.
    But anti-vaxxers have developed some clever workarounds to Instagram’s restrictions.
    Coda Story reported Dec. 6 that anti-vaxxers have started using coded hashtags to continue promoting the false belief that vaccines are dangerous. Prior to Instagram’s announcement, anti-vaccine users promoted posts with hashtags like #vaccineskill, whereas now, users are using abstruse hashtags like #learntherisk and #justasking.
    “Tactics like spelling vaccines with a cedilla (vaççines) or using a bracket (va((ines) to try to avoid detection by Instagram also proliferate on the platform,” Coda Story wrote. 
    Another way anti-vaxxers have tried to dupe Instagram’s controls is to co-opt the language used primarily by abortion rights advocates, such as #righttochoose and #mybodymychoice. And it’s not just online.

    NBC News reported     Dec. 6 that anti-vaccine organizers have been harassing legislators and doctors in person. Similar to how anti-abortion protesters will stake out women’s health clinics to heckle patients, some anti-vaxxers have started to confront parents outside of doctors’ offices.
    “Some of the protesters sat with signs, while others stuck anti-vaccine propaganda under car windshield wipers in the parking lot,” NBC wrote about one demonstration on Long Island, New York, in October. “Several approached parents entering the building with their infants, asking, ‘Are you vaccinating your baby?’”
    The backdrop for those demonstrations, which used to be almost entirely online, is a global outbreak of measles. In Samoa, the preventable illness has led to more than 65 deaths — and the reason why has to do with vaccine skepticism there.
    “Whereas flawed health-care systems have been associated with surges in measles cases in some countries, the key reason for Samoa’s woes appear rooted in recent anti-vaccine activism, which pushed vaccination rates to dangerously low levels,” The Washington Post reported Dec. 6.
    To try to abate the health crisis, Samoa made the measles vaccine mandatory and arrested anti-vaccine campaigners. In response, anti-vaxxers started leaving one-star reviews for the country’s government on Facebook.
    If these events tell us anything, it’s that anti-vaxxers are among the most coordinated — and dangerous — misinformers on the internet. And as they continue to refine their coordination tactics and take them offline, they have real potential to affect ongoing public health crises.

    . . . technology

    • Worried about post-trauma disorders, fact-checkers in India set guidelines for self-care. Boom's fact-checking team, for example, now follows six rules to keep everyone mentally safe.  
      • Those interested in learning how to deal with photos and videos featuring lynchings, child abuse and other crimes should visit the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma's website, which offers relevant tips and many articles about handling traumatic imagery.   
    ·         CrowdTangle has launched a new and improved search for fact-checkers. The tool will make it easier to search for posts about a specific subject across Facebook, Instagram and Reddit.

    . . . politics

    • The national security law website Lawfare looked at how the impeachment investigation report from U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) handled false claims and conspiracy theories. The report’s strategy, the authors said: “Deny it the attention it needs to grow.”
      • “The Schiff report shows remarkable discipline in marrying the shorthand used to describe conspiracies with modifiers that underscore their untruthfulness,” they wrote.
    ·         In the runup to Britain’s general election today, much false content has come from the parties and candidates themselves, as opposed to foreign meddling, The New York Times reported.

    . . . the future of news

    • An updated version of IFCN’s 2016 Code of Principles has been approved by an overwhelming majority of its verified signatories and will be introduced worldwide in March 2020. Among other changes, applicants will be required to have published an average of at least one fact check a week for at least six months in most countries, and 12 weeks in countries where the IFCN already has five or more signatories, to be eligible to apply. 
      • The updated code will also require those parent media companies that want their fact-checking units to be signatories to also follow an honest and open corrections policy, said IFCN's senior adviser, Peter Cunliffe-Jones.
    ·         Journalists today operate in an environment of misinformation and polarization, while also being mistrusted and maligned by politicians who seek to discredit their work. API has published a new report synthesizing some experts’ strategies to deal with these challenges.

    It’s hard to predict what would happen if a complex piece of legislation were to become law. In the United States, looking at a bill’s potential effects is the job of a nonpartisan legislative scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office. 
     
    But once CBO “scores” a bill, its numbers are often cherry-picked and sometimes taken out of context by people seeking to advocate a particular outcome. That’s what happened when PhRMA, the lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry, created an ad asserting that a drug pricing plan from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would “siphon” $1 trillion from biopharmaceutical innovation over 10 years.
     
    In a fact-check delivered this week, (Poynter-owned) PolitiFact and Kaiser Health News painstakingly deconstructed the ad and its numbers, ultimately concluding that it was “mostly false.” 
     
    What we liked: The fact check not only dissected the numbers, but also detailed other factors at work. For example, noted writer Shefali Luthra, a lot of drug research and development is actually done by the government as opposed to the drugmakers. The fact check is also evidence that the PolitiFact-KHN partnership, which began this year, is bearing fruit in the health care policy space. 
    1.     The New York Times’ Malachy Browne shared some of his verification tools with the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
    2.     People given accurate statistics on a controversial issue will misremember those numbers to fit commonly held beliefs, according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University.
    3.     If you missed Columbia Journalism Review’s recent conference on covering disinformation in 2020, the video is available here, and CJR did a roundup.
    4.     On Facebook, misinformation is still targeting Hillary Clinton and her family’s charitable foundation.
    5.     Business Insider found a whole lot of anti-vaxxer magazine articles in the checkout line at Whole Foods.
    6.     A researcher at George Mason University is developing a “Cranky Uncle” app to help people identify and contend with science denial techniques, according to The Guardian.
    7.     Facebook ads are promoting misinformation about HIV and drugs that are used to prevent it, The Washington Post reported.
    8.     Full Fact has partnered with Ndemic Creations to create a misinformation version of the game Plague Inc.
    9.     The Atlantic published a deep dive on the roots of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 election.
    10.  A former InfoWars employee wrote a first-hand account of what it was like to work with notorious conspiracist Alex Jones.

    via
    Daniel, Susan and Cristina

     

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