Pages

▼

Monday, November 23, 2020

Text-only website are quite useful, especially today

 GOOD:  Study finds hyperbaric oxygen treatments reverse aging process.


Life Might Just Find A Way

That is, biological organisms may be making choices with goals in mind. This is a big change in the mindset of biology researchers. “The latest research suggests that it’s wrong to regard agency as just a curious byproduct of blind evolutionary forces. Nor should we believe that it’s an illusion produced by our tendency to project human attributes onto the world. Rather, agency appears to be an occasional, remarkable property of matter, and one we should feel comfortable invoking.” – Aeon Magazine


A Harold Evans postscript

By NOEL TURNBULL | On 15 November 2020

What sort of obituary do you think The Sunday Times would publish about probably its greatest editor, Harry Evans?Continue reading →


3
The best entrepreneurs in this country are entirely unsung, whilst the wrong people are rewarded

Posted on November 16 2020

The FT has an editorial today on the taxation of private equity and hedge funds. It comes in response to the review of capital gains
Read the full article…


Text-only website are quite useful, especially today - Greycoder – “Text-only website are quite useful, especially today. Web pages are increasingly filled with ads, videos and other bandwidth-heavy content. Here is a list of text-only, clutter-free news sites:

These are stripped-down sites with minimal images:


Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It - Scientific American: “…We prefer information from people we trust, our in-group. We pay attention to and are more likely to share information about risks—for Andy, the risk of losing his job. We search for and remember things that fit well with what we already know and understand. These biases are products of our evolutionary past, and for tens of thousands of years, they served us well. People who behaved in accordance with them—for example, by staying away from the overgrown pond bank where someone said there was a viper—were more likely to survive than those who did not. Modern technologies are amplifying these biases in harmful ways, however. Search engines direct Andy to sites that inflame his suspicions, and social media connects him with like-minded people, feeding his fears. Making matters worse, bots—automated social media accounts that impersonate humans—enable misguided or malevolent actors to take advantage of his vulnerabilities. Compounding the problem is the proliferation of online information. 
Viewing and producing blogs, videos, tweets and other units of information called memes has become so cheap and easy that the information marketplace is inundated. Unable to process all this material, we let our cognitive biases decide what we should pay attention to. These mental shortcuts influence which information we search for, comprehend, remember and repeat to a harmful extent…”


Media in the Asian Century. The past week’s regional diplomacy passed through the media in a blur.

By HAMISH MCDONALD | On 20 November 2020

Drop-catching in Canberra

China’s embassy in Canberra has belatedly woken up to the way things are done in our capital, it seems, and got into the business of “dropping” newsworthy material into the laps of selected press gallery members.Continue reading →

at