As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction Isaiah
Dorothy Brown On Morning Joe: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans
TechRepublic – This simple Zoom trick can protect your privacy or hide a messy room from coworkers during your next video conferencing call. Let’s say you have a Zoommeeting, but your normal work-from-home space is occupied, or worse, a mess. You have no time to clean it up, or find a neutral, privacy-maintaining space to set up, and panic sets in. Don’t worry–you have options built right into Zoom to hide the space behind you: background blurring. This easily toggleable option can keep your space private, or render messy rooms indeterminably fuzzy, and it’s available in Zoom right now…”
Saturday’s good reading and listening for the weekend
What people in other forums are saying about public policy...
Newscientist: British Legal Deeds Were Once Written On Sheepskin To Prevent Fraud
It’s not just a social media problem – how search engines spread misinformation – Chirag Shah, Associate Professor in the Information School, University of Washington and Founding Director of InfoSeeking Lab, which focuses on issues related to information seeking, human-computer interaction (HCI), and social media. Shah’s research describes how search engines are not just one of society’s primary gateways to information and people, but they are also conduits for misinformation. Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformation.
Negligence, Not Politics, Drives Most Misinformation Sharing
Wired – “Researchers found that social media users are generally adept at identifying fake news. But that doesn’t always affect their decision to repost it. you don’t need a study to know that misinformation is rampant on social media; a quick search on “ vaccines” or “climate change” will confirm that. A more compelling question is why. It’s clear that, at a minimum, there are contributions from organized disinformation campaigns, rampant political partisans, and questionable algorithms.
But beyond that, there are still a lot of people who choose to share stuff that even a cursory examination would show is garbage. What’s driving them? That was the question that motivated a small international team of researchers who decided to take a look at how a group of US residents decided on which news to share. Their results suggest that some of the standard factors that people point to when explaining the tsunami of misinformation—inability to evaluate information and partisan biases—aren’t having as much influence as most of us think. Instead, a lot of the blame gets directed at people just not paying careful attention…”
How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world’s biggest seed bank The Conversation
This rabbit walks on its ‘hands.’ Scientists think they’ve found the genetic reason why (video) Science. It does!
More Evidence Links ‘Cat Scratch’ Bacteria and Schizophrenia Gizmodo
Scientists Finally Identify a Deadly Toxin That’s Been Killing Birds Wired
The Big, Stuck Boat Is Glorious The Atlantic