Wednesday, October 05, 2022

Most powerful Star Wars villains ever, ranked

Cheating in chess. A teenager beats the world champion; cryptic tweets and a chess-world meltdown ensue  Czech mate  »


6 Best All-In-One Messaging Platforms to Simplify Your Messaging -Make Use Of

Make Use Of: “With all the messaging apps available, it’s often hard to keep track of whose messaging you and where. All-in-one messaging platforms offer a solution to this modern-day problem. These platforms allow you to organize various messaging apps in one place, allowing you to say goodbye to the days of juggling multiple apps…”


Our report – Spreading The Big Lie: How Social Media Sites Have Amplified False Claims of U.S. Election Fraud – diagnoses the industry’s shortcomings and makes practical recommendations for reform. 

Our recommendations include providing greater transparency about how social media platforms rank, recommend, and remove content and how their automated systems interact with human content moderation; subjecting themselves to independent outside audits to check whether platforms are weighing the intended benefits of their services against potential risks to users and society at large; and enhancing fact-checking programs designed to identify demonstrably false content that needs to be removed or labeled and down-ranked…”


New book by Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia.


Do old people enjoy spending money less?


Most powerful Star Wars villains ever, ranked



Hanno Sauer on why philosophers spend far too much time reading and writing about dead philosophers:

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical or scientific data? Very little or none. Yet when we engage with the history of philosophy, this is often exactly what we do. In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. 


 What is proof-of-stake? A computer scientist explains a new way to make cryptocurrencies, NFTs and metaverse transactions – Prof. Scott Ruoti, briefs us on yet another new component in Digital Ledger Technology. Proof-of-stake is a mechanism for achieving consensus on a blockchain. 

Blockchain is a technology that records transactions that can’t be deleted or altered. It’s a decentralized database, or ledger, that is under no one person or organization’s control. Since no one controls the database, consensus mechanisms, such as proof-of-stake, are needed to coordinate the operation of blockchain-based systems. 


How to scrub your phone number and address from Google search

Washington Post: “From a simple Google search, strangers can dig up your phone number, physical address or other personal information. You might not want that floating around the internet — or its presence could be putting you in danger. 

Now, Google says it’s making it easier to request that information be removed from search results. A new shortcut, which Google teased in May, is rolling out in its app and next to search results in the United States during the next two weeks. Before, you could request the removal of that type of information through this form. The change comes as concerns intensify about the connection between online privacy and real-life safety. This month, stalker forum Kiwi Farms was taken down after forum members spent years harassing women and those who identify as LGBTQ, frequently posting their physical addresses and phone numbers. Victims of domestic abuse are also at riskwhen their personal information appears online. 

Some jurisdictions, including the European Union, have adopted a “right to be forgotten,” which grants people the right to ask for their personal information to be deleted from company databases or the internet, but the United States hasn’t adopted such a law. In addition to requesting the removal of search results, starting early next year people can sign up for alerts if their personal information appears in new results, Google says…”


Tuters, M., & Willaert, T. (2022). Deep state phobia: Narrative convergence in coronavirus conspiracism on Instagram. Convergence28(4), 1214–1238. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221118751

“Recent scholarship has established that conspiracist narratives proliferated in mainstream online discourse during the coronavirus pandemic


EXCLUSIVE: British father, 30, SPLITS from Ukrainian refugee accusing her of ‘irrational behaviour, not handling her drink and stabbing a wall’ – just four months after he dumped his partner of 10 years and mother of his two children to be with her Daily Mail. Was she a comedian?