If using LinkedIn makes you feel like an imposter at work, here’s how to cope – Dr. Sebastian Oliver acknowledges when it comes to professional social media, LinkedIn, with its billion-plus members, stands unrivalled. The platform for career updates, networking and job searches has effectively become a requirement in the professional world. It can be a great tool to help you progress in your career. But, as Oliver describes, just like other social media, using LinkedIn can lead to feelings of envy, comparison and self-doubt.
FLIGHT FROM REALITY: Scottish Green Party Expels 13 Members for Saying ‘Sex Is a Biological Reality.’Somewhere, the Gods of the Copybook Headings frown and nod. “Denial of objective truth is one of the signs of a society’s downfall.”
Jahanbakhsh et al, A Browser Extension for in-place Signaling and Assessment of Misinformation, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.11485
MIT News: “Most people agree that the spread of online misinformation is a serious problem. But there is much less consensus on what to do about it. Many proposed solutions focus on how social media platforms can or should moderate content their users post, to prevent misinformation from spreading. “But this approach puts a critical social decision in the hands of for-profit companies. It limits the ability of users to decide who they trust. And having platforms in charge does nothing to combat misinformation users come across from other online sources,” says Farnaz Jahanbakhsh SM ’21, Ph.D. ’23, who is currently a postdoc at Stanford University. She and MIT Professor David Karger have proposed an alternate strategy. They built a web browser extension that empowers individuals to flag misinformation and identify others they trust to assess online content. Their decentralized approach, called the Trustnet browser extension, puts the power to decide what constitutes misinformation into the hands of individual users rather than a central authority. Importantly, the universal browser extension works for any content on any website, including posts on social media sites, articles on news aggregators, and videos on streaming platforms. Through a two-week study, the researchers found that untrained individuals could use the tool to effectively assess misinformation. Participants said having the ability to assess content, and see assessments from others they trust, helped them think critically about it…”
EFF: “Axon—the makers of widely-used police body cameras and tasers (and that also keeps trying to arm drones)—has a new product: AI that will write police reports for officers. Draft One is a generative large language model machine learning system that reportedly takes audio from body-worn cameras and converts it into a narrative police report that police can then edit and submit after an incident.
Axon bills this product as the ultimate time-saver for police departments hoping to get officers out from behind their desks. But this technology could present new issues for those who encounter police, and especially those marginalized communities already subject to a disproportionate share of police interactions in the United States…”
How to Block Companies From Tracking You Online Lifehacker
Lifehacker: “…Currently, there are two major methods of data-tracking online: The first, cookies, is on the way out, but pixel trackers are a bit more complicated. You’ve probably heard the term cookies before. These are little packets of information that allow websites to store data like your password, so you don’t need to log in every single time you access a website.
But in addition to these “necessary” cookies, there are also third-party cookies that can track your browsing session, information that can be sold to data firms later. These are probably the most obvious way you might get tracked online. If you’ve recently visited a website that operates in the EU (or certain states), you’ve probably noticed a form asking you to consent to cookies.
These are what those forms are talking about, and while clicking through them can be a brief annoyance, they’ve gone a long way to making cookies less sneaky and far easier to block. Throw in Google’s oft-delayed but still planned attempt to kill the cookie outright, and data brokers have had to get more clever. Enter the tracking pixel. These operate in a similar fashion to cookies, but use images rather than text.
Essentially, companies can hide transparent or otherwise invisible pixels on your screen, and get pinged when your browser loads them, allowing them to track which parts of a website you’re accessing and when. It’s a real letter vs. spirit of the law thing, as while the principle remains the same, there’s little legislation on tracking pixels, meaning users who had gotten used to the government crackdown on cookies now have to go back to square one when it comes to data vigilance.
Nowadays, some site elements even come bundled with their own scripts that can go further than cookies ever did…”
The Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Beingemphasizes the connection between the well-being of workers and the health of organizations. It offers a foundation and resources that can be used by workplaces of any size, across any industry. Sustainable change must be driven by committed leaders in continuous collaboration with the valued workers who power each workplace. The most important asset in any organization is its people. By choosing to center their voices, we can ensure that everyone has a platform to thrive.” [scroll to bottom of the homepage to locate links to resource guides, presentation and related materials.]
See also The Burnout Crisis in Journalism: Solutions for Today’s Newsroom February 2024. A Reynolds Journalism Institute research-based set of solutions to prevent and mitigate burnout issues in journalism.
When Online Content Disappears Pew Research Center. The deck: “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. Why don’t we nationalize the cloud?
Traffic lights could change in the era of smart vehicles Fast Company
VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads TechCrunch
Emoji history: the missing years Get Info
Librarians Are Waging a Quiet War Against International “Data Cartels” The Markup