We’re All Going to Die: A Special Guest Column – Reluctant Habits
‘Shoulder to shoulder’: ATO details COV-19 assistance
There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.
Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”
The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.
That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.
During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children.
Exponential Growth and Epidemics
Exponential Growth and Epidemics
Ernst and Young staff told to work from home after a colleague develops COVID-19 symptoms
Bitcoin plummets as cryptocurrencies suffer in coronavirus-induced market turmoil
During a pandemic, Isaac Newton had to work from home, too. It was time well spent
FASTER, PLEASE: Israeli Research Center to Announce It Developed Coronavirus Vaccine, Sources Say. “Scientists at the Biological Research Institute are making significant breakthroughs in understanding the virus, the sources say, but a long process of pre-clinical and clinical trials is to follow.”
CORONAVIRUS: Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson Test Positive for Coronavirus.
Hello, folks. Rita and I are down here in Australia. We felt a bit tired, like we had colds, and some body aches. Rita had some chills that came and went. Slight fevers too. To play things right, as is needed in the world right now, we were tested for the Coronavirus, and were found to be positive
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Disinfect Your Phone Without Ruining It.
CORONAVIRUS: Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson Test Positive for Coronavirus.
Hello, folks. Rita and I are down here in Australia. We felt a bit tired, like we had colds, and some body aches. Rita had some chills that came and went. Slight fevers too. To play things right, as is needed in the world right now, we were tested for the Coronavirus, and were found to be positive
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Disinfect Your Phone Without Ruining It.
The difficult choices in coronavirus reporting
News
organizations are tracking
coronavirus cases as they are confirmed. But what happens when there are
suspected cases? Should they be reported too?
On
the one hand, reporting cases that are suspected but not confirmed could
perform a necessary public service for audiences who might have read about the
cases on social media or wonder why a school
was closed. On the other hand, if it’s only a suspected case, publishing
unconfirmed information could generate unnecessary fear and uncertainty.
It’s
one of many gray areas news people face in covering the COVID-19 outbreak,
forcing difficult choices between satisfying public hunger for new developments
and avoiding the amplification of unconfirmed information, misinformation or
outright conspiracies.
Misinformation
about the virus is so widespread that it’s being called an infodemic, which the
World
Health Organization says is “an overabundance of information — some
accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy
sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”
The
falsehoods on social media and other platforms involve every aspect of the
virus: its origins, the number of cases, the kinds of precautions people should
take, how it spreads, potential treatments, and who is most at risk. The
misinformation ranges from silly
to dangerous.
These
hoaxes and falsehoods often create tricky calculations for news organizations.
In debunking a conspiracy theory about the disease’s origins, for example, are
news organizations actually drawing attention to it?
There
are also judgment calls involving situations that are unquestionably true.
Take, for example, the fact that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visited a school
where a student and his mother have since been quarantined after she came into
contact with someone who tested positive for the virus.
The
school told
the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that the student was not among those who met
with Pence when he visited. And the school said neither the student nor his mom
is showing symptoms. So is it worth reporting?
The
local papers wrote about it, as did Bloomberg
News, among others. But some big national news organizations simply ignored
the story, presumably concluding that it wasn’t news.
In
an era of misinformation, professional news leaders are accustomed by now to
stories that test their ethics and challenge their judgment. But as the
coronavirus — and the misinformation surrounding it — continues to spread,
these difficult choices will also proliferate.
Related
note for journalists: The Washington Post’s science editor, Laura Helmuth,
offered some excellent
tips on The Open Notebook, a nonprofit that provides tools and resources
for science writers.
—
Susan Benkelman, API
. . . technology
- In a new poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup, 72% of respondents said internet platforms should make no user information available to political campaigns in order to target certain voters with online advertisements.
- Solid majorities also said social media companies should ban misleading content in political ads, the groups said. That includes ads that would target supporters of an opposing candidate and provide the wrong election date (81%) or ads that say a politician voted for a policy they didn’t actually vote for (62%).
·
Facebook
is giving the World Health Organization free advertising to combat
misinformation on the coronavirus, CEO
Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the platform.
. . . politics
- A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour concluded that web sites that published factually dubious content during the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign made up a small share of people’s information diets on average. These results, the study says, “suggest that the widespread speculation about the prevalence of exposure to untrustworthy websites has been overstated.”
- Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan, one of the study’s authors, told Scientific American that the main problem with these sites is the risk that someone in power will amplify their lies. “One implication of our study is that most of the misinformation that people get about politics doesn’t come from these fringe web sites. It comes from the mainstream — it comes from the media and political figures who are the primary sources of political news and commentary,” he said.
. . . science and health
·
The
Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published an article showing that
Chinese social media platforms have been blocking messages about the new
coronavirus. The researchers say the censorship might have affected critical
medical information too.
·
Police
departments are spreading coronavirus misinformation as a joke, BuzzFeed
reported.
·
While
struggling to fight the new coronavirus, Taiwan
is also witnessing a serious digital attack driven by malicious disinformers,
two fact-checkers there wrote for Poynter.
Chequeado,
in Argentina, has proved once more that live fact-checking is powerful and
useful. Last Sunday, 28 fact-checkers got together with 14 experts and 8
volunteers in Buenos Aires to check the first speech given by the recently
elected president Alberto Fernández while opening the legislative
year.
Fernández spoke for about 1 hour and 40 minutes and had 10
claims assessed. Six of them were rated true. Fernández used good data to talk
about the economic crisis his country is facing, Chequeado concluded. And he
shared the right information about the agreement Argentina has with the International
Monetary Fund and the fact that the unemployment
rate rose to 9.7% during Mauricio Macri’s presidency.
Four other claims, however, were considered misleading.
Fernández exaggerated, for example, when he said Argentina had a record
inflation of 53.8%
in 2019. It wasn’t a record.
In addition to fact-checking, Chequeado’s team also counted
the words used most frequently by the new president in his speech and created a
robust website
to share all the content. Argentina was obviously number one, with 53 mentions,
followed by “national” (41 mentions), “state” (40), “development” (37) and
“social” (36). On Monday, Chequeado’s editors also discussed the most important
findings on a 14-minute
podcast, lending a multi-platform aspect to its work.
What we liked: The idea of inviting experts and volunteers to live fact-check
politicians is not only courageous but also adds transparency to the
fact-checking process. To broaden its reach, Chequeado also offers an intensive
training workshop to those who want to join them at such an important moment.
— Cristina Tardáguila, IFCN
1. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale told
the network’s Brian Stelter on Sunday that journalists covering Donald
Trump need to “resist being beaten down by the frequency of dishonesty ... and
treat it as news every time ...”
2. The Texas Secretary of State said voters
were the target of misleading
robocalls about the timing of last Tuesday’s primaries.
3. Overall, though, the Department of
Homeland Security and disinformation experts monitoring social media had a
relatively quiet night on Super Tuesday, NBC
reported.
4. Business Insider India is offering
readers tips on identifying falsehoods
on WhatsApp.
5. Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
wrote
for the BBC about the impact of fabricated news in her country.
