Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Raids: More Home Surveillance Coming Your Way, Courtesy Bosch and the Internet of Things Bosch brings you Stasi at home

A Korean energy giant's last-ditch bid to build a new coal mine in regional New South Wales has been dismissed by the High Court.

High Court rejects South Korean company's request to appeal Bylong Valley coal mine in NSW


WaPo Op-Ed: Taxpayers Will Pay An Enormous Price For The IRS Not Using Facial Recognition


Vladimir Putin: Crafty Strategist or Aggrieved and Reckless Leader? New York Times


Think you can’t be scammed? Think again

  • by Samantha Selinger-Morris



More Home Surveillance Coming Your Way, Courtesy Bosch and the Internet of Things

Bosch brings you Stasi at home….and the worst is, too many people will happily pay for more surveillance.


Court documents: Mazars, Donald Trump’s accounting firm, cuts ties to Trump OrganizationUSA Today

 

The Prince Andrew Trial That Wasn’t Vanity Fair



The Tyee – “The ‘dreaded disease’ that claimed 1.5 million looks a lot like COVID-19, including the long-term threat posed by ‘viral promiscuity.’… About one in a 100 people infected by the contagion either died from pneumonia or experienced severe illness affecting the brain, lungs or stomach. The breadth and persistence of the outbreak reintroduced the word “pandemic” to the English vocabulary. To this day, the little-known biological storm ranks as one of the globe’s great disease outbreaks in terms of scale and mortality. Now, 133 years after that event, virologists and historians suspect that a novel coronavirus triggered the so-called “Russian flu pandemic.” Many view this pandemic as a dramatic historical preview of the current one — complete with variants, waves and longhaulers suffering from chronic neurological complications. Here are five scenes from this fascinating and evolving story…”


Moderna CEO Sells Shares, Deletes Social Media: What You Need To Know Benzinga


‘I trust my drug dealer more than I trust this vaccine’ STAT (MR). Well worth a read.


UN reports that millions of dollars in stolen crypto have gone towards funding North Korean missile program Web3 is Going Just Great


NFTs are just the beginning of the Crypto Wealth Splash Noah Smith, Noahpinion. Really quite something.


Coinbase launches remittances programme to take on Western Union with cryptocurrenciesSouth China Morning Post. Let me know how that works out.


Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported IEEE Spectrum


How to critically evaluate scientific claims before pursuing a story

Nieman Lab: “Our inboxes are full of them — press releases, pitches, and other media calling some scientific event “a breakthrough,” “a game-changer,” or “a paradigm-shifter.” Scientists, investors, and analysts flood our Twitter feeds, cheerleading a preprint or singing some company’s praises, even when there is little to no data to back up those claims. Figuring out whether something is newsworthy can be hard. But, as science journalists, we need to examine these statements, and decide: Is this worth covering? If so, how do we do so objectively, without accidentally becoming a mouthpiece for hyperbolic claims? What’s at stake is significant. Information comes at us like a fire hose on full blast, and social media algorithms have made it easy for lies to spread faster than truth. For example, antithetical claims have continued to try and sow doubt around the causes of climate change. And misinformation problems have only worsened during the pandemic: In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll on false statements about Covid-19 vaccines, researchers found that 78% of people either believed or weren’t sure about at least one of the claims. For journalists on tight deadlines, sifting fact from fiction can sometimes feel impossible. But coverage lends credibility, which matters immensely to readers. Some of the things we write can profoundly affect people’s actions, especially in health and medicine, says Rosie Mestel, the executive editor of Knowable Magazine. “There are a lot of people who are desperate and very sick,” she says, “and you have to be very, very careful that you’re not going to be misleading people and overplaying things.”

To cut through the murkiness and hype, science journalists need to vet the information and sources they come across and be on the lookout for red flags. Also essential is understanding our own biases — what we wish to be true, and how that plays into our decision making. Here, both skepticism and self-awareness can be key. Journalists have the power to tell or not tell a story—and how we dissect claims plays into that power, says Ashley Smart, a physics journalist who is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark. “We owe it to our readers and to the general public, and even to our sources, to be thoughtful in what we decide to cover, and to make sure that it’s worthy of the platform that we’re giving it,” Smart says…”