International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those effects by critically reviewing the research literature. It goes beyond prior estimates by including ripple effects beyond the wages earned or taxes paid directly by migrants. The sharp reduction in US refugee admissions starting in 2017 costs the overall US economy today over $9.1 billion per year ($30,962 per missing refugee per year, on average) and costs public coffers at all levels of government over $2.0 billion per year ($6,844 per missing refugee per year, on average) net of public expenses. Large reductions in the presence of asylum seekers during the same period likewise carry ongoing costs in the billions of dollars per year. These estimates imply that barriers to migrants seeking protection, beyond humanitarian policy concerns, carry substantial economic costs.

Source: economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers | Oxford Review of Economic Policy | Oxford Academic

[…] Writing in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, a Duke University-led team says they have created the first gel-based cartilage substitute that is even stronger and more durable than the real thing.

Mechanical testing reveals that the Duke team’s hydrogel—a material made of water-absorbing polymers—can be pressed and pulled with more force than natural cartilage, and is three times more resistant to wear and tear.

[…]

To make this material, the Duke team took thin sheets of cellulose fibers and infused them with a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol—a viscous goo consisting of stringy chains of repeating molecules—to form a gel.

The cellulose fibers act like the collagen fibers in natural cartilage, Wiley said—they give the gel strength when stretched. The polyvinyl alcohol helps it return to its original shape. The result is a Jello-like material, 60% water, which is supple yet surprisingly strong.

Natural cartilage can withstand a whopping 5,800 to 8,500 pounds per inch of tugging and squishing, respectively, before reaching its breaking point. Their lab-made version is the first hydrogel that can handle even more. It is 26% stronger than natural cartilage in tension, something like suspending seven grand pianos from a key ring, and 66% stronger in compression—which would be like parking a car on a postage stamp.

[…]

In the past, researchers attempting to create stronger hydrogels used a freeze-thaw process to produce crystals within the gel, which drive out water and help hold the polymer chains together. In the new study, instead of freezing and thawing the hydrogel, the researchers used a heat treatment called annealing to coax even more crystals to form within the polymer network.

By increasing the crystal content, the researchers were able to produce a gel that can withstand five times as much stress from pulling and nearly twice as much squeezing relative to freeze-thaw methods.

The improved strength of the annealed gel also helped solve a second design challenge: securing it to the joint and getting it to stay put.

Cartilage forms a thin layer that covers the ends of bones so they don’t grind against one another. Previous studies haven’t been able to attach hydrogels directly to bone or cartilage with sufficient strength to keep them from breaking loose or sliding off. So the Duke team came up with a different approach.

Their method of attachment involves cementing and clamping the hydrogel to a titanium base. This is then pressed and anchored into a hole where the damaged cartilage used to be. Tests show the design stays fastened 68% more firmly than natural cartilage on bone.

[…]

In wear tests, the researchers took artificial cartilage and natural cartilage and spun them against each other a million times, with a pressure similar to what the knee experiences during walking. Using a high-resolution X-ray scanning technique called micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), the scientists found that the surface of their lab-made version held up three times better than the real thing. Yet because the hydrogel mimics the smooth, slippery, cushiony nature of real cartilage, it protects other joint surfaces from friction as they slide against the implant.

[…]

From the lab, the first cartilage-mimicking gel that’s strong enough for knees

---

More information: Jiacheng Zhao et al, A Synthetic Hydrogel Composite with a Strength and Wear Resistance Greater than Cartilage, Advanced Functional Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202205662

Journal information: Advanced Functional Materials

Source: Stiff, achy knees? Lab-made cartilage gel outperforms the real thing

Toxic discussions on open-source GitHub projects tend to involve entitlement, subtle insults, and arrogance, according to an academic study. That contrasts with the toxic behavior – typically bad language, hate speech, and harassment – found on other corners of the web.

Whether that seems obvious or not, it’s an interesting point to consider because, for one thing, it means technical and non-technical methods to detect and curb toxic behavior on one part of the internet may not therefore work well on GitHub, and if you’re involved in communities on the code-hosting giant, you may find this research useful in combating trolls and unacceptable conduct.

It may also mean systems intended to automatically detect and report toxicity in open-source projects, or at least ones on GitHub, may need to be developed specifically for that task due to their unique nature.

[…]

Courtney Miller, Sophie Cohen, Daniel Klug, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Christian Kästner – describe their findings in a paper [PDF] titled, “‘Did You Miss My Comment or What?’ Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions,” that was presented last month at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In a video explainer, Miller, a doctoral student at CMU’s Institute for Software Research and lead author on the paper, says the project adopted the definition of toxicity proposed by those working on Google’s Perspective API: “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.”

[…]

The open source community’s long tradition of blunt interaction has led many projects to adopt codes of conduct, the paper notes. The reason for doing so is to encourage contributors to join open source projects and to keep them from being driven away by trolling and other forms of hostility.

The researchers acknowledge that “toxicity in open source is often written off as a naturally occurring if not necessary facet of open source culture.” And while there are those who defend a more rough-and-tumble mode of online interaction, there are consequences for angry interactions. Witness the departures in the Perl community over hostility.

“Toxicity is different in open-source communities,” Miller said in a CMU news release. “It is more contextual, entitled, subtle and passive-aggressive.”

[…]

many open source contributors have cited toxic and continuously negative behavior as their reason for disengaging (see Section 2 of our paper for more details). Because of this, it was important to consider toxicity that could be considered toxic to a wide spectrum of open source contributors.”

Toxicity in open source projects is relatively rare – the researchers in previous work found only about six per 1,000 GitHub issues to be toxic. That meant a random sampling of issues wouldn’t serve the research objective, so the group adopted several strategies for identifying toxic issues and comments: a language-based detector, finding mentions of “codes of conduct” and locked threads, and threads that had been deleted.

The result was a data set of 100 toxic issues on GitHub. What the researchers found was that toxicity on the Microsoft-owned website has its own particular characteristics.

[….]

The computer scientists note that GitHub Issues, while they include insults, arrogance, and trolling seen elsewhere, do not exhibit the severe language common on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Beyond milder language, GitHub differs in its abundance of entitled comments – people making demands as if their expectations were based on a contract or payment.

[…]

The researchers identify a variety of triggers for toxic behavior, which mostly occur in large, popular projects. These include: trouble using software, technical disagreements, politics/ideology, and past interactions.

[…]

“The harms of toxicity were outside the scope of this project, but informally we observed that one thing that seemed to be an efficient way of curbing toxicity was for maintainers to cite their project’s code of conduct and lock the thread as too heated,” said Miller. “This seemed to help reduce the amount of time and emotional labor involved with dealing with the toxicity.”

[…]

Source: ‘Toxic’ open source GitHub discussions analyzed in study

the finalists of this year’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest aren’t going to leave your brain feeling any less raddled, confused, or exhausted as we quickly approach the new year. As they do every year, a group of talented neurologists, visual scientists, ophthalmologists, and artists have come together to create and celebrate the best optical illusions of the year, and once again their creations will make you wonder if your brain really is completely broken.

Source: The 10 Best Illusions of the Year

Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed.

The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health.

Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease.

Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

“We did not expect to find the highest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, or particles of the sizes we found,” said Laura Sadofsky at Hull York medical school in the UK,a senior author of the study. “It is surprising as the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before getting this deep.”

[…]

Source: Microplastics found deep in lungs of living people for first time | Plastics | The Guardian

Scientists have discovered microplastics in human blood for the first time, warning that the ubiquitous particles could also be making their way into organs.

The tiny pieces of mostly invisible plastic have already been found almost everywhere else on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains as well as in the air, soil and food chain.

A Dutch study published in the Environment International journal on Thursday examined blood samples from 22 anonymous, healthy volunteers and found microplastics in nearly 80 percent of them.

Half of the blood samples showed traces of PET plastic, widely used to make drink bottles, while more than a third had polystyrene, used for disposable food containers and many other products.

[…]

“Where is it going in your body? Can it be eliminated? Excreted? Or is it retained in certain organs, accumulating maybe, or is it even able to pass the blood-brain barrier?”

The study said the microplastics could have entered the body by many routes: via air, water or food, but also in products such as particular toothpastes, lip glosses and tattoo ink.

[…]

 

Source: Scientists find microplastics in blood for first time

[…] Beginning on Jan. 31, hosts will only see the initials of guests’ first names until they confirm a booking request, Airbnb announced in a December news announcement spotted by the Verge. After a host confirms the booking, the guest’s full name will appear. The change to how names are displaced will be in place for at least two years.

“While we have made progress, we have much more to do and continue working with our Hosts and guests, and with civil rights leaders to make our community more inclusive,” Airbnb said.

In its announcement, the company said the update is consistent with the voluntary settlement agreement it reached with individuals in Oregon in 2019 “who raised concerns regarding the way guests’ names are displayed when they seek to book a listing.”

According to the Oregonian, in 2017 Portland resident Patricia Harrington filed a lawsuit against Airbnb. She claimed that because Airbnb requires guests to disclose their full name and include a photo, which hosts’ review before they accept a booking, the company was allowing hosts to discriminate against Black guests. This constituted a violation of Oregon’s public accommodation laws, she alleged.

Airbnb settled the lawsuit, which included two more Black women in Oregon, in 2019. By that time, Harrington had died.

The lawsuit’s claims weren’t wrong. Black guests have been sounding the alarm about discrimination on the platform for years and even created a hashtag: #AirbnbWhileBlack. In 2016, a Harvard Business School study even found that requests from guests with African American names were roughly 16% less likely to be accepted by hosts than identical guests with distinctively white names.

[…]

“Given that the impact of this change is unknown, the implementation will be limited,” Airbnb spokesperson Liz DeBold Fusco said in an email. “We will evaluate the impact of this change to understand if there are learnings from this work that can inform future efforts to fight bias.”

[…]

Source: Airbnb Hides Guest First Names in Oregon to Stop Discrimination

If you’re a fan of aerosol spray antiperspirants and deodorants, you’re going to want to check to see whether the one you use is part of a voluntary recall issued by Procter & Gamble (P&G).

The recall comes after a citizen’s petition filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month that claims more than half of the batches of antiperspirant and deodorant sprays they tested contained benzene—a chemical that, when found at high levels, can cause cancer. Here’s what you need to know.

[…]

They found that out of the 108 batches of products tested, 59 (or 54%) of them had levels of benzene exceeding the 2 parts per million permitted by the FDA.

[…]

Valisure’s tests included 30 different brands, but according to CNN, P&G is the only company to issue a recall for its products containing benzene; specifically, the recall covers 17 types of Old Spice and Secret antiperspirant.

The full list of products Valisure tested and found to contain more than 2 parts per million of benzene can be found on the company’s petition to the FDA. Examples include products from other familiar brands like Tag, Sure, Equate, Suave, Right Guard, Brut, Summer’s Eve, Right Guard, Power Stick, Soft & Dri, and Victoria’s Secret.

If you have purchased any of the Old Spice or Secret products included in P&G’s recall, the company instructs consumers to stop using them, throw them out, and contact their customer care team (at 888-339-7689 from Monday – Friday from 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. EST) to learn how to be reimbursed for eligible products.

Source: Clear These Recalled Antiperspirants From Your Home

Debates around the effectiveness of high-profile Twitter account suspensions and similar bans on abusive users across social media platforms abound. Yet we know little about the effectiveness of warning a user about the possibility of suspending their account as opposed to outright suspensions in reducing hate speech. With a pre-registered experiment, we provide causal evidence that a warning message can reduce the use of hateful language on Twitter, at least in the short term. We design our messages based on the literature on deterrence, and test versions that emphasize the legitimacy of the sender, the credibility of the message, and the costliness of being suspended. We find that the act of warning a user of the potential consequences of their behavior can significantly reduce their hateful language for one week. We also find that warning messages that aim to appear legitimate in the eyes of the target user seem to be the most effective. In light of these findings, we consider the policy implications of platforms adopting a more aggressive approach to warning users that their accounts may be suspended as a tool for reducing hateful speech online.

[…]

we test whether warning users of their potential suspension if they continue using hateful language might be able to reduce online hate speech. To do so, we implemented a pre-registered experiment on Twitter in order to test the ability of “warning messages” about the possibility of future suspensions to reduce hateful language online. More specifically, we identify users who are candidates for suspension in the future based on their prior tweets and download their follower lists before the suspension takes place. After a user gets suspended, we randomly assign some of their followers who have also used hateful language to receive a warning that they, too, may be suspended for the same reason.

Since our tweets aim to deter users from using hateful language, we design them relying on the three mechanisms that the literature on deterrence deems as most effective in reducing deviation behavior: costliness, legitimacy, and credibility. In other words, our experiment allows us to manipulate the degree to which users perceive their suspension as costly, legitimate, and credible.

[…]

Our study provides causal evidence that the act of sending a warning message to a user can significantly decrease their use of hateful language as measured by their ratio of hateful tweets over their total number of tweets. Although we do not find strong evidence that distinguishes between warnings that are high versus low in legitimacy, credibility, or costliness, the high legitimacy messages seem to be the most effective of all the messages tested.

[…]

he coefficient plot in figure 4 shows the effect of sending any type of warning tweet on the ratio of tweets with hateful language over the tweets that a user tweets. The outcome variable is the ratio of hateful tweets over the total number of tweets that a user posted over the week and month following the treatment. The effects thus show the change in this ratio as a result of the treatment.

Figure 4 The effect of sending a warning tweet on reducing hateful language

Note: See table G1 in online appendix G for more details on sample size and control coefficients.

We find support for our first hypothesis: a tweet that warns a user of a potential suspension will lead that user to decrease their ratio of hateful tweets by 0.007 for a week after the treatment. Considering the fact that the average pre-treatment hateful tweet ratio is 0.07 in our sample, this means that a single warning tweet from a user with 100 followers reduced the use of hateful language by 10%.

[…]

The coefficient plot in figure 5 shows the effect of each treatment on the ratio of tweets with hateful language over the tweets that a user tweets. Although the differences across types are minor and thus caveats are warranted, the most effective treatment seems to be the high legitimacy tweet; the legitimacy category also has by far the largest difference between the high- and low-level versions of the three categories of treatment we assessed. Interestingly, the tweets emphasizing the cost of being suspended appear to be the least effective of the three categories; although the effects are in the correctly predicted direction, neither of the cost treatments alone are statistically distinguishable from null effects.

Figure 5 Reduction in hate speech by treatment type

Note: See table G2 in online appendix G for more details on sample size and control coefficients.

An alternative mechanism that could explain the similarity of effects across treatments—as well as the costliness channel apparently being the least effective—is that perhaps instead of deterring people, the warnings might have made them more reflective and attentive about their language use.

[…]

ur results show that only one warning tweet sent by an account with no more than 100 followers can decrease the ratio of tweets with hateful language by up to 10%, with some types of tweets (high legitimacy, emphasizing the legitimacy of the account sending the tweet) suggesting decreases of perhaps as high as 15%–20% in the week following treatment. Considering that we sent our tweets from accounts that have no more than 100 followers, the effects that we report here are conservative estimates, and could be more effective when sent from more popular accounts (Munger Reference Munger2017).

[…]

A recently burgeoning literature shows that online interventions can also decrease behaviors that could harm the other groups by tracking subjects’ behavior over social media. These works rely on online messages on Twitter that sanction the harmful behavior, and succeed in reducing hateful language (Munger Reference Munger2017; Siegel and Badaan Reference Siegel and Badaan2020), and mostly draw on identity politics when designing their sanctioning messages (Charnysh et al. Reference Charnysh, Lucas and Singh2015). We contribute to this recent line of research by showing that warning messages that are designed based on the literature of deterrence can lead to a meaningful decrease in the use of hateful language without leveraging identity dynamics.

[…]

Two options are worthy of discussion: relying on civil society or relying on Twitter. Our experiment was designed to mimic the former option, with our warnings mimicking non-Twitter employees acting on their own with the goal of reducing hate speech/protecting users from being suspended

[…]

hile it is certainly possible that an NGO or a similar entity could try to implement such a program, the more obvious solution would be to have Twitter itself implement the warnings.

[…]

the company reported “testing prompts in 2020 that encouraged people to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply—such as insults, strong language, or hateful remarks—before Tweeting it. Once prompted, people had an opportunity to take a moment and make edits, delete, or send the reply as is.”Footnote ¹⁵ This appears to result in 34% of those prompted electing either to review the Tweet before sending, or not to send the Tweet at all.

We note three differences from this endeavor. First, in our warnings, we try to reduce people’s hateful language after they employ hateful language, which is not the same thing as warning people before they employ hateful language. This is a noteworthy difference, which can be a topic for future research in terms of whether the dynamics of retrospective versus prospective warnings significantly differ from each other. Second, Twitter does not inform their users of the examples of suspensions that took place among the people that these users used to follow. Finally, we are making our data publicly available for re-analysis.

We stop short, however, of unambiguously recommending that Twitter simply implement the system we tested without further study because of two important caveats. First, one interesting feature of our findings is that across all of our tests (one week versus four weeks, different versions of the warning—figures 2 (in text) and A1(in the online appendix)) we never once get a positive effect for hate speech usage in the treatment group, let alone a statistically significant positive coefficient, which would have suggested a potential backlash effect whereby the warnings led people to become more hateful. We are reassured by this finding but do think it is an open question whether a warning from Twitter—a large powerful corporation and the owner of the platform—might provoke a different reaction. We obviously could not test for this possibility on our own, and thus we would urge Twitter to conduct its own testing to confirm that our finding about the lack of a backlash continues to hold when the message comes from the platform itself.Footnote ¹⁶

The second caveat concerns the possibility of Twitter making mistakes when implementing its suspension policies.

[…]

Despite these caveats, our findings suggest that hate-speech moderations can be effective without priming the salience of the target users’ identity. Explicitly testing the effectiveness of identity versus non-identity motivated interventions will be an important subject for future research.

Source: Short of Suspension: How Suspension Warnings Can Reduce Hate Speech on Twitter | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

The first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy is that he does things a good guy would never do. Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values.

This moral physics underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) and X-Men (2000-), as well as most Disney cartoons. Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics. In Marvel comics, Thor has to be worthy of his hammer, and he proves his worth with moral qualities. But in ancient myth, Thor is a god with powers and motives beyond any such idea as ‘worthiness’.

In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys advice. Defending a consistent set of values is so central to the logic of newer plots that the stories themselves are often reshaped to create values for characters such as Thor and Loki – who in the 16th-century Icelandic Edda had personalities rather than consistent moral orientations.

Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them,  despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.

The situation is more complex in epics such as The Iliad, which does have two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the world from the other team. They don’t symbolise anything but themselves and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the reason to fight the good fight. The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one.

Most folklore scholarship since the Second World War has been concerned with archetypes or commonalities among folktales, the implicit drive being that if the myths and stories of all nations had more in common than divided them, then people of all nations could likewise have more in common than divides us. It was a radical idea, when earlier folktales had been published specifically to show how people in one nation were unlike those in another.

In her study of folklore From the Beast to the Blonde (1995), the English author and critic Marina Warner rejects a reading of folktales, popularised by the American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, as a set of analogies for our psychological and developmental struggles. Warner argues instead that external circumstances make these stories resonate with readers and listeners through the centuries. Still, both scholars want to trace the common tropes of folktales and fairytales insofar as they stay the same, or similar, through the centuries.

Novelists and filmmakers who base their work on folklore also seem to focus on commonalities. George Lucas very explicitly based Star Wars on Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which describes the journey of a figure such as Luke Skywalker as a human universal. J R R Tolkien used his scholarship of Old English epics to recast the stories in an alternative, timeless landscape; and many comic books explicitly or implicitly recycle the ancient myths and legends, keeping alive story threads shared by stories new and old, or that old stories from different societies around the world share with each other.

Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. That shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to change or improve society’s values. Good guys stand up for what they believe in, and are willing to die for a cause. This trope is so omnipresent in our modern stories, movies, books, even our political metaphors, that it is sometimes difficult to see how new it is, or how bizarre it looks, considered in light of either ethics or storytelling.

When the Grimm brothers wrote down their local folktales in the 19th century, their aim was to use them to define the German Volk, and unite the German people into a modern nation. The Grimms were students of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who emphasised the role of language and folk traditions in defining values. In his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), von Herder argued that language was ‘a natural organ of the understanding’, and that the German patriotic spirit resided in the way that the nation’s language and history developed over time. Von Herder and the Grimms were proponents of the then-new idea that the citizens of a nation should be bound by a common set of values, not by kinship or land use. For the Grimms, stories such as Godfather Death, or the Knapsack, the Hat and the Horn, revealed the pure form of thought that arose from their language.

The corollary of uniting the Volk through a storified set of essential characteristics and values is that those outside the culture were seen as lacking the values Germans considered their own. Von Herder might have understood the potential for mass violence in this idea, because he praised the wonderful variety of human cultures: specifically, he believed that German Jews should have equal rights to German Christians. Still, the nationalist potential of the Grimm brothers’ project was gradually amplified as its influence spread across Europe, and folklorists began writing books of national folklore specifically to define their own national character. Not least, many modern nations went on to realise the explosive possibilities for abuse in a mode of thinking that casts ‘the other’ as a kind of moral monster.

In her book The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987), the American scholar Maria Tatar remarks on the way that Wilhelm Grimm would slip in, say, adages about the importance of keeping promises. She argued that: ‘Rather than coming to terms with the absence of a moral order … he persisted in adding moral pronouncements even where there was no moral.’ Such additions established the idea that it was values (not just dinner) at stake in the conflicts that these stories dramatised. No doubt the Grimms’ additions influenced Bettelheim, Campbell and other folklorists who argued for the inherent morality of folktales, even if they had not always been told as moral fables.

As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s 1973 cartoon or the film Prince of Thieves (1991) are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations than outlaw hijinks. The Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of values.

Or consider the legend of King Arthur. In the 12th century, poets writing about him were often French, like Chrétien de Troyes, because King Arthur wasn’t yet closely associated with the soul of Britain. What’s more, his adversaries were often, literally, monsters, rather than people who symbolised moral weaknesses. By the early 19th century, when Tennyson wrote Idylls of the King, King Arthur becomes an ideal of a specifically British manhood, and he battles human characters who represent moral frailties. By the 20th century, the word ‘Camelot’ came to mean a kingdom too idealistic to survive on Earth.

Once the idea of national values entered our storytelling, the peculiar moral physics underlying the phenomenon of good guys versus bad guys has been remarkably consistent. One telling feature is that characters frequently change sides in conflicts: if a character’s identity resides in his values, then when he changes his mind about a moral question, he is essentially swapping sides, or defecting. This is not always acknowledged. For example, when in the PBS series Power of Myth (1988) the journalist Bill Moyers discussed with Campbell how many ancient tropes Star Wars deployed, they didn’t consider how bizarre it would have seemed to the ancient storytellers had Darth Vader changed his mind about anger and hatred, and switched sides in his war with Luke and the Rebels. Contrast this with The Iliad, where Achilles doesn’t become Trojan when he is angry at Agamemnon. Neither the Greeks nor the Trojans stand for some set of human strengths or frailties. Since their conflict is not a metaphor for some internal battle of anger versus love, switching sides because of a transport of feeling would be incoherent. In Star Wars, the opposing teams each represent a set of human properties. What side Darth Vader fights on is therefore absolutely dependent on whether anger or love is foremost in his heart.

Bad guys change their minds and become good in exactly the same way in countless, ostensibly folkloric, modern stories: The Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), the Harry Potter series (1997-2007). When a bad character has a change of heart, it’s always a cathartic emotional moment – since what’s at stake for a character is losing the central part of his identity. Another peculiarity in the moral physics of good guys versus bad is that bad guys have no loyalty and routinely punish their own; whether it’s the Sheriff of Nottingham starving his own people or Darth Vader killing his subordinates, bad guys are cavalier with human life, and they rebuke their allies for petty transgressions. This has been true since the earliest modern bad guys, though it scarcely exists among older adversaries who might be hungry for human flesh, but don’t kill their own.

Good guys, on the other hand, accept all applicants into the fold, and prove their loyalty even when their teammates transgress. Consider Friar Tuck getting drunk on ale while Robin Hood looks the other way. Or Luke Skywalker welcoming the roguish Han Solo on side. Good guys work with rogues, oddballs and ex-bad guys, plus their battles often hinge on someone who was treated badly by the bad guys crossing over and becoming a good guy. Forgiving characters their wicked deeds is an emotional climax in many good guy/bad guy stories. Indeed, it’s essential that the good side is a motley crew that will never, ever reject a fellow footsoldier.

Again, this is a point of pride that seems incoherent in the context of pre-modern storytelling. Not only do people in ancient stories not switch sides in fights but Achilles, say, would never win because his army was composed of the rejects from the Trojans’. In old stories, great warriors aren’t scrappy recruits, there for the moral education: they’re experts.

Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters in conflict – as we find in The Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise, flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good, or he belongs to Team Evil.

Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. Their values feel like morality, and the association with folklore and mythology lends them a patina of legitimacy, but still, they don’t arise from a moral vision. They are rooted instead in a political vision, which is why they don’t help us deliberate, or think more deeply about the meanings of our actions. Like the original Grimm stories, they’re a political tool designed to bind nations together.

It’s no coincidence that good guy/bad guy movies, comic books and games have large, impassioned and volatile fandoms – even the word ‘fandom’ suggests the idea of a nation, or kingdom. What’s more, the moral physics of these stories about superheroes fighting the good fight, or battling to save the world, does not commend genuine empowerment. The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win.

When I talked with Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017), about the rise of the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, she told me: ‘Three inventions collided to make concentration camps possible: barbed wire, automatic weapons, and the belief that whole categories of people should be locked up.’ When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals. It is the Grimms’ and von Herder’s vision taken to its logical nationalist conclusion that implies that ‘categories of people should be locked up’.

Watching Wonder Woman at the end of the 2017 movie give a speech about preemptively forgiving ‘humanity’ for all the inevitable offences of the Second World War, I was reminded yet again that stories of good guys and bad guys actively make a virtue of letting the home team in a conflict get away with any expedient atrocity.

Source: The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

A GoFundMe is collecting money to put toward the wellbeing of the three daughters Kyanka left behind. Here is the corresponding thread on Something Awful. Original story continues below.

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Longtime Something Awful forum administrator Fragmaster posted that site founder Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka has died. “I guess I should preface this by saying this isn’t a joke especially since I’m posting for like the first time in 10 years or something, but I got the bad news today directly from Rich’s family,” wrote Fragmaster. “Lowtax has passed away.”

“I didn’t ask for details,” Fragmaster continued. “I don’t know details. I don’t know what the current opinion of Rich here is. Not here to answer questions, I’m sharing the news. I really hate to share this news. But there you go.”

Considering all the shit that Something Awful has gotten up to over the years, some have wondered if this were a hoax. “Is this for real?” wondered one forum member. Some expressed shock at the news, while others offered their condolences to his children.

Kyanka’s second wife, who posts on SA under the name LadyAmbien, has confirmed her husband’s death, in a very angry post about his treatment of her and their children.

Below is the SA admin’s eulogy for the site’s founder, which was originally posted in a thread titled “itt a tribute to our late founder, farewell, deer richard.”

In 1999, Kyanka created Something Awful, and today, it’s hard to understate the site’s influence. It also spawned endless, classic memes, such as, “All your base are belong to us,” and was even the launching pad for what became 4chan. Our colleagues at Gizmodo listed it at number 89 in the 100 websites that shaped the internet today, writing the following:

While Something Awful had its moments as a host for various bits of comedy, rants, and reviews, SA’s community is its real legacy. From its forums, Something Awful members gave birth to the legend of Slenderman, an entire new genre of videos in Let’s Plays, and thanks to offshoots like the Goonswarm, SA was indirectly responsible for some of the most massive (and costly) space battles ever witnessed in video game history. It was also, uh, actually awful.

“The Something Awful forums spawned a great many things in its multiple decades of existence,” said Fragmaster in his YouTube eulogy. “Some things horrible and unfortunate, many things just unintelligible and a huge waste of time. But ultimately, Rich created a community where interesting things happened and people connected.”

In October 2020, Kyanka sold the site, writing on Facebook, “I just signed away the rights to Something Awful, goodbye, good riddance.”

[…]

Source: Something Awful Founder Richard Kyanka Has Reportedly Died

Stanford researchers think they’ve devised an effective and quick-acting way to treat difficult cases of depression, by improving on an already approved form of brain stimulation. In a new trial published this week, the researchers found that almost 80% of patients improved after going through treatment—a far higher rate than those who were given a sham placebo.

Brain stimulation has emerged as a promising avenue for depression, particularly depression that hasn’t responded to other treatments. The basic concept behind it is to use electrical impulses to balance out the erratic brain activity associated with neurological or psychiatric disorders. There are different forms of stimulation, which vary in intensity and how they interact with the body. Some require permanent implants in the brain, while others can be used noninvasively, like repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). As the name suggests, rTMS relies on magnetic fields that are temporarily applied to the head.

[…]

the Stanford neuromodulation therapy (SNT), relies on higher-dose magnetic pulses delivered over a quicker, five-day schedule, meant to mimic about seven months of standard rTMS treatment. The treatment is also personalized to each patient, with MRI scans used beforehand to pick out the best possible locations along the brain to deliver these pulses.

[…]

Last year, Williams and his team published a small study of 21 patients who were given SNT, showing that 90% of people severely affected by their depression experienced remission—in other words, that they no longer met the criteria for an acute depressive episode. Moreover, people’s feelings of suicidal ideation went away as well. The study was open label, though, meaning that patients and doctors knew what treatment was being given. Confirming that any drug or treatment actually works requires more rigorous tests, such as a double-blinded and placebo-controlled experiment. And that’s what the team has done now, publishing the results of their new trial in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

[…]

This time, about 78% of patients given genuine SNT experienced remission, based on standard diagnostic tests, compared to about 13% of the sham group. There were no serious side effects, with the most common being a short-lasting headache. And when participants were asked to guess which treatment they took, neither group did better than chance, indicating that the blinding worked.

[…]

Source: 5-Day Brain Stimulation Treatment Highly Effective Against Depression, Stanford Researchers Find

A Missouri politician has been relentlessly mocked on Twitter after demanding the prosecution of a journalist who found and responsibly reported a vulnerability in a state website.

Mike Parson, governor of Missouri, described reporters for local newspaper the St Louis Post Dispatch (SLPD) as “hackers” after they discovered a web app for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was leaking teachers’ private information.

Around 100,000 social security numbers were able to be exposed when the web app was loaded in a user’s browser. The public-facing app was intended to be used by local schools to check teachers’ professional registration status. So users could tell between different teachers of the same name, it would accept the last four digits of a teacher’s social security number as a valid search string.

It appears that in the background, the app was retrieving the entire social security number and exposing it to the end user.

The SLPD discovered this by viewing a search results page’s source code. “View source” has been a common feature of web browsers for years, typically available by right-clicking anywhere on a webpage and selecting it from a menu.

SLPD reporters told the Missouri Department of Education about the flaw and held off publicising it so officials could fix it – but that wasn’t good enough for the governor.

“The state is committed to bring to justice anyone who hacked our system and anyone who aided and abetted them to do so,” Parson said, according to the Missouri Independent news website. He justified his bizarre outburst by saying the SLPD was “attempting to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

[…]

Source: Missouri governor demands prosecution for data breach report • The Register

It’s nothing short of amazing what trained dancers can do with their bodies, and a real shame that visually-impaired people can’t enjoy the experience of, say, ballet. For this year’s Hackaday Prize, [Shi Yun] is working on a way for visually-impaired people to experience dance performances via haptic feedback on a special device.

This platform, which is called Kinetic Soul, uses Posenet computer vision to track a dancer’s movements. Posenet detects the dancer’s joints and creates a point map to determine what body parts are moving where, and at what speed. Then the system translates and transmits the movements to the 32 pins on the surface, creating a touchable picture of what’s going on. Each 3D-printed pin is controlled with a solenoid, all of which are driven by a single Arduino.

We think it’s interesting that Kinetic Soul can speak to the user in two different languages. The first is more about the overall flow of a dance, and the second delves into the deconstructed details. Both methods allow for dances to be enjoyed in real time, or via video recording. So how does one deconstruct dance? [Shi Yun] turned to Laban Movement Analysis, which breaks up human locomotion into four broad categories: the body in relation to itself, the effort expended to move, the shapes assumed, and the space used.

[Shi Yun] has been user-testing their ideas at dance workshops for the visually impaired throughout the entire process — this is how they arrived at having two haptic languages instead of one. They plan to continue getting input as they work to fortify the prototype, improve the touch experience, and refine the haptic languages. Check out the brief demonstration video after the break.

Yes indeed, dance is a majestic way of expressing all kinds of things. Think you have no use for interpretive dance? Think again — it can help you understand protein synthesis in an amusing way.

 

 

Source: The Beauty Of Dance, Seen Through The Power Of Touch | Hackaday

A US judge has temporarily blocked a new law in Texas that effectively bans women from having an abortion.

District Judge Robert Pitman granted a request by the Biden administration to prevent any enforcement of the law while its legality is being challenged.

The law, which prohibits women in Texas from obtaining an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, was drafted and approved by Republican politicians.

The White House praised the latest ruling as an important step.

“The fight has only just begun, both in Texas and in many states across this country where women’s rights are currently under attack,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

Texan officials immediately appealed against the ruling, setting the stage for further court battles.

Judge Pitman, of Austin, wrote in an 113-page opinion that, from the moment the law came into effect on 1 September, “women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution”.

“This court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right,” he said on Wednesday.

Whole Woman’s Health, which runs a number of clinics in Texas, said it was making plans to resume abortions “as soon as possible”.

But the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, accused judges of “catering to the abortion industry” and called for a “fair hearing” at the next stage.

[…]

Source: Texas abortion: Judge temporarily blocks enforcement of law – BBC News

Just How Much Time Do We Spend On Our Phones?

Source: https://www.cellphonedeal.com/blog/just-how-much-time-do-we-spend-on-our-phones

Edit: https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/children-and-screen-time also has a good reading on this for children

China’s authorities have called for internet companies to create a governance system for their algorithms.

A set of guiding opinions on algorithms, issued overnight by nine government agencies, explains that algorithms play a big role in disseminating information online and enabling growth of the digital economy. But the guiding opinions also point out that algorithms employed online can also impact society, and financial markets.

[…]

To achieve its aims, Beijing expects that algo-wielding organisations will create algorithm governance teams to assess their code and detect any security or ethical flaws. Self-regulation is expected, as is continuous revision and self-improvement.

Chinese authorities will watch those efforts and will be unsparing when they find either harmful algorithms, or less-than-comprehensive compliance efforts. Citizen reports of erroneous algos will inform some regulatory actions.

Organisations have been given three years to get this done, with further guidance to come from Beijing.

[…]

Requiring oversight of algorithms suggests that Beijing is worried on two fronts. First, it’s concerned about how automation is already playing out on China’s internet. Second, it has observed that western web giants have used algorithms to increase user engagement in ways that amplify misinformation and that have clearly caused considerable real-world harm.

The new regulations are further evidence that Beijing wants to exercise control over what Chinese citizens can see online. That desire has already seen China crack down on depictions of effeminate men, warn fan clubs not to turn mean, ban racy online content aimed at kids, and crack down on computer games – including those that aren’t historically accurate – and even advise on what songs make for acceptable karaoke.

Source: China to regulate -may censor – web giants’ algorithms • The Register

he Wall Street Journal has had something of a banner week tearing down Facebook. Its series on a trove of internal company documents obtained by the paper has unveiled Facebook’s secret system for treating certain users as above the rules, company research showing how harmful Instagram is for young girls, how the site’s algorithmic solutions to toxic content have backfired, and that Facebook executives are slow to respond to reports of organized criminal activity. On Friday, it published another article detailing how badly Facebook has fumbled fighting anti-vax content and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign to get users vaccinated.

[…]

One big problem was that Facebook users were brigading any content addressing vaccination with anti-vax comments. Company researchers, according to the Journal, warned executives that comments on vaccine-related content were flooded with anti-vax propaganda, pseudo-scientific claims, and other false information and lies about the virus and the vaccines.

Global health institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef had registered their concern with Facebook, with one internal company memo warning of “anti-vaccine commenters that swarm their Pages,” while another internal report in early 2021 made an initial estimate that up to 41% of comments on vaccine-related posts appeared to risk discouraging people from getting vaccinated (referred to within the company “barrier to vaccination” content). That’s out of a pool of around 775 million vaccine-related comments seen by users daily.

[…]

Facebook had promised in 2019 to crack down on antivax content and summoned WHO reps to meet with tech leaders in February 2020. Zuckerberg personally got in contact with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci to discuss funding vaccine trials, offer ad space and user data for government-run vaccination campaigns, and arrange a live Q&A between the two on the site. Facebook had also made adjustments to its content-ranking algorithm that a June 2020 memo claimed reduced health misinformation by 6.7% to 9.9%, the Journal wrote.

But by summer 2020, BS claims about the coronavirus and vaccines were going viral on the site, including the viral “Plandemic” video, a press conference staged by a group of right-wing weirdos calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors,” and a handful of anti-vax accounts such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s that advocacy group Avaaz later identified as responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of the offending content. According to the Journal, Facebook was well aware that the phenomenon was being driven by a relatively small but determined and prolific segment of posters and group admins:

As the rollout of the vaccine began early this year, antivaccine activists took advantage of that stance. A later analysis found that a small number of “big whales” were behind many antivaccine posts and groups on the platform. Out of nearly 150,000 posters in Facebook Groups disabled for Covid misinformation, 5% were producing half of all posts, and around 1,400 users were responsible for inviting half the groups’ new members, according to one document.

“We found, like many problems at FB, this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth,” Facebook researchers would write in May, likening the movement to QAnon and efforts to undermine elections.

Zuckerberg waffled and suggested that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of censoring anti-vax posts in an interview with Axios in September 2020, saying “If someone is pointing out a case where a vaccine caused harm or that they’re worried about it —you know, that’s a difficult thing to say from my perspective that you shouldn’t be allowed to express at all.” This was a deeply incorrect assessment of the problem, as Facebook was well aware that a small group of bad actors was actively and intentionally pushing the anti-vax content.

Another internal assessment conducted earlier this year by a Facebook employee, the Journal wrote, found that two-thirds of randomly sampled comments “were anti-vax” (though the sample size was just 110 comments). In their analysis, the staffer noted one poll that showed actual anti-vaccine sentiment in the general population was 40% lower.

[…]

The Journal reported that one integrity worker flagged a post with 53,000 shares and three million views that asserted vaccines are “all experimental & you are in the experiment.” Facebook’s automated moderation tools had ignored it after somehow concluding it was written in the Romanian language. By late February, researchers came up with a hasty method to scan for “vaccine hesitant” comments, but according to the Journal their report mentioned the anti-vax comment problem was “rampant” and Facebook’s ability to fight it was “bad in English, and basically non-existent elsewhere.”

[…]

 

Source: Facebook Documents Show It Fumbled the Fight Over Vaccines

Internal memos show how a big 2018 change rewarded outrage and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes

In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it.

He pointed to the success of a BuzzFeed post titled “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying,” which received 13,000 shares and 16,000 comments on Facebook, many from people criticizing BuzzFeed for writing it, and arguing with each other about race. Other content the company produced, from news videos to articles on self-care and animals, had trouble breaking through, he said.

Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email.

BuzzFeed built its business on making content that would go viral on Facebook and other social media, so it had a vested interest in any algorithm changes that hurt its distribution. Still, Mr. Peretti’s email touched a nerve.

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the aim of the algorithm change was to strengthen bonds between users and to improve their well-being. Facebook would encourage people to interact more with friends and family and spend less time passively consuming professionally produced content, which research suggested was harmful to their mental health.

Within the company, though, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect, the documents show. It was making Facebook’s platform an angrier place.

Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook.

“Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news,” wrote a team of data scientists, flagging Mr. Peretti’s complaints, in a memo reviewed by the Journal. “This is an increasing liability,” one of them wrote in a later memo.

They concluded that the new algorithm’s heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made the angry voices louder. “Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” researchers noted in internal memos.

Some political parties in Europe told Facebook the algorithm had made them shift their policy positions so they resonated more on the platform, according to the documents.

“Many parties, including those that have shifted to the negative, worry about the long term effects on democracy,” read one internal Facebook report, which didn’t name specific parties.

Facebook employees also discussed the company’s other, less publicized motive for making the change: Users had begun to interact less with the platform, a worrisome trend, the documents show.

The email and memos are part of an extensive array of internal company communications reviewed by the Journal. They offer an unparalleled look at how much Facebook knows about the flaws in its platform and how it often lacks the will or the ability to address them. This is the third in a series of articles based on that information.

[…]

Anna Stepanov, who led a team addressing those issues, presented Mr. Zuckerberg with several proposed changes meant to address the proliferation of false and divisive content on the platform, according to an April 2020 internal memo she wrote about the briefing. One such change would have taken away a boost the algorithm gave to content most likely to be reshared by long chains of users.

“Mark doesn’t think we could go broad” with the change, she wrote to colleagues after the meeting. Mr. Zuckerberg said he was open to testing the approach, she said, but “We wouldn’t launch if there was a material tradeoff with MSI impact.”

Last month, nearly a year and a half after Ms. Stepanov said Mr. Zuckerberg nixed the idea of broadly incorporating a similar fix, Facebook announced it was “gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment or share political content.” The move is part of a broader push, spurred by user surveys, to reduce the amount of political content on Facebook after the company came under criticism for the way election protesters used the platform to question the results and organize protests that led to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in Washington.

[…]

“MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions,” Mr. Peretti wrote in his email to the Facebook official, adding that his staff felt “pressure to make bad content or underperform.”

It wasn’t just material that exploited racial divisions, he wrote, but also “fad/junky science,” “extremely disturbing news” and gross images.

Political effect

In Poland, the changes made political debate on the platform nastier, Polish political parties told the company, according to the documents. The documents don’t specify which parties.

“One party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm,” wrote two Facebook researchers in an April 2019 internal report.

Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said she has heard complaints from many political parties in that region that the algorithm change made direct communication with their supporters through Facebook pages more difficult. They now have an incentive, she said, to create posts that rack up comments and shares—often by tapping into anger—to get exposure in users’ feeds.

The Facebook researchers, wrote in their report that in Spain, political parties run sophisticated operations to make Facebook posts travel as far and fast as possible.

“They have learnt that harsh attacks on their opponents net the highest engagement,” they wrote. “They claim that they ‘try not to,’ but ultimately ‘you use what works.’ ”

In the 15 months following fall 2017 clashes in Spain over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a Spanish digital risk protection firm.

[…]

Early tests showed how reducing that aspect of the algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for those categories in the spring of 2020.

When Ms. Stepanov presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team’s proposal to expand that change beyond civic and health content—and a few countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were already being made—Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn’t want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the documents.

[…]

Source: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Institut Pasteur in France have developed a technique for reconstructing whole genomes, including the human genome, on a personal computer. This technique is about a hundred times faster than current state-of-the-art approaches and uses one-fifth the resources. The study, published September 14 in the journal Cell Systems, allows for a more compact representation of genome data inspired by the way in which words, rather than letters, offer condensed building blocks for language models.

“We can quickly assemble entire genomes and metagenomes, including microbial genomes, on a modest laptop computer,” says Bonnie Berger, the Simons Professor of Mathematics at the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT and an author of the study. “This ability is essential in assessing changes in the gut microbiome linked to disease and bacterial infections, such as sepsis, so that we can more rapidly treat them and save lives.”

[…]

To approach genome assembly more efficiently than current techniques, which involve making pairwise comparisons between all possible pairs of reads, Berger and colleagues turned to language models. Building from the concept of a de Bruijn graph, a simple, efficient data structure used for genome assembly, the researchers developed a minimizer-space de Bruin graph (mdBG), which uses short sequences of nucleotides called minimizers instead of single nucleotides.

“Our minimizer-space de Bruijn graphs store only a small fraction of the total nucleotides, while preserving the overall genome structure, enabling them to be orders of magnitude more efficient than classical de Bruijn graphs,” says Berger.

[…]

Berger and colleagues used their method to construct an index for a collection of 661,406 bacterial genomes, the largest collection of its kind to date. They found that the novel technique could search the entire collection for antimicrobial resistance genes in 13 minutes—a process that took 7 hours using standard sequence alignment.

[…]

“We can also handle sequencing data with up to 4% error rates,” adds Berger. “With long-read sequencers with differing error rates rapidly dropping in price, this ability opens the door to the democratization of sequencing data analysis.”

Berger notes that while the method currently performs best when processing PacBio HiFi reads, which fall well below a 1% error rate, it may soon be compatible with ultra-long reads from Oxford Nanopore, which currently has 5-12% error rates but may soon offer reads at 4%.

[…]

Source: Scientists can now assemble entire genomes on their personal computers in minutes