Facebook has finally said it would now prohibit the sale of all historical artifacts due to rampant black market trade in looted antiquitieson the site, per the New York Times—a problem the social media company has known about for years.

The new rules ban any “attempts to buy, sell or trade in historical artifacts,” defined as “rare items of significant historical, cultural or scientific value,” on Facebook or Instagram. It also comes after years of Facebook doing very little to restrict trade in those same objects.

Reporting last month in the Times found at least 90 Facebook groups, mostly written in Arabic, with tens of thousands of members that were “connected to the illegal trade in Middle Eastern antiquities.” In those groups, salespeople would post images or descriptions of objects and often then direct interested buyers to contact them via chat or other services to arrange payment or meetings in person; in some cases, the buyers simply posted that they were interested in acquiring a specific type of artifact. Some of the groups also trafficked in do-it-yourself guides on how others could get into the black market antiquities trade.

Some of the items may have been originally acquired by Islamic State terrorists, who in addition to destroying thousands of years’ worth of artifacts and archaeological sites in regions under their control in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, looted those sites and other cultural institutions like museums for profit. Armed groups affiliated or working with other extremist groups and criminal organizations have participated as well. A United Nations Security Council report in January 2020 noted evidence of numerous excavations by Islamic State or al-Qaeda affiliates and concluded that social media groups “dedicated to antiquities trafficking continue to be created, while the area of origin of trafficked artefacts increases, continuously revealing a web of interconnectivity among antiquities traffickers.”

While in some cases looters and buyers used coded language to discuss the deals, Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project (ATHAR) co-directors Katie Paul told the Times, in other instances it was all playing out in the open, right down to photos and videos of the objects being stolen to prove they were genuine. Paul told Artnet News that the countries of origin are “places where no legal trade exists,” making the sales uniformly illegal.

The total number of groups identified by researchers and activists is at least 200, according to the Times, and those are just the ones that they have caught onto. ATHAR released a report in 2019 finding “488 individual admins managing a collective 1,947,195 members across 95 Facebook Groups” comprised of a “mix of average citizens, middlemen, and violent extremists,” with what appeared to be a high degree of coordination between the admins of those groups:

Group members include a mix of average citizens, middlemen, and violent extremists. Violent extremists currently include individuals associated with Syrian-based groups like Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), Hurras Al-Din, the Zinki Brigade and other non-Syrian based Al-Qaeda or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) affiliates. All of these groups are using Facebook as a platform for antiquities trafficking, whether through direct interaction with buyers and sellers or through the use of middlemen who straddle transactions between the general public and terrorist groups.

Administrators usually demanded that the black market traders cough up fees from any sales related to their membership in groups, according to the report. Around 36 percent of the sellers in an ATHAR case study of Syrian groups were actually located in conflict zones, while another 44 percent were in countries bordering conflict zones.

ATHAR co-director and Shawnee State University professor Amr Al-Azm, who had previously worked in Syria as an antiquities official, told the Times artifacts were also flowing from Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia and that Facebook could have taken action as early as 2014, when deleting the groups would have had a bigger impact. He added it was a “supply and demand issue” and that deleting Facebook pages instead of archiving evidence destroys “a huge corpus of evidence” that might later be used to track down artifacts.

A Facebook report released on Tuesday acknowledged the issue, conceding significant pitfalls in policies that allowed trade in historical artifacts except where “it is clear that the artifacts have been looted.” Key findings included there is a “good chance that historical artifacts traded online are either illegal or fake, as an estimated 80% of antiquities have ‘sketchy provenances,’” as well as that there “is criticism that Facebook’s policy has led the platform to become a digital black market where users buy and sell illicit antiquities originating from conflict zones.”

Greg Mandel, a spokesperson for Facebook, told the Times that trade in “stolen artifacts” was already prohibited by site rules. (Paul and Al-Azm have disagreed that Facebook was actively enforcing those policies in the past, writing in 2018 that “Facebook does not currently enforce an explicit ban on transactions involving illicit cultural property.”)

“To keep these artifacts and our users safe, we’ve been working to expand our rules, and starting today, we now prohibit the exchange, sale or purchase of all historical artifacts on Facebook and Instagram,” Mandel added.

Paul told the Times the new policy is “an important shift in [Facebook’s] position on the trade in cultural heritage” and demonstrates they are aware of “illegal and harmful activity” on the site. But the policy is “only as good as its enforcement,” she added.

Source: Facebook Bans Sale of Historical Artifacts Due to Rampant Black Market Trade

Polish President Andrzej Duda accused the LGBT rights movement Saturday of promoting a viewpoint more harmful than communism and said he agreed with another conservative politician who stated that “LGBT is not people, it’s an ideology.”

Duda made his comments in the small southwestern town of Brzeg as he campaigns for reelection in Poland, a predominantly Catholic nation that spent more than four decades under communist governments.

Gay rights is emerging as a key campaign theme in the presidential election as the race grows close between Duda, backed by the nationalist conservative ruling party, and Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who has called for tolerance for gays and lesbians.

Duda, who is 48, told his supporters that his parents’ generation did not struggle to cast off communism only to now accept “an ideology” that he thinks “is even more destructive to the human being.”

The president said that during Poland’s communist era, regimes ensured survival by indoctrinating the youngest generation.

“That was Bolshevism. It was the ideologizing of children,” he said. “Today, there are also attempts to push an ideology on us and our children, but different. It’s totally new, but it is also neo-Bolshevism.”

Earlier in the week, Duda signed a declaration drafted for the stated purpose of helping families that included language on “protecting children from LGBT ideology” with a ban on “propagating LGBT ideology in public institutions.”

Many conservative politicians in Poland say they are not against gay men and lesbians as individuals, but insist they oppose the goals of a civil rights movement they claim is imported from abroad and threatens to sexualize young people.

But gay and lesbian Poles and liberal Poles say government officials are adopting a language of dehumanization. They believe Duda and others are targeting homosexuals to curry favor with the powerful Catholic church — which faces allegations of covering up clerical abuse — and shore up support among conservative voters ahead of the election.

Some analysts also suspect that Duda and the governing Law and Justice party are making a bid for far-right voters who will mostly support the candidate of a smaller party, Confederation, in the election’s first round but whose votes will be up for grabs in a runoff.

Source: Polish President Says LGBT ‘Ideology’ Worse Than Communism | Time

Breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue. Most of us misunderstand breathing. We see it as passive, something that we just do. Breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not that simple and binary. How we breathe matters, too. Inside the breath you just took, there are more molecules of air than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. We each inhale and exhale some 30 pounds of these molecules every day — far more than we eat or drink. The way that we take in that air and expel it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise and the genes we’ve inherited. This idea may sound nuts, I realize. It certainly sounded that way to me when I first heard it several years ago while interviewing neurologists, rhinologists and pulmonologists at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions. What they’d found is that breathing habits were directly related to physical and mental health.

Today, doctors who study breathing say that the vast majority of Americans do it inadequately. […] But it’s not all bad news. Unlike problems with other parts of the body, such as the liver or kidneys, we can improve the airways in our too-small mouths and reverse the entropy in our lungs at any age. We can do this by breathing properly. […] [T]he first step in healthy breathing: extending breaths to make them a little deeper, a little longer. Try it. For the next several minutes, inhale gently through your nose to a count of about five and then exhale, again through your nose, at the same rate or a little more slowly if you can. This works out to about six breaths a minute. When we breathe like this we can better protect the lungs from irritation and infection while boosting circulation to the brain and body. Stress on the heart relaxes; the respiratory and nervous systems enter a state of coherence where everything functions at peak efficiency. Just a few minutes of inhaling and exhaling at this pace can drop blood pressure by 10, even 15 points. […] [T]he second step in healthy breathing: Breathe through your nose. Nasal breathing not only helps with snoring and some mild cases of sleep apnea, it also can allow us to absorb around 18% more oxygen than breathing through our mouths. It reduces the risk of dental cavities and respiratory problems and likely boosts sexual performance. The list goes on.

Source: Breathing Habits Are Related To Physical and Mental Health – Slashdot

New research published today in Science Advances suggests pulses of ultrasonic waves can be used to partially control decision-making in rhesus macaque monkeys. Specifically, the ultrasound treatments were shown to influence their decision to look either left or right at a target presented on a screen, despite prior training to prefer one target over the other.

The new study, co-authored by neuroscientist Jan Kubanek from the University of Utah, highlights the potential use of this non-invasive technique for treating certain disorders in humans, like addictions, without the need for surgery or medication. The procedure is also completely painless.

Scientists had previously shown that ultrasound can stimulate neurons in the brains of mice, including tightly packed neurons deep in the brain. By modulating neuronal activity in mice, researchers could trigger various muscle movements across their bodies. That said, other research has been less conclusive about this and whether high-frequency sound waves can trigger neuromodulatory effects in larger animals.

The new research suggests they can, at least in a pair of macaque monkeys.

Source: Researchers Control Monkeys’ Decisions With Bursts of Ultrasonic Waves

Do smartphones alter what people are willing to disclose about themselves to others? A new study in the Journal of Marketing suggests that they might. The research indicates that people are more willing to reveal personal information about themselves online using their smartphones compared to desktop computers. For example, Tweets and reviews composed on smartphones are more likely to be written from the perspective of the first person, to disclose negative emotions, and to discuss the writer’s private family and personal friends. Likewise, when consumers receive an online ad that requests personal information (such as phone number and income), they are more likely to provide it when the request is received on their smartphone compared to their desktop or laptop computer.

Why do smartphones have this effect on behavior? Melumad explains that “Writing on one’s smartphone often lowers the barriers to revealing certain types of sensitive information for two reasons; one stemming from the unique form characteristics of phones and the second from the emotional associations that consumers tend to hold with their device.” First, one of the most distinguishing features of phones is the small size; something that makes viewing and creating content generally more difficult compared with desktop computers. Because of this difficulty, when writing or responding on a smartphone, a person tends to narrowly focus on completing the task and become less cognizant of external factors that would normally inhibit self-disclosure, such as concerns about what others would do with the information. Smartphone users know this effect well—when using their phones in public places, they often fixate so intently on its content that they become oblivious to what is going on around them.

The second reason people tend to be more self-disclosing on their phones lies in the feelings of comfort and familiarity people associate with their phones. Melumad adds, “Because our smartphones are with us all of the time and perform so many vital functions in our lives, they often serve as ‘adult pacifiers’ that bring feelings of comfort to their owners.” The downstream effect of those feelings shows itself when people are more willing to disclose feelings to a close friend compared to a stranger or open up to a therapist in a comfortable rather than uncomfortable setting. As Meyer says, “Similarly, when writing on our phones, we tend to feel that we are in a comfortable ‘safe zone.’ As a consequence, we are more willing to open up about ourselves.”

The data to support these ideas is far-ranging and includes analyses of thousands of social media posts and online reviews, responses to web ads, and controlled laboratory studies. For example, initial evidence comes from analyses of the depth of self-disclosure revealed in 369,161 Tweets and 10,185 restaurant reviews posted on TripAdvisor.com, with some posted on PCs and some on smartphones.? Using both automated natural-language processing tools and human judgements of self-disclosure, the researchers find robust evidence that smartphone-generated content is indeed more self-disclosing. Perhaps even more compelling is evidence from an analysis of 19,962 “call to action” web ads, where consumers are asked to provide private information.

Consistent with the tendency for smartphones to facilitate greater self-disclosure, compliance was systematically higher for ads targeted at smartphones versus PCs.

The findings have clear and significant implications for firms and consumers. One is that if a firm wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the real preferences and needs of consumers, it may obtain better insights by tracking what they say and do on their smartphones than on their desktops. Likewise, because more self-disclosing content is often perceived to be more honest, firms might encourage consumers to post reviews from their personal devices. But therein lies a potential caution for consumers—these findings suggest that the device people use to communicate can affect what they communicate. This should be kept in mind when thinking about the device one is using when interacting with firms and others.

Source: Why smartphones are digital truth serum

A 17-year-old boy in Los Angeles County who became the first teen believed to have died from complications with covid-19 in the U.S. was denied treatment at an urgent care clinic because he didn’t have health insurance, according to R. Rex Parris, the mayor of Lancaster, California. Roughly 27.5 million Americans—8.5 percent of the population—don’t have health insurance based on the latest government figures.

“He didn’t have insurance, so they did not treat him,” Parris said in a video posted to YouTube. The staff at the urgent care facility told the teen to try the emergency room at Antelope Valley (AV) Hospital, a public hospital in the area, according to the mayor.

“En route to AV Hospital, he went into cardiac arrest, when he got to AV hospital they were able to revive him and keep him alive for about six hours,” Parris said. “But by the time he got there, it was too late.”

The name of the urgent care clinic that refused to treat the teen has not been released. Mayor Parris explained in his YouTube video that the 17-year-old is believed to have had no underlying conditions that may have contributed to his death.

“He had been sick for a few days, he had no previous health conditions. On the Friday before he died, he was healthy, he was socializing with his friends,” the mayor explained.

Source: Teen Who Died of Covid-19 Was Denied Treatment Because He Didn’t Have Health Insurance

The World Health Organization recommended Tuesday that people suffering COVID-19 symptoms avoid taking ibuprofen, after French officials warned that anti-inflammatory drugs could worsen effects of the virus.

The warning by French Health Minister Olivier Veran followed a recent study in The Lancet medical journal that hypothesised that an enzyme boosted by anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen could facilitate and worsen COVID-19 infections.

Asked about the study, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva the UN health agency’s experts were “looking into this to give further guidance.”

“In the meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol, and do not use ibuprofen as a self-medication. That’s important,” he said.

Source: Avoid taking ibuprofen for COVID-19 symptoms: WHO

Across the globe, governments are imposing travel limits in a bid to stem the spread of coronavirus. The unintended consequence is a squeeze on migrant labor that’s a cornerstone of food production.

American produce growers preparing to harvest crops are warning of a devastating impact on fruit and vegetables after the U.S. Embassy in Mexico announced a halt to visa interviews for seasonal farm workers. Slaughterhouses also may face labor shortages.

In Australia, growers say the country may face shortages of some fruits and vegetables because of travel curbs, with the nation traditionally using overseas workers for one third of seasonal farming jobs. Kiwifruit pickers are in short supply in New Zealand. And in Canada, travel limits threaten meat processors that rely on temporary foreign workers to fill chronic labor shortages.

“There won’t be anyone to harvest the crops,” said Robert Guenther, senior vice president for public policy for the United Fresh Produce Association, which represents U.S. growers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. “It will be devastating to growers and ultimately to the supply chain and consumers. They won’t have the food.”

Vulnerable supply chains

Expectations for a labor crunch reveal how interconnected the world of global agriculture has become, and expose the strains of production and areas of vulnerability to the supply chain. In many key food-making nations, the industry relies heavily on migrant and immigrant workers to fill jobs that middle-class citizens shun. Think of the back-breaking work of tomato pickers, the dangerous conditions at slaughter houses and what many would consider the unpalatable environment of large livestock-feed operations.

The timing for the disruptions in some ways couldn’t be worse. In the Northern Hemisphere, farmers are gearing up for their peak spring and summer growing seasons. Ranchers also tend to sell more animals to slaughter at this time of year.

Source: Virus Travel Bans Threaten Labor for Global Food Harvests | Time

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have created a new, rubber-like material with a unique set of properties that could act as a replacement for human tissue in medical procedures. The material has the potential to make a big difference to many people’s lives. The research was recently published in the highly regarded scientific journal ACS Nano.

In the development of medical technology products, there is a great demand for new naturalistic materials suitable for integration with the body. Introducing materials into the body comes with many risks, such as serious infections, among other things. Many of the substances used today, such as Botox, are very toxic. There is a need for new, more adaptable materials.

In the new study, the Chalmers researchers developed a material consisting solely of components that have already been shown to work well in the body.

The foundation of the material is the same as plexiglass, a material used in many medical technology applications. By redesigning its makeup, and through a process called nanostructuring, the researchers gave the material a unique combination of properties. Their initial intention was to produce a hard, bone-like material, but they had unexpected results.

“We were really surprised that the material turned out to be very soft, flexible and extremely elastic. It would not work as a bone replacement material, we concluded. But the new and unexpected properties made our discovery just as exciting,” says Anand Kumar Rajasekharan, Ph.D. in Materials Science and one of the researchers behind the study.

The results showed that the new rubber-like material may be appropriate for many applications that require an uncommon combination of properties—high elasticity, easy processability, and suitability for medical uses.

“The first application we are looking at now is urinary catheters. The material can be constructed in such a way that prevents bacteria from growing on the surface, meaning it is very well suited for medical uses,” says Martin Andersson, research leader for the study and Professor of Chemistry at Chalmers.

The structure of the new nano-rubber material allows its surface to be treated so that it becomes antibacterial, in a natural, non-toxic way. This is achieved by sticking antimicrobial peptides—small proteins that are part of the innate immune system—onto its surface. This can reduce the need for antibiotics, an important contribution to the fight against growing antibiotic resistance.

Because the new material can be injected and inserted via keyhole surgery, it can also help reduce the need for drastic surgery and operations to rebuild parts of the body. The material can be injected via a standard cannula as a viscous fluid, so that it forms its own elastic structures within the body. Or the material can also be 3-D printed into specific structures as required.

“There are many diseases where the cartilage breaks down and friction results between bones, causing great pain for the affected person. This material could potentially act as a replacement in those cases,” Martin Andersson continues.

A further advantage of the material is that it contains three-dimensionally ordered nanopores. This means it can be loaded with medicine for various therapeutic purposes such as improving healing and reducing inflammation. This allows for localized treatment, avoiding, for example, having to treat the entire body with drugs, something that could help reduce problems associated with side effects. Since it is non-toxic, it also works well as a filler—the researchers see plastic surgery therefore as another very interesting potential area of application for the new material.

“I am now working full time with our newly founded company, Amferia, to get the research out to industry. I have been pleased to see a lot of real interest in our material. It’s promising in terms of achieving our goal, which is to provide real societal benefit,” Anand concludes.

Source: Nanostructured rubber-like material with optimal properties could replace human tissue

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like “the Bongcloud.” One YouTube commenter calls it “a revolution in the history of chess.”

Slate documents the antics in an article titled “DrDrunkenstein’s Reign of Terror.” “DrDrunkenstein” is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great.

Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community… Carlsen appeared incognito as “DannyTheDonkey” and won, donating his small prize money back to the website. Carlsen’s first showing as DrDrunkenstein was in Lichess’ second Titled Arena the following month… Carlsen streamed the games on Twitch, where he lived up to his username, pounding Coronas while bantering in Norwegian with his friends. Chess fans were astonished. There’s something hypnotizing about watching a guy known as “the Mozart of chess” — a player who is quantifiably better than Bobby Fischer — taking a big gulp of beer, announcing his position as “completely winning,” then singing along to Dr. Dre saying “motherfuck the police” while coasting into another quick checkmate…

In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper in October, Carlsen admits he quit drinking for his health. “I wouldn’t say I was an alcoholic exactly,” he said, “but I found out this year, if I’m going to travel and play a lot… I need to prioritize differently….” On the eve of his world championship defense, Carlsen appeared in the next tournament as “manwithavan,” playing a large chunk of his games on a phone from a minivan, where the touch screen presented a massive handicap. He again earned the adoration of spectators, this time for riskily walking his king into the center of the board against one of the most dangerous players in the tournament. He came in third… As DrNykterstein, he alternated between two ways of wasting his early, important opening moves. Sometimes, he’d take his queen on a four-move tour of the board before swapping her home square with the king’s, letting his opponent develop their pieces while he showboated… Other times, he’d fidget his knights back and forth from their starting squares, offering his challenger a six-move time advantage. In this tournament he filled with gags, he came in first again…

One of the sweetest benefits of watching these matches is enjoying Carlsen’s dry, self-deprecating sense of humor — something no chess prodigy has any right to have.
In December, Magnus also reached the #1 spot, beating seven million other players, on a fantasy football table.

Source: World Chess Champion Plays Recklessly Online Using a Pseudonym – Slashdot

Our rapidly evolving world forces us to adopt distinct patterns of behavior, and in the process, paves the way for new cognitive biases to emerge.

Source: Infographic: 50 Cognitive Biases in the Modern World

The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community – although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.

Actix Web was developed by Nikolay Kim, who is also a senior software engineer at Microsoft, though the Actix project is not an official Microsoft project. Actix Web is based on Actix, a framework for Rust based on the Actor model, also developed by Kim.

The web framework is important to the Rust community partly because it addresses a common use case (development web applications) and partly because of its outstanding performance. For some tests, Acitx tops the Techempower benchmarks.

The project is open source and while it is popular, there has been some unhappiness among users about its use of “unsafe” code. In Rust, there is the concept of safe and unsafe. Safe code is protected from common bugs (and more importantly, security vulnerabilities) arising from issues like variables which point to uninitialized memory, or variables which are used after the memory allocated to them has been freed, or attempting to write data to a variable which exceeds the memory allocated. Code in Rust is safe by default, but the language also supports unsafe code, which can be useful for interoperability or to improve performance.

Actix is top of the Techempower benchmarks on some tests

There is extensive use of unsafe code in Actix, leading to debate about what should be fixed. Kim was not always receptive to proposed changes. Most recently, developer Sergey Davidoff posted about code which “violates memory safety by handing out multiple mutable references to the same data, which can lead to, eg, a use-after-free vulnerability.”

Davidoff also stated that: “I have reported the issue to the maintainers, but they have refused to investigate it,” referring to a bug report which Kim deleted.

Debate on this matter on the Reddit Rust forum became heated and personal, the key issue being not so much the existence of real or potential vulnerabilities, but Kim’s habit of ignoring or deleting some reports. Kim decided to quit. On January 17th, he posted an “Actix project postmortem”, defending his position and complaining about the community response.

“Be[ing] a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You[‘re] alway[s] face[d] with rude[ness] and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do homework and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help. … You could notice after each unsafe shitstorm, i started to spend less and less time with the community. … Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well. I am done with open source.”

Kim said that he did not ignore or delete issues arbitrarily, but only because he felt he had a better or more creative solution than the one proposed – while also acknowledging that the “removing issue was a stupid idea.” He also threatened to “make [Actix] repos private and then delete them.”

Over on the official Actix forum, he said he was “highly sceptical about fork viability” perhaps because, at least according to him, “no one showed any sign of project architecture understanding.”

So long, and good luck

Since then, matters have improved. The Github repository was restored and Kim said:

I realized, a lot of people depend on actix. And it would be unfair to just delete repos. I promote @JohnTitor to project leader. He did very good job helping me for the last year. I hope new community of developers emerge. And good luck!

In addition, Kim has started winning support from many community members, as evidenced by a letter with over 100 signatories thanking him and stating: “We are extremely disappointed at the level of abuse directed towards you.”

The episode demonstrates that expert developers are often not expert in managing the human relations aspect of projects that can become significant. It also shows how some contributors and users do not practice best behaviour in online interactions, forgetting the extent of the work done by volunteers and for which, it’s worth noting, they have paid nothing.

Positive recent developments may mean that Actix development continues, that bugs and security vulnerabilities are fixed, and that its community gets a better handle on how to proceed constructively. ®

Source: ‘I am done with open source’: Developer of Rust Actix web framework quits, appoints new maintainer • The Register

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

Revving up the immune system

This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn’t also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system’s inability to eliminate tumor cells isn’t only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It’s also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells. A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a “cold” immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a “hot” one that is able to attack a tumor.

[…]

To check whether something similar might be happening in humans, the researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn’t get the flu.

[…]

the researchers obtained this year’s flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.

Oddly, this wasn’t true for every flu vaccine. Some vaccines contain chemicals that enhance the immune system’s memory, promoting the formation of a long-term response to pathogens (called adjuvants). When a vaccine containing one of these chemicals was used, the immune system wasn’t stimulated to limit the tumors’ growth.

This suggests that it’s less a matter of stimulating the immune system and more an issue of triggering it to attack immediately. But this is one of the things that will need to be sorted out with further study.

[…]

Source: Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it | Ars Technica

The study, published in Lancet Public Health on Monday, is a review of existing research that looked at how commonly traumatic brain injuries happen among people. It specifically included studies that also took into account people’s housing situation. These studies involved more than 11,000 people who were fully or partially homeless at the time and living in the U.S., UK, Japan, or Canada. And 26 of the 38 originally reviewed studies were included in a deeper meta-analysis.

Taken as a whole, the review found that around 53 percent of homeless people had experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) at some time in their lives. Among people who reported how seriously they had been hurt, about a quarter had experienced a moderate to severe head injury. Compared to the average person, the authors noted, homeless people are over twice as likely to have experienced any sort of head injuries and nearly 10 times as likely to have had a moderate to severe one.

“TBI is prevalent among homeless and marginally housed individuals and might be a common factor that contributes to poorer health and functioning than in the general population,” the researchers wrote.

Source: Most People Experiencing Homelessness Have Had a Traumatic Brain Injury, Study Finds

I have spent the better half of the last two years trying to convince companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, DeepMind, and OpenAI that they need to hire philosophers.

My colleagues and I—a small collective of academics that make up a program called Transformations of the Human at the Los Angeles-based think tank called the Berggruen Institute—think that the research carried out by these companies has been disrupting the very concept of the human that we—in the West particularly—have taken for granted for almost half a millennium.

It’s not only that, though. These companies have helped create realities that we can no longer navigate with the old understanding of what it means to be human.

We need new ones—for ourselves, so that we are able to navigate and regulate the new worlds we live in, but also for the engineers who create tech products, tools, and platforms, so that they can live up to the philosophical stakes of their work.

To make that possible, we need philosophers and artists working alongside computer and software engineers.

[…]

I realized that fields like AI and microbiome research or synthetic biology not only undermine the historic way we think of the human—they also allow for new possibilities for understanding the world.

It suddenly dawned on me that I could look at each one of these fields, not just AI and the microbiome, but also synthetic biology, biogeochemistry, and others, as if they were a kind of philosophical laboratory for re-articulating our reality.

[…]

We are living in an era of a major, most far-reaching philosophical event: A radical re-articulation of what it is to be human and of the relation between humans, nature, and technology.

Yet at present, no one really formally talks about this philosophical quality of tech. Hence, no one attends to it, with the inevitable consequence that the sweeping re-articulation of the human unfolds around us in a haphazard, entirely unconscientious way.

Shouldn’t we try to change this?

When I shared my enthusiasm with my colleagues in academia, I found that what was exciting to me was an unbearable provocation for many others.

My suggestion that the question concerning the human has migrated into the fields of the natural sciences and engineering—that is, into fields not concerned with the traditional study of the human and humanity at all—were received as threat to academics in the arts. If humans are no longer more than nature or machines, then what are the arts even good for?

[…]

Today, we have philosophy and art teams at Element AI, Facebook, and Google, and also at AI labs at MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford. Our researchers are in regular conversation with DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

[…]

What we need now is a completely new model for an educational institution, one that can produce a new kind of practitioner.

We need a workforce that thinks differently, and that can understand engineering, from AI to microbiome research to synthetic biology to geoengineering and many other fields—as philosophical and artistic practices that ceaselessly re-invent the human.

Almost every month, you’ll likely read about another billion-dollar endowment for a new tech school. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with this—I agree we always need better, smarter, tech.

On the other hand, these tech schools tend to reproduce the old division of labor between the faculty of arts and the faculties of science and engineering. That is, they tend to understand tech as just tech and not as the philosophical and artistic field that it is.

What we need are not so much tech schools, as institutions that combine philosophy, art, and technology into one integrated curriculum.

Source: Why tech companies need to hire philosophers — Quartz

I completely agree with Mr Tobias Rees

This article is absolutely worth reading in full.

a recent experiment by Microsoft Japan suggests with a 4-day workweek we may be more productive if we work less.

In particular, it shows that a shorter workweek can actually impact productivity positively.

In August this year, Microsoft Japan ran an experiment where for one month they had a 3 day weekend, taken Friday off. This was paid leave and did not impact the worker’s usual vacation allocation.

Some results were predictable.

Workers were happier and took  25.4 percent fewer days off during the month.

There were also savings from spending less time at work.  23.1 percent less electricity was used and 58.7 percent fewer pages were printed.

More importantly from a bottom-line standpoint, however, productivity went up 39.9%, as fewer and shorter meetings were held, often virtually rather than in person.

In the end, the project had 92.1 percent employee approval, suggesting workers were happy with getting more done in less time.

The trial involved 2,300 employees, and Microsoft is looking to repeat it next summer.

Source: Microsoft finds workers are more productive with a 4-day workweek

Elizabeth Warren has taken an attention-getting approach to attacking Facebook’s recent announcement that it won’t fact-check politicians’ posts. She’s running an ad on the social network that deliberately contains a falsehood.

“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election,” reads the ad, which Warren also tweeted out Saturday. The ad immediately corrects itself but says it’s making a point. “What Zuckerberg *has* done is given Trump free rein to lie on his platform,” it says, “and then pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.”

Neither Facebook nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.

Late last month, Facebook said it exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking process and that that’s been the policy for more than a year. The company treats speech from politicians “as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard,” Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, said at the time.

“We don’t believe … that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” Clegg added.

Earlier this week, Facebook told Joe Biden’s presidential campaign that it wouldn’t remove an ad by Trump’s reelection campaign despite assertions that the ad contains misinformation about Biden. The 30-second video said Biden had threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine unless officials there fired the prosecutor investigating a company that employed Biden’s son.

At the time, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said the ads were accurate. But Factcheck.org noted that while Biden did threaten to withhold US money from Ukraine, there’s no evidence he did this to help his son, which is what the Facebook ad implied. Factcheck.org also said there’s no evidence Biden’s son was ever under investigation and that Biden and the US weren’t alone in pressuring Ukraine to fire the prosecutor, who was widely seen as corrupt.

Responding to Facebook’s refusal to pull the ad, Biden spokesman T.J. Ducklo said at the time that  “the spread of objectively false information to influence public opinion poisons the public discourse and chips away at our democracy. It is unacceptable for any social media company to knowingly allow deliberately misleading material to corrupt its platform.”

And Warren tweeted then that Facebook was “deliberately allowing a candidate to intentionally lie to the American people.”

Warren has called for the breakup of Facebook and other big tech companies, saying in part that they wield too much influence. Other lawmakers have called for Facebook and rival platforms to be regulated as a way of addressing concerns about the spread of fake news, among other things.

Source: Warren runs a false Facebook ad to protest false Facebook ads – CNET

And who decides what the definition of a politician is?

GitHub is really good at visualizing burnout. pic.twitter.com/OdncS2UK66

— Jonnie Hallman (@destroytoday) October 6, 2019

And it’s something becoming more and more common among open source developers.

The annual Misery Index ranks the most and least miserable countries, based on four economic factors—unemployment, inflation, lending rates, and GDP growth.

Source: Visualizing The Most Miserable Countries in the World

Source: The rise of social media – Our World in Data

An excellent resource, but the most fascinating I thought shows that technology adoption for most technologies since the 30s has been just as fast for most products.

A study out of Texas State University attempted to determine the number of available horticultural community service opportunities for individuals completing community service hours per their probation or parole requirements, and whether that brand of community service generates a calculable offset against the common nature of repeat offenses for an inmate population once released.

[…]

The United States currently incarcerates the greatest percentage of its population compared with any other nation in the world. Although the world average rate of incarceration is 166 individuals per 100,000, the US average is 750 per 100,000. And recidivism is a predictable factor of our criminal justice system.

Recidivism is the repetition of criminal behavior and reimprisonment of an offender and is one of the reasons for large inmate populations in the United States. Research tracked a total of 404,638 prisoners across 30 states for a span of 5 years and found 67.8% of prisoners released reoffended within 3 years and a total of 76.6% reoffended within 5 years of being released. One third of those offenders were arrested within the first 6 months of being released.

Holmes added, “Further researching the role plants play on positively impacting an individual’s life or decision to productively redirect their behavior has the potential to greatly benefit our society as a whole, long-term.”

Past studies have shown that certain educational and rehabilitation efforts have helped to reduce a return to a life of crime. As a means of education and vocational rehabilitation, horticultural programs have been introduced into detention facilities across the United States. Many prisoners have participated in horticultural activities such as harvesting and maintaining their own vegetable gardens as a means of providing food for the institution, which can also serve as skill development for a means of earning income once released back into society.

[…]

In investigating the different types of community service opportunities available to offenders, Holmes and Waliczek found there were 52 different agencies available as options for community service during the time of the study. Of the 52 community service agencies, 25 of them provided horticultural work options.

The results and information gathered support the notion that horticultural activities can play an important role in influencing an offender’s successful reentry into society. The researchers found that individuals who engaged in horticultural programs demonstrated the lowest rate of recidivism over all other categories of released inmates.

Holmes interjected, “It was indeed notable the study found that those individuals who completed their community service requirements in a horticultural setting were less likely to recidivate when compared to those who completed their community service in a non-horticultural setting.”

She further added, “I plan on continuing this research and studying the overall benefits of horticulture on the well-being and recidivism rates of both incarcerated juvenile and adult offenders on a larger scale.”

Source: Combating prison recidivism with plants

In the mid-1950s, domesticated cats in Minamata, Japan mysteriously began to convulse and fall into the bay. The people of Minamata took on similar symptoms shortly after, losing their ability to speak, move, and think.

Chisso Corp., a Japanese chemical company, had dumped more than 600 tons of mercury into the bay between 1932 and 1968 via the company’s wastewater. 1,784 people were slowly killed over the years while doctors scrambled to find the cause of the deaths that shared uncanny symptoms.

The Minamata Bay disease is a neurological illness where methylmercury poisoning causes long-term impairment of the central nervous system. The Minamata Convention on Mercury emerged in early 2013 as an international environmental treaty aiming to limit global mercury pollution, with 112 countries as current parties. Although the Environmental Protection Agency and other government organizations worldwide have since limited mercury that enters surface waters from power utilities and other corporations, this toxin has a new and powerful avenue to the human brain: marine plastic pollution.

“The concentration of mercury in the surface level of the ocean is probably three or four times higher today than it was 500 years ago,” said Dr. Carl Lamborg, an associate professor from the ocean sciences department at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Methylmercury makes its journey to our dinner plate up the food chain from the marine ecosystem’s smallest organisms—phytoplankton and zooplankton—to fish and humans.

Dr. Katlin Bowman, a postdoctoral research scholar at UCSC, is researching how mercury enters the food chain. Through methylation, mercury in the ocean becomes methylmercury, an organic form of the element. It is far more dangerous because it easily concentrates while traveling up the food chain. Heavy metal toxins naturally adhere to plastics in the water, contributing to the mercury pollution issue by creating extremely concentrated “fish food” bombs of dangerous chemicals, she said.

“Plastic has a negative charge, mercury has a positive charge. Opposites attract so the mercury sticks,” Bowman said.

Microplastics are more concentrated in methylmercury as a result of their greater surface area, trapping toxic particles in the many folds and tight spaces.

“Microplastics are defined as a piece of plastic that’s less than five millimeters in size,” said Abigail Barrows, a marine research scientist from College of the Atlantic. “They cover a whole suite of things.” These include microbeads in personal care products and microfibers that break off of clothing. As plastic bags, bottles, and utensils degrade over time, they become microplastics.

“If microplastics increase the rate of methylmercury production, then microplastics in the environment could indirectly be increasing the amount of mercury that accumulates in fish,” Bowman said.

Two key concepts worsen methylmercury’s impact: bioaccumulation and biomagnification.

With bioaccumulation, methylmercury never leaves the body, instead building up over time.

“The longer the fish lives, it just keeps eating mercury in its diet, and it doesn’t lose it, so it ends up concentrating very high levels of mercury in its tissues,” said Dr. Nicholas Fisher, distinguished professor at State University of New York Stony Brook. “The methylmercury also biomagnifies, which means that the concentration is higher in the predator than it is in the prey.”

According to the European Commission’s Mercury Issue Briefing of 2012, top-level predators have more than 100,000 times more methylmercury stored in their system compared to their surrounding waters.

However, our focus should be on the plastic pollution issue rather than mercury discharge.

“The mercury bounces back and forth between the air and the ocean very easily,” Lamborg said. While this toxin cycles through the environment in regular cycles, plastics serve as a magnet for mercury, prolonging its lifetime in the ocean and funneling it into the mouths of plankton and fish. When people eat affected seafood, they eat the concentrated methylmercury as well.

The Minamata Bay Disaster has already spelled out the horrific effects of mercury poisoning in all of its nitty-gritty glory. The EPA and other international agencies have passed regulations since the 1970s, such as the Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act, that have significantly driven surface water mercury emissions downward. However, according to a report published by Science in 2015, the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the ocean each year ensure that the problem will only swell.

“The plastic produced is on trend to double in the next 20 years,” Barrows said. “So, I think that’s where we need to focus on in terms of worrying about our environment.”

Source: Marine plastic pollution hides a neurological toxin in our food