A SECRET document shows in scary detail how Facebook can exploit the insecurities of teenagers using the platform.
Nick Whighamnews.com.au@NWWHIGHAM
FACEBOOK has come under fire over revelations it is targeting potentially vulnerable youths who “need a confidence boost” to facilitate predatory advertising practices.
The allegation was revealed this morning by The Australian which obtained internal documents from the social media giant which reportedly show how Facebook can exploit the moods and insecurities of teenagers using the platform for the potential benefit of advertisers.
The confidential document dated this year detailed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that an open and free internet is vital for America in the 21st century.
During a speech at the Newseum on Wednesday, Pai said he plans to roll back the net-neutrality regulations and to restore the light-touch regulatory system established by President Bill Clinton and Congressional Republicans by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Net neutrality passed under former Democrat Tom Wheeler’s FCC in 2010. The rule, known as the Open Internet Order, reclassified the internet as a public monopoly. Critics chided the rule, stating that it would diminish the freedom of the internet. Proponents argue that the regulations prevent Internet service providers from discriminating against content providers.
Chairman Pai said during his speech that the internet prospered before net neutrality was enacted. Pai said, “The internet is the greatest free market success in American history.”
Breitbart News asked the FCC chief why he thinks that net neutrality is a problem, and why we must eliminate the rule. He said:
Number one there was no problem to solve, the internet wasn’t broken in 2015. In that situation, it doesn’t seem me that preemptive market-wide regulation is necessary. Number two, even if there was a problem, this wasn’t the right solution to adopt. These Title II regulations were inspired during the Great Depression to regulate Ma Bell which was a telephone monopoly. And the broadband market we have is very different from the telephone market of 1934. So, it seems to me that if you have 4,462 internet service providers and if a few of them are behaving in a way that is anticompetitive or otherwise bad for consumer welfare then you take targeted action to deal with that. You don’t declare the entire market anticompetitive and treat everyone as if they are a monopolist.
Going forward we are going to propose eliminating that Title II classification and figure out the right way forward. The bottom line is, everyone agrees on the principles of a free and open internet what we disagree with is how many regulations are needed to preserve the internet.
Apple CEO Tim Cook once personally told Uber CEO Travis Kalanick that the Uber app violated Apple’s privacy rules, and threatened to remove Uber from Apple’s App Store, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The issue in the reported early-2015 meeting was that Uber had a system to identify iPhones after they had been wiped and the Uber app had been deleted — something Uber was doing to combat driver fraud in China.
Ethical lapses at some of the tech industry’s biggest companies suggest a chilling reality of what really matters in the world’s most rollicking economy.
It has been said that Silicon Valley, or the 50 or so square-mile area extending from San Francisco to the base of the peninsula, has overseen the creation of more wealth than any place in the history of mankind. It’s made people richer than the oil industry; it has created more money than the Gold Rush. Silicon chips, lines of code, and rectangular screens have even minted more wealth than religious wars.
Wealthy societies, indeed, have their own complicated incentive structures and mores. But they do often tend, as any technological entrepreneur will be quick to remind you, to distribute value across numerous income levels, in a scaled capacity. The Ford line, for instance, may have eventually minted some serious millionaires in Detroit, but it also made transportation cheaper, helped drive down prices on countless consumer goods, and facilitated new trade routes and commercial opportunities. Smartphones, or any number of inventive modern apps or other software products, are no different. Sure, they throw off a lot of money to the geniuses who came up with them, and the people who got in at the ground floor. But they also make possible innumerable other opportunities, financial and otherwise, for their millions of consumers.
Silicon Valley is, in its own right, a dynasty. Instead of warriors or military heroes, it has nerds and people in half-zip sweaters. But it is becoming increasingly likely that the Valley might go down in history not only for its wealth, but also for creating more tone deaf people than any other ecosystem in the history of the world.
The social network says it had been “combating” the operation for six months.
Facebook famously boasts it has 1.86 billion users who visit the social network every month. It looks like that number shrank on Friday.
The company, which previously announced it’s cracking down on fake accounts, said it’s disrupted a major spam operation being run out of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.
“The apparent intent of the campaign was to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with popular publisher Pages on our platform, after which point they would send spam,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook technical program manager wrote in a blog post.
“We found that most of this activity was generated not through traditional mass account creation methods, but by more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation,” Shaik wrote. “By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people.”
The number of authentic users matters for Facebook because the company charges marketers and advertisers to reach the most eyeballs. Facebook didn’t reveal the number of accounts affected by this crackdown.
Doyle Rice , USA TODAYPublished 2:39 p.m. ET March 30, 2017 | Updated 6 hours ago
It might be streaming by on April Fools’ Day, but this comet is no holiday prank.
On Saturday, the inelegantly named comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák will make its closest flyby of Earth since its discovery in 1858.
There’s no need to worry about it hitting Earth: The comet will zoom past at a safe distance of around 13.2 million miles, about 50 times the moon’s distance, EarthSky.org reports.
Fewer than 1 percent of papers published in scientific journals follow the scientific method, according to research by Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong.
Professor Armstrong, who co-founded the peer-reviewed Journal of Forecasting in 1982 and the International Journal of Forecasting in 1985, made the claim in a presentation about what he considers to be “alarmism” from forecasters over man-made climate change.
“We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong in his presentation, which can be watched in full below. “People just don’t do it.”
Ask a Question: The scientific method starts when you ask a question about something that you observe: How, What, When, Who, Which, Why, or Where?
For a science fair project some teachers require that the question be something you can measure, preferably with a number.
Your Question
Do Background Research: Rather than starting from scratch in putting together a plan for answering your question, you want to be a savvy scientist using library and Internet research to help you find the best way to do things and insure that you don’t repeat mistakes from the past.
Background Research Plan
Finding Information
Bibliography
Research Paper
Construct a Hypothesis: A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work. It is an attempt to answer your question with an explanation that can be tested. A good hypothesis allows you to then make a prediction:
“If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen.”
State both your hypothesis and the resulting prediction you will be testing. Predictions must be easy to measure.
Variables
Variables for Beginners
Hypothesis
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment: Your experiment tests whether your prediction is accurate and thus your hypothesis is supported or not. It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. You conduct a fair test by making sure that you change only one factor at a time while keeping all other conditions the same.
You should also repeat your experiments several times to make sure that the first results weren’t just an accident.
Experimental Procedure
Materials List
Conducting an Experiment
Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion: Once your experiment is complete, you collect your measurements and analyze them to see if they support your hypothesis or not.
Scientists often find that their predictions were not accurate and their hypothesis was not supported, and in such cases they will communicate the results of their experiment and then go back and construct a new hypothesis and prediction based on the information they learned during their experiment. This starts much of the process of the scientific method over again. Even if they find that their hypothesis was supported, they may want to test it again in a new way.
Data Analysis & Graphs
Conclusions
Communicate Your Results: To complete your science fair project you will communicate your results to others in a final report and/or a display board. Professional scientists do almost exactly the same thing by publishing their final report in a scientific journal or by presenting their results on a poster or during a talk at a scientific meeting. In a science fair, judges are interested in your findings regardless of whether or not they support your original hypothesis.
Then next time you answer your smartphone and press it firmly to your face, consider this: Are you touching fecal matter right now?
Quite possibly. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found fecal matter on one out of every six smartphones in a 2011 study. Add to that the work of Charles Gerba, a famed University of Arizona microbiologist who found cell phones carry 10 times the bacteria of most toilet seats.
Familiar items we touch every day, from cellphones to kitchen sinks, swarm with far more germs than our toilets. And while 80 percent of infections come from what we touch, we rarely clean these ordinary items as often as our porcelain thrones.
RHS & Network for Responsible Public Policy Host Climate Forum
Forum at RHS considers climate policy Climate Crisis Panel Discussion March 23 2017 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM Location: RHS Campus Center
Reader , “Relentless advancement of an ideological agenda. Politics, propaganda, “intellectual” intimidation, naked cooptation of the previously respectable apparatus of scientific discovery and exposition. Like-minded zealots bent on transforming this country and the world according to their twisted, godless mindset. We must continue to fight this scourge.”
Climate Change the new Religious Cult
Posted Dec 16, 2016 by Martin Armstrong
This is the picture that was used to start the global warming movement that man supposedly created. Of course, since the weather is not consistently warmer, they changed the term from “global warming” to “climate change.” They pointed to everything from pollution, cutting down trees, exhaust from cars and buses, and even attributed it to cows farting, but they never provided any historical proof of real climate change outside of a normal cycle.
I lived in London in 1985 when the buses spewed out black smoke. It was horrible and hard to breath. That is the kind of pollution that we all want to eliminate. We want clean water and clean air — absolutely. But cutting down trees and diesel-spewing buses do not change the historic climate cycle — it just makes where you live nasty.
Science was turned on its head after a discovery in 1772 near Vilui, Siberia, of an intact frozen woolly rhinoceros, which was followed by the more famous discovery of a frozen mammoth in 1787. You may be shocked, but these discoveries of frozen animals with grass still in their stomachs set in motion these two schools of thought since the evidence implied you could be eating lunch and suddenly find yourself frozen, only to be discovered by posterity.
Amazon is sticking to its guns in the fight to protect customer data. The tech titan has filed a motion to quash the search warrant for recordings from an Amazon Echo in the trial of James Andrew Bates, accused of murdering friend Victor Collins in Bentonville, Arkansas in November 2015. And it’s arguing as part of that motion that the responses of Alexa, the voice of the artificially intelligent speaker, has First Amendment rights.
The case first came to light in December, when it emerged Amazon was contesting a warrant to provide audio from the Echo device covering a 48-hour period from November 21 through 22 2015, alongside subscriber and account information. Amazon handed over the subscriber information and purchase history, but in its 90-page argument against the warrant, filed late last week and published in full below, Amazon said recorded audio should have First Amendment protections and so it wanted the warrant thrown out.
Not only does Amazon believe Echo users’ voice commands are protected as free speech, but also the Alexa Voice Service response. Amazon argued that requests and responses to Alexa contained details that would reveal much about the user and their interests, and so deserved protection from government. Furthermore, as Alexa responses reflect in some way both the user’s and Amazon’s speech, she’s also protected, the lawyers said.
Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.
Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans, and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps. While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges.
In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter!
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?
The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean. Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.
The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water! To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy. To heat it by a mere 1˚C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.
Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1˚C!
In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!
PUBLISHED: 21:21 EST, 11 February 2017 | UPDATED: 04:59 EST, 12 February 2017
They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.
A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.
The response has been extraordinary, with The Mail on Sunday’s disclosures reverberating around the world. There have been nearly 150,000 Facebook ‘shares’ since last Sunday, an astonishing number for a technically detailed piece, and extensive coverage in media at home and abroad.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
1Feb – by Josh Noble – 37 – In Facebook Studies Family Studies Psychological Studies Relationship Studies Social Media Studies Technology Studies
Could social media be making people more anti-social?
Many people who use social media may go to desperate lengths to receive “likes” from followers, the study found.
The social media boom continues to make it easier than ever to stay in touch with loved ones in real time. But with the flourishing of new technology and the ability to be connected to anyone and everyone at any time, real-life human interactions could be suffering a heavy blow.
A recent global study conducted by Kasperksy Lab reveals that social media users are interacting less face-to-face than in the past because of this newfound ability to constantly communicate and stay in touch online. In the study, researchers found that about one-third of people communicate less with their parents (31%), partners (23%), children (33%) and friends (35%) because they can simply follow them on social media. This may be doing more harm than good, in a world where editing one’s life to make it appear perfect is more appealing than naturally existing.
“Under certain circumstances they perceive their online communication as ‘hyper-personal communication’ and thus they can misread and over-interpret the messages on social media,” said Dr. Astrid Carolus, Media Psychologist at the University of Würzburg. “We feel especially close, we blind out the rather negative, focus on the possible positive intentions behind a message, and over-interpret.”
The study was conducted between October and November of last year among 16,750 participants, split evenly between men and women at least 16 years old from 18 countries, each of whom was surveyed online.
When your morning coffee’s kick is wearing off and that afternoon slump starts to hit you, go and take a nap to keep your mind running properly.
The idea of a siesta is nothing new, particularly in hotter countries like Spain, and researchers have long studied the benefits of these post-lunch catnaps. A new study pinpoints the optimal amount of time seniors should nap in the afternoon for the benefit of their mental function: about one hour.
Findings in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society were based on surveys of almost 3,000 older Chinese people about their napping habits and data of their cognitive function. Those who napped for a moderate amount of time after lunch — most of them for close to 60 minutes — showed “better overall cognition” as compared to both people who didn’t nap and people who napped for periods that were longer than 90 minutes or shorter than 30 minutes. Based on the results, those moderately long naps “may be an important part of optimizing cognition in elderly adults,” the study suggested, and thus decreasing “the risk of functional dependence and poor quality of life.”
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