A.I. Kung Fu

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Facebook, Alarmed by Discord Over Vote Count, Is Said to Be Taking Action

New measures would slow down the flow of information and make election misinformation less visible, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

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'Stop the Steal' Facebook Group Is Taken Down

In its short life span, it was one of the fastest growing groups in Facebook’s history and a hub for those trying to delegitimize the election.

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Twitter says Trump's special treatment around offensive or misleading content rule violations will expire in January if he loses the presidency (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Twitter says Trump's special treatment around offensive or misleading content rule violations will expire in January if he loses the presidency — - For now, violating posts get warning label, not removal — But ‘world leader’ newsworthiness rules wouldn't apply

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Wednesday, November 4, 2020

False News Targeting Latinos Trails the Election

Rampant falsehoods evolved online on Wednesday, intended to make Spanish speakers question the unfolding election results and believe that President Trump was being robbed of victory.

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Best Black Friday TV deals available now and coming soon, starting at $120 - CNET

It's the best time of the year to save on new TVs.

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The best headphone gifts for the holidays - CNET

Who wouldn't appreciate a good pair of headphones as a gift this holiday season? Here's a wide selection of top wireless models.

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Walmart's Black Friday sale is happening now. Get $99 AirPods, HP gaming laptop for $450 and more - CNET

The retailer is spreading out its best savings over three events dubbed Black Friday Deals for Days, and starting with an all-time low price on AirPods.

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Uber and Lyft's Proposition 22 passed, but that's just the beginning - CNET

"They may have won this round, but we're in this for the long haul," says ride-hail driver Cherri Murphy.

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Xbox Series X launch games: All the titles you can play on Nov. 10 - CNET

Launch is less than a week away.

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2022 VW Golf R gets more power and more tech - Roadshow

VW's most powerful hot hatch gets even more oomph for 2022.

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The best PS5 games you'll need to play - CNET

Here are our favourite PS5 games from launch day and beyond.

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Best gifts for Dad in 2020 - CNET

A collection of great gifts, from the practical to the extravagant, for a hard guy to please.

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Santa to visit virtually as Christmas grottos cancelled

Events organisers have coordinated Covid-safe video calls with Mr Claus over lockdown.

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No, Joe Biden Wasn’t Suddenly Awarded 138,000 Votes in Michigan

Screenshots of an election map suggested that 100 percent of a vote update in Michigan went to Mr. Biden. The reason: A typo that was quickly fixed.

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Facebook now says it will label posts from presidential candidates and "other individuals" who declare premature victory in individual states or overall (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Facebook now says it will label posts from presidential candidates and “other individuals” who declare premature victory in individual states or overall — Election night ended the way many experts predicted it might: with several races too close to call and President Donald Trump claiming victory anyway.

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Vendée Globe: Tech to spot sailor’s mood in tough race

The Vendée Globe solo race will see competitors face extreme conditions with little sleep.

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The Best Xbox Series X games you'll need to play - CNET

The Xbox Series X is coming soon, here are the games we're most excited about.

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Election still too close to call: How to spot misinformation while you wait for results - CNET

Without a final result from Tuesday's election, we're targets for people trying to confuse the issues.

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Now's your chance to get a Fujitsu duplex scanner for your home office for 30% off - CNET

Get the ScanSnap iX1500 Color Duplex Document Scanner for $340 and scan documents to your computer or directly to the cloud.

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The 17 best TV shows to watch on Amazon Prime Video - CNET

Looking for a great show to watch tonight? Let's round up Amazon's best gems.

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Ancient 'paper-clip squid' may have lived to be 200 - CNET

An unusual-looking underwater creature named Diplomoceras maximum existed around 68 million years ago, and new research says it lived to a ripe old age.

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31 of the best movies to see on Netflix - CNET

Not sure what to watch tonight? Here are some of the best movies Netflix has to offer.

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So How Wrong Were the Polls This Year, Really?

Pollsters spent four years preparing to better capture Trump support and avoid a repeat of 2016. Somehow, they missed it again.

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On election night and into Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook have continued to label inaccurate election posts from Trump and others (New York Times)

New York Times:
On election night and into Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook have continued to label inaccurate election posts from Trump and others — Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remained on alert as the lack of a clear election result kept the online misinformation flowing.

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YouTube says it won't remove an OAN video called "Trump won", which claims Democrats are tossing GOP ballots, but says the video undermines election confidence (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
YouTube says it won't remove an OAN video called “Trump won”, which claims Democrats are tossing GOP ballots, but says the video undermines election confidence — - Google-owned YouTube refused to take down a video that falsely claims Trump won the Presidential election and democrats committed voter fraud.

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Why counting votes in Pennsylvania is taking so long

So Election Day is over, but the election continues.

The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure?

“I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a press conference today, “We are going to accurately count every single ballot.”

“The vote count, as I’ve said many times, is never done on the day of election night. The counties are doing this accurately as quickly as they possibly can.”

Across the state, mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day are still arriving—don’t forget there have been significant postal delays—and so counting continues. The Republican state legislature declined to change Pennsylvania law, which meant that processing of over 2.5 million mail-in votes could only begin on Tuesday morning, while other states started the process much earlier. So the processing starts later, the counting starts later, and the work is greater for mail-in ballots.

“The practical labor associated with mail-in ballots has more steps than in-person voting,” said Eddie Perez, a Texas-based election administration expert with the nonpartisan OSET Institute. But, he added, “Both in human and technology features, there’s a lot of safeguards for mail-in ballots.”

Here’s a concise but thorough rundown of the counting, security, and integrity process right now in Pennsylvania:

Ballots and envelopes were sent out only to registered and verified voters who requested them.
Election officials receive the ballot and envelope within three days of Election Day—although this deadline may be challenged by Republicans.
Officials verify that each ballot is associated with the exact, eligible voter on the rolls.
Ballots are validated with voter records in exactly the same way as in-person votes.
To prevent fraud, each ballot and envelope has computer-readable codes and exact physical features like style, size, weight, and design that allow the computers to identify which specific elections, precincts, content, and additional validation information the vote applies to.
Signatures on the ballot envelopes are matched against a central database by bipartisan teams.
Envelopes are opened and paperwork removed in a specific and legally-mandated procedure.
Ballots that fail to pass these security measures are sent for further investigation, or for follow-up with the voter.

Decades of history, independent study, and these extra security steps explain why mail-in ballots are not easily susceptible to fraud, and why attempts to paint them as frail are baseless disinformation, a false narrative propagated first and foremost by the president of the United States. In decades of increasing mail-in voting around the United States, widespread fraud is nonexistent.

The Trump campaign, having now lost in the key swing state of Wisconsin, has said it will sue in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the ongoing counting of ballots, while falsely claiming victory despite many votes still remaining uncounted. Votes counted earlier in the process favor Trump, while the mail-in votes from Democratic areas that are still being counted are expected to favor Biden.

The counting in Pennsylvania could carry on through Friday.

There is one more scenario to address. Pennsylvania automatically recounts votes if the result is within 0.5%. A loser can request and pay for a recount by going to court and alleging errors in the vote count.

So far there is no reason to believe any such errors have occurred but, as has been said so many times, there is still a long way to go in Pennsylvania—and that means there may still be a long way to go for everyone.

This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.

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Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Hellscape lava planet rains rocks, suffers from supersonic winds - CNET

Earth-size exoplanet K2-141b would be a wonderful place to never ever visit.

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Trump Ally Tweets Misleading Images of Philadelphia Voting

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Intel acquires Israel-based Cnvrg.io, which operates a platform for data scientists to build and run ML models; Intel says Cnvrg.io will remain independent (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Intel acquires Israel-based Cnvrg.io, which operates a platform for data scientists to build and run ML models; Intel says Cnvrg.io will remain independent — Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations. In the latest move, TechCrunch has learned …

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Sources: China says Ant Group can't proceed with IPOs until it complies with new capital requirements and reapplies for licenses to operate nationwide (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Sources: China says Ant Group can't proceed with IPOs until it complies with new capital requirements and reapplies for licenses to operate nationwide — - Listing of Jack Ma's fintech giant was halted on Tuesday — Ma criticized regulators for stifling innovation last month

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DHS and the FBI are investigating a robocall and text campaign warning US voters to "stay safe and stay home" (Washington Post)

Washington Post:
DHS and the FBI are investigating a robocall and text campaign warning US voters to “stay safe and stay home” — A Department of Homeland Security official said the FBI was investigating the call, which, along with new robotexts that surfaced in Michigan, prompted warnings about misinformation

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European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde says the ECB is now seeking public comments on a potential digital euro (Kevin Reynolds/CoinDesk)

Kevin Reynolds / CoinDesk:
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde says the ECB is now seeking public comments on a potential digital euro — European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde Sunday announced an ECB survey of public opinion regarding the issuance of a digital euro, implying the central bank …

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Twitter bans David Icke over Covid misinformation

Mr Icke's account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter's rules on Covid misinformation.

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TikTok star Emily Canham falls foul of UK ads watchdog

Social media influencer Emily Canham is the first to be reprimanded over a video posted to TikTok.

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Projector reviews: A 4K portable and a pocket-sized device

BBC Click's Lara Lewington compares some of the latest home projectors on the market.

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Get an infrared forehead thermometers for just $11 - CNET

Take the temperature of your entire family in seconds, without reaching into anyone's mouth like a caveman.

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2022 Volkswagen Golf R revealed with even hotter hatch performance - Roadshow

The quicker, more powerful Golf R will arrive in the US in late 2021, and yes, you can still get a manual transmission.

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BTS will play the game show battle royale Fall Guys on its web series - CNET

The episode will be released on Nov. 10.

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Election 2020: Your cybersecurity questions answered - CNET

A primer on how hackers are targeting the election and what officials are doing to protect it.

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The 17 best movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video - CNET

Don't know what to watch on Amazon tonight? Let's round up some of its best gems.

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How to watch election night 2020 like a pro with a multiscreen setup - CNET

Place laptops and tablets alongside your main TV to livestream more than one view of the returns.

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The best Nintendo Switch controllers for 2020 - CNET

Save some cash while upping your stats with these Nintendo Switch gamepads.

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Save $250 on Eargo's invisible in-ear hearing aids - CNET

Plus, doctors, nurses, first responders and military can save 20%. Federal employees might qualify to get Eargo for free.

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Despite Hacking Fears, Election Day Has a Mostly Smooth Start

Plenty of hours remain. But so far, the worst-case scenarios about ransomware and other meltdowns have seemingly not come to pass.

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US Cyber Command and the NSA say they took actions against Iranian hackers in the past 2 weeks to deter election interference, but did not specify actions taken (Ellen Nakashima/Washington Post)

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
US Cyber Command and the NSA say they took actions against Iranian hackers in the past 2 weeks to deter election interference, but did not specify actions taken — U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency have taken recent actions to ensure that foreign actors do not interfere …

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Looking to improve their AR and VR offerings, tech companies are hiring Hollywood's visual artists, who are tired of their industry's working conditions (R.T. Watson/Wall Street Journal)

R.T. Watson / Wall Street Journal:
Looking to improve their AR and VR offerings, tech companies are hiring Hollywood's visual artists, who are tired of their industry's working conditions — From ‘Star Wars’ to Animoji, visual effects gurus create digital worlds meant to advance computing — Silicon Valley's biggest companies …

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Udacity raises $75M in debt funding as it says it is profitable following a pivot to enterprise services, with its education business bookings up 120% YoY in Q3 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Udacity raises $75M in debt funding as it says it is profitable following a pivot to enterprise services, with its education business bookings up 120% YoY in Q3 — Online education tools continue to see a surge of interest boosted by major changes in work and learning practices in the midst of a global health pandemic.

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Monday, November 2, 2020

NASA's Voyager 2 probe receives first commands since March, sends back a hello - CNET

We haven't been able to talk to Voyager 2 since before the pandemic.

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Baby Shark chews past Despacito to become YouTube's most viewed video ever - CNET

Baby Shark news, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, seven BILLION views, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

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The best noise-canceling true wireless earbuds for 2020 - CNET

Looking for a set of true-wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation? There are more options than just Apple's AirPods Pro.

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LEVC VN5 is a 1-ton electric van that's built like a Lotus and turns like a London taxi - Roadshow

The LEVC VN5 is related to the LEVC TX that's been carrying Londoners around town for a few years now.

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The 32 best movies to watch on Disney Plus - CNET

Looking for entertainment other than Marvel and Star Wars? Let's round up the best gems on Disney Plus.

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Best car air fresheners in 2020 - Roadshow

Whether you simply want a nice clean scent, or want to keep the car fresh for ridesharing purposes, these are our top picks.

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Best fitness trackers for 2020 - CNET

Whether you're looking for band or a watch, these four options will help kick your fitness routine into high gear.

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Volvo to bring electric motor design in-house - Roadshow

This is a big step toward the company's goal to have half its vehicle sales come from EVs in five years.

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YouTube says it will end full-day masthead ad reservations in 2021, to give "advertisers more budget flexibility", says change is not connected to the election (CNBC)

CNBC:
YouTube says it will end full-day masthead ad reservations in 2021, to give “advertisers more budget flexibility”, says change is not connected to the election — - YouTube will discontinue full-day reservations for its masthead ads beginning in 2021.

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PayPal reports Q3 revenue of $5.46B, up 25% YoY, as it adds 15.2M net new active accounts; Venmo's total processed payment volume rises 61% YoY to $44B (Natalie Gagliordi/ZDNet)

Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
PayPal reports Q3 revenue of $5.46B, up 25% YoY, as it adds 15.2M net new active accounts; Venmo's total processed payment volume rises 61% YoY to $44B — PayPal said it processed a record-setting $247 billion in total payment volume during the quarter. — PayPal on Monday delivered …

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Twitter says, in a new filing, that a board committee formed this spring recommended that current management structure remain in place with Jack Dorsey as CEO (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
Twitter says, in a new filing, that a board committee formed this spring recommended that current management structure remain in place with Jack Dorsey as CEO — Elliott Management initiated the review of company's leadership in the spring — Jack Dorsey's job as CEO of Twitter Inc. appears safe.

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Stensul, which aims to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16M Series B led by USVP (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Stensul, which aims to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16M Series B led by USVP — Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. — When the company raised its $7 million Series …

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Treyarch and Raven reveal more about Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War’s campaign and Zombies

The Fracture Jaw mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops -- Cold War.

Treyarch and Raven Software revealed more details about the Call of Duty: Black Ops -- Cold War single-player campaign and Zombies mode.Read More

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Be a 'secret agent' and other new ways to exercise

Turning a run into an adventure is just one of the innovations in the exercise industry.

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Best online will makers for 2020 - CNET

Affordable, quick and painless.

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Where to get your flu shot for cheap or free in 2020 - CNET

Yes, you really need it -- here's where to get it.

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The best movies to watch on Disney Plus for Thanksgiving - CNET

Stuffed with turkey and ready for a wholesome movie? Here are options for everyone.

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6 of the best beauty tools to gift this year - CNET

Give your beauty-obsessed friends and family gifts they will love this year.

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Facebook, Twitter plan to warn you if politicians prematurely declare victory - CNET

The social networks say new labels will appear at the bottom of posts if they contain premature election victory claims.

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AWS introduces new GPU-equipped P4 instances, powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPUs, offering 2.5x DL performance over P3 (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
AWS introduces new GPU-equipped P4 instances, powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPUs, offering 2.5x DL performance over P3 — AWS today announced the launch of its newest GPU-equipped instances. Dubbed P4, these new instances are launching a decade …

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How social media sites plan to handle premature election declarations

The election results will start to come in as early as 7pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more votes processed, more counts updated. But we won’t have the final result that night.

This isn’t unusual: In the US, counting votes and officially certifying them always goes on longer than Election Day, and the coronavirus means the counting will probably take longer than that. But on Sunday, Axios reported that President Trump intends to prematurely declare victory if it looks like he’s leading in the early returns, even if there are still millions of votes left to be counted. He has denied this specific claim, but it is in line with his long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election, and matches his promise to use lawyers to stop ballot counting in Pennsylvania as soon as polls close—even though the state will still have many mail-in ballots left to count and report.

So what exactly will happen if a candidate prematurely declares victory before the contest is truly over?

Social media

This the front line. Any premature declaration will likely hit American networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube first, so the way these platforms handle this kind of activity will inform what happens next. Those three sites are planning to use labeling to deal with this kind of disinformation.

Twitter, the president’s social media platform of choice, says it will prominently label misleading tweets about election results from candidates, as well as any viral tweet. Disputed announcements will be met with a label that says “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”

To confirm results, the company will be leaning on state and local election officials as well as major national news outlets with dedicated election coverage desks. At least two sources will have to confirm the results of a race before a candidate can tweet about results without a warning label being applied.

YouTube, which has been a top campaign advertising battleground, will place an information panel on videos prematurely declaring victory. That will link to Google’s election results feature, which is being produced in partnership with the Associated Press.

“We’ll also continue to raise up authoritative content from news organizations and reduce the spread of borderline election misinformation,” said Google spokesperson Ivy Choi. “Additionally, if a piece of content, in the course of prematurely declaring victory, misleads viewers about voting or encourages interference in democratic processes, we will remove that in accordance with our community guidelines.”

When the polls close, all Google’s ad platforms—including YouTube and its search engine—will pause ads that reference the 2020 election. That may cut off another potential avenue for disinformation across the company’s internet empire.

Facebook is placing its own hopes in labels as well, including a preemptive notification in news feeds to follow authoritative news outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press for election results. Facebook’s normal response to false news is to reduce its spread on the network and partner with fact-checkers for additional labeling.

Elsewhere, TikTok’s policy reduces the visibility of posts prematurely claiming victory and is working on an “expedited” schedule with fact checking partners around Election Day.

This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.

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Looking for Job Advice? Try TikTok

Career coaches are watching their follower counts soar on the short-form video app in the midst of a global recession.

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What to Expect From Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on Election Day

The sites are key conduits for communication and information. Here’s how they plan to handle the challenges facing them before, on and after Tuesday.

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How to talk to kids and teens about misinformation

Tomorrow is Election Day in the US, which means we’ve reached peak political saturation: Americans are being hit with constant news alerts, a torrent of punditry and campaign ads on television, and even warring yard signs. The stakes are high, and we’re all struggling to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Kids and teens are no different. Being young has never been easy, but it’s especially tough when social media, television programs, and maybe even the adults in your life often twist truth into misinformation.

Here are some tips for grownups and young people alike for how to talk with someone about misinformation and make sure the information you’re getting and sharing is true.

How to talk to kids about misinformation

We don’t know much about how kids are affected by conspiracy theories and misinformation. “There is so little research examining conspiracy beliefs in younger people,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and the mother of two teenagers. The literature has made clear that more education helps shield people against misinformation, and that same logic probably applies to kids, who may be likelier to believe misinformation the younger they are. Douglas is developing a psychometric scale to measure conspiracy theory belief in adolescents, but until then, we won’t quite know how kids take in misinformation—which makes fighting against it more difficult.

Be age appropriate. Not all kids are ready to handle the graphic details of George Floyd’s murder or the systemic racism underlying it, for example. Nor should they be if they’re younger than tween-age, says Tanner Higgin, the director of education editorial strategy at CommonSense Media. “For kids under seven, don’t involve them in political discussions or worrying about issues,” he says. Younger kids need to know they are safe and parents are keeping them safe, and worrying them—especially during a pandemic, when they have less contact with their friends—will backfire.

That said, don’t sugarcoat. If you’ve got a particularly precocious, mature kid who’s asking pointed questions and can digest information without spiraling into anxiety and worry, be clear and honest. Lying won’t help kids who will undoubtedly find out the truth elsewhere. “Even toddlers can understand how not telling the truth, or basing decisions on bad information, can be harmful,” says Peter Adams, the senior vice president at the News Literacy Project. “They can also understand foundational journalistic concepts like fairness or the importance of accuracy. You just need to tailor the examples or themes you employ to make this real to them.”

Try introducing a “lite” conspiracy theory. This might go against logic, but Douglas says that doing so is important, especially for more gullible little ones: “Once they believe in conspiracy theories, these beliefs are difficult to correct.” Protect against that by introducing a weak version of the misinformation before they’re exposed to it in the real world, and debunking it with them. This helps kids understand what’s problematic about the reasoning, so when a more persuasive conspiracy theory comes along, they’re able to step back and question it.

How to fight misinformation at any age

Remember that you, too, can fall for misinformation. Yes, even you. “A lot of teens—particularly those who are tech savvy—think that they’re too sharp to fall for misinformation so they don’t have to worry about it,” Adams says. But it bears repeating: No one is immune from misinformation.

Be wary of reposts. “If a claim or screenshot is crossposted to a different platform, it could be a sign that it’s missing context,” Alexa Volland says. She knows: Volland trains teen fact checkers across the United States with MediaWise’s Teen Fact Checking Network (a collaboration between the Poynter Institute, the Google News Initiative, and Facebook). She’s seen plenty of Instagram stories featuring screenshots within a screenshot, or screenshots of tweets posted within an Instagram story or TikTok. Solution: Go to the original platform and check out what that person was saying before sharing.

Even toddlers can understand how not telling the truth, or basing decisions on bad information, can be harmful.

Reverse image searches are your best friend for meme checks. On social media, people sometimes post striking images that they think are about a particular news event but actually have nothing to do with that incident. Volland says that doing a simple reverse image search is one of the easiest, fastest ways to check if a viral image is really what it purports to be.

Ask yourself who is behind the information. Look at the organization or person who originally shared the story and think about their possible incentives. What do they stand to gain from the information that was shared? They may be motivated to twist the truth in ways that can lead to misinformation.

Get proof. Be your own fact checker and try to verify the information to the best of your ability. Consider: What is the evidence? Are there links to sources? Are those sources reliable? And are multiple other sources saying the same thing? Sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact might be useful here.

Check your own bias. Hello, confirmation bias: If you have a strong reaction of “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” or nod vigorously in agreement with a post, step back. “If it’s a claim that sparks an intense emotional reaction, that can translate into validation,” Volland says. That makes us more likely to believe misinformation.

Check for context. Volland says a lot of the misinformation that goes viral on social media pulls images out of context for memes. For example, her group debunked a viral image supposedly about recent Black Lives Matter protests that misled viewers with images from protests in Ferguson, Missouri, a few years ago.

Go private. Nobody likes being attacked, whether it’s at the dinner table or in the comments section on Facebook. Talk to someone who might be misinformed privately and separately, whether it’s in DMs or in person away from others.

Seek other perspectives. “We tend to read an article up and down but it’s important to open up multiple tabs and get out of your echo chamber,” Volland says. That means going to a news source that might lean the opposite way you tend to, or reading the tweets and press releases of politicians you disagree with. It might be hard, but it will make you more well-rounded and help you know what’s true and what’s inflated.

Check the comments. The comments section will often do a lot of the work in determining whether something is true or not by pointing to alternative sources, and it can be a fast, easy way to see if the post has been flagged by others as suspicious or misleading.

Conversation means meeting the other person halfway. As we’ve said before, being kind is ultimately the most powerful way to talk about misinformation. Attacking people for their beliefs can cause them to double down. Volland suggests “swapping sources” when a news story comes under dispute. Another tip: If a person is skeptical of a news source, presenting information from that source won’t be persuasive. Volland suggests instead seeking out a source you both can agree on and finding information there.

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How Amazon’s offsets could exaggerate its progress toward “net zero” emissions

In April, Amazon announced it would contribute $10 million to a pair of projects designed to pay forest owners across the Appalachian Mountains to manage their lands in ways that capture more carbon dioxide from the air.

It is one of the first investments in the retail giant’s $100 million Right Now Climate Fund, an initiative to support the use of “nature-based climate solutions” like forests, grasslands, and wetlands to absorb more of the greenhouse gas. Amazon launched it last year in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, a conservation nonprofit, as part of its effort to reach “net zero carbon” by 2040. Together, they’re developing ways Amazon and other companies can effectively pay others to prevent or remove enough emissions to counterbalance those from their own operations.

But offsets researchers reviewed one of the proposals for the forests in the eastern US on behalf of MIT Technology Review and warned it may significantly overstate carbon reductions. Moreover, studies and articles have repeatedly highlighted similar problems with other offset programs designed to incentivize additional carbon uptake through things like trees and soil.

That’s raising real concerns as a growing list of large companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and even oil and gas giants like Shell, trumpet “net zero emissions” plans that will rely heavily on nature-based offsets to theoretically cancel out their continuing climate pollution.

Lowering landowner costs

Trees suck carbon out of the air through photosynthesis and store it in their trunks, leaves, roots, and branches. Healthy forests with larger trees generally capture more carbon than overpacked forests, where smaller trees and other vegetation compete for water, sunlight, and space. When trees fall down and rot, or are cut down and converted into products like paper, much of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with the American Forest Foundation to create a new offset protocol designed to allow owners of small tracts of wooded land to earn credits for taking steps to suck up and store more carbon.

The Family Forest Impact Foundation, an affiliate of the American Forest Foundation, will pay the landowners for carrying out two practices: promoting the growth of larger trees by harvesting less than previously planned, and thinning out competing shrubs and other vegetation. The change in practices must persist for 20 and 10 years, respectively.

The Family Forest Impact Foundation will, in turn, sell credits for the additional carbon that builds up on the properties to companies like Amazon on voluntary offset markets.

Family landowners largely haven’t participated in such markets up to now because complying with the programs can be complicated and expensive.

“Existing carbon forest markets weren’t working for small landowners,” says Christine Cadigan, director of the Family Forest Carbon Program at the American Forest Foundation. By easing some of the most cumbersome requirements, the groups believe they can reduce the costs by 75%, she says.

The organizations are working with Verra, a nonprofit that accredits offset protocols, to “review and validate” the approach. In the second Amazon-funded effort, known as Forest Carbon Co-ops, the Nature Conservancy is collaborating with the Vermont Land Trust to develop a similar program for owners of wooded lands ranging in area from 200 to 2,000 acres.

Amazon said the two programs together will draw down or prevent the release of 18.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2031. The company didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review before press time.

Over counting carbon reductions

Several outside researchers who have looked at the proposal, however, fear there are a few ways the program could overestimate the carbon reductions actually achieved.

The biggest red flag for Barbara Haya, a research fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is how the program deals with what’s known as “leakage.” This occurs when reduced timber harvests brought about by offset projects simply lead to increased harvesting elsewhere.

Haya says some earlier research suggests that more than 80% of such reductions can simply shift to harvesting on timberlands in neighboring regions or even other nations. But under the rules for the reduced harvesting practice, landowners would generally only need to account for a 10% leakage rate in their calculations.

This suggests that even if the family forest projects do draw down significant additional carbon, much of the benefit could be wiped out by larger harvests elsewhere, limiting the real-world climate benefits.

Some observers also worry about how the projects will be audited to ensure compliance.

One of the key ways the program promises to make participation less expensive is by eliminating the need for surveyors to come out and conduct detailed assessments of every project site.

Instead, the program will use an aggregation of sample plots in similar forests to figure out what would be expected to happen on the project land in the absence of the program, given common forestry practices in the region. They’ll then compare those figures with field measurements of additional stored carbon over time from a “statistically significant random sample of properties” enrolled in the program, to determine how much more carbon the practices should be saving or removing.

This approach may produce an accurate accounting over time, says Grayson Badgley, a plant physiologist at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University. But he says it will be tricky to ensure that all the assumptions are correct, and that they properly select and weight plots to reflect conditions and land management practices on the enrolled projects.

One risk that is that the forestry practices assumed to be common in the area could be more representative of large timber companies than family landowners. That would exaggerate the amount of harvesting that would have occurred in the program’s absence, thus overstating the carbon gains it achieves.

Finally, there are additional concerns about whether the program will bank enough credits to account for setbacks that could occur if landowners simply increase harvesting at the end of the 10- or 20-year contract terms—or as a result of natural risks to trees like wildfires, storms, and insect infestations, all of which are rising with climate change.

In an email, Cadigan stressed that they’re still in the approval process and are working through various adjustments based on public comments and other feedback. But she also said they’re confident that their methodologies will bring about sustained improvement in forestry practices and accurately estimate additional carbon removal over time.

“Once they’ve reset their management, it actually makes more economic sense for them to maintain this approach, and as a result, this management will have a long-term positive impact,” she wrote.

The broader risks

The family forest program is just one of numerous offset efforts that Amazon intends to eventually invest in or purchase credits from. The company also announced plans to provide more than $4 million to an “urban greening” program in Germany, another Nature Conservancy project.

Amazon is taking concrete steps to cut its direct corporate emissions as well. It’s invested in more than 30 large-scale solar and wind projects around the world and added rooftop solar panels to dozens of fulfillment or sorting centers, as part of its effort to run entirely on renewable electricity by 2025. The retailer also agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian with an eye toward ensuring that half of its shipments are “net zero carbon” by 2030.

But between its corporate facilities, data centers, operations, and suppliers, the company has a massive carbon footprint – and one still growing at last count. Last year it emitted the equivalent of more than 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, directly or indirectly. That’s up from around 44 million in 2018.

Amazon, like most companies, hasn’t specified what portion of its emissions it expects to address through nature-based offsets. But a heavy reliance on them creates very real challenges if most of these programs are, as a growing number of researchers believe, often overcounting actual reductions.

It allows companies to assert to customers, policymakers and others that they’re operating in a climate neutral way, while continuing to produce more planet-warming gases, on a ton-for-ton basis, than the programs are removing.

Another issue is that the growing number of nature-based projects is creating larger pools of low-cost carbon offsets, the availability of which can undermine the viability of more reliable carbon-capture methods.

Bottom-line-minded companies will, for instance, likely pick a roughly $10 forestry offset that purports to cancel out the same ton of emissions that Swiss startup Climeworks is charging $1,100 to reliably remove and permanently store, using carbon dioxide sucking machines and underground geological formations. (Notably, Microsoft has said it only wants to pay $20 a ton for offsets as it looks to cancel out its entire corporate history of emissions, which some observers believe will steer it away from the more dependable means of carbon removal.)

It will also often be far cheaper for a corporation like Amazon to buy offset credits than to figure out the tougher aspects of corporate emissions reductions, like fully cleaning up the shipping process or ensuring that its vast network of suppliers is carbon free.

“You are essentially giving these large corporations a license to continue doing business as usual,” says Sam Davis, a conservation scientist at the Dogwood Alliance, an environmental nonprofit focused on protecting forests in the southern US. “If we really need and want to address climate change from a corporate perspective, then we can’t just pay the debt with fancy carbon credits and greenwashing.”

Climate models show that the world will now need to slash emissions and draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by midcentury to prevent really dangerous levels of global warming. But there are limits to how much forests and other nature-based systems can do to get us there.

Ideally, these options should be reserved for the really hard-to-solve parts of the decarbonization puzzle—like aviation, heavy industry, and methane from agriculture—or used to grant poor nations leeway to continue emitting a little longer as their economies develop, says Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo.

In other words, there are real risks if rich companies in rich nations buy up a disproportionate share of the cheapest sources of carbon removal while they’ve got plenty of other ways to drive their emissions toward zero.

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Halodoc uses AI to improve how doctors receive feedback

Due to Indonesia’s vast size and population, timely and reliable access to healthcare can sometimes be a challenge. Halodoc aims to change that with a mobile first-telemedicine platform that connects Indonesians to doctors and helps them arrange appointments, medicine deliveries and tests.

What’s distinctive about the Halodoc platform is that it draws on human-centered artificial intelligence: a promising new area of research that uses continuous human feedback to improve how AI systems work, and provides a better experience for the people who rely on those systems.

With support from Google’s Late Stage Accelerator, a program that assists high-potential startups, we assembled a team of doctors, data scientists, engineers, product managers and researchers to determine how technology could support Indonesian doctors’ work. One particular approach the team identified was using AI to replicate the mentoring and feedback that junior doctors receive from more experienced colleagues in hospitals—a process that’s important to improving quality of care, but is hard to reproduce on a larger scale.

We set out to create an easy way to provide feedback in virtual health, and worked with Google’s machine learning experts in the Late-Stage Accelerator to determine the best approach. With Google’s guidance, Halodoc's engineers applied Natural Language Processing in Bahasa Indonesia to measure, rank, and provide insights that can inform doctors’ decisions across the country—using thousands of consultations to train their machine learning models.

When doctors open the Halodoc app, they see information on how they performed based on their response time and quality index metrics, along with suggested actions on how they can improve their consultation quality. They also have the option of receiving further feedback and coaching from more senior doctors if needed.

Right now, more than five percent of Indonesians use Halodoc’s platform. As a result of applying AI principles to improve the quality of care that patients experience, our app ratings have increased from 4.5 to 4.8 stars in fewer than six months, while our overall doctor scores have improved by 64 percent.

Halodoc's app interface. — Halodoc’s telemedicine app enables doctors to deliver personalized feedback with assistance from ML-enabled insights that improve patient care.

From here, with Google’s help, we hope to continue simplifying Indonesia’s healthcare infrastructure and advance the application of AI in healthcare globally.

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Digital voting trialled in US presidential election

Some US will be voting on their mobile phones and computers but how secure are the systems?

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Best cheap earbuds and headphones - CNET

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Sunday, November 1, 2020

Tinder: Dating-style app tech for brain scan research

Scientists devise ways to improve brain scans by asking the public to sign up for a dating-style app.

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Online study company Chegg says its subscribers grew 69% YoY to 3.7M in the last quarter, as many parents from the US turn to online tutors, many from India (Eric Bellman/Wall Street Journal)

Eric Bellman / Wall Street Journal:
Online study company Chegg says its subscribers grew 69% YoY to 3.7M in the last quarter, as many parents from the US turn to online tutors, many from India — Coronavirus pandemic is boosting India's education-technology industry; 'We get that one-on-one attention they need and it's affordable'

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The best leggings in 2020 for yoga, working out and lounging - CNET

Save yourself some dressing room distress and start here.

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In Avatar 2, Kate Winslet breaks Tom Cruise's underwater record - CNET

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Dani's beautifully haunting love story has a few complicated knots. Here are some answers to everything that happened in the Netflix horror.

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The 16 best TV shows to binge-watch on Amazon Prime Video - CNET

Searching for a great show to watch tonight? Let's round up Amazon's best gems.

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The 31 best TV shows to binge on Hulu - CNET

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Best laptop for 2020 - CNET

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Best Blu-ray player for 2020 - CNET

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