You might think that lawyers representing abuse victims would want to publicly expose such information to bolster their clients’ claims. But that is not how the legal industry always works. Often, keeping things quiet is good business.

One of the revelations of the #MeToo era has been that victims’ lawyers often brokered secret deals in which alleged abusers paid to keep their accusers quiet and the allegations out of the public sphere. Lawyers can pocket at least a third of such settlements, profiting off a system that masks misconduct and allows men to abuse again.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

“It was never the intention to share the menstrual information with their customers” Japanese store ‘rethinks’ badges for staff on periods

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

we present evidence that violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high

Juveniles represented by legal counsel were over two times more likely to receive an out-of-home placement compared to those without attorneys. The lawyer penalty was robust over time

Verbal Messages Coming from Behind are Perceived as More Negative

Flavor is the most important factor in eCig appeal

Individuals with dark traits have the ability but not the disposition to empathize

gray matter volume differences between bilinguals and monolinguals (there is considerable heterogeneity of results that complicate the understanding of the bilingual brain)

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music.

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency

Quantum computing for the very curious

This page is designed especially for students of cheminformatics who are just starting to learn about how chemical structures are represented digitally.

An Outback pulling an Outback, stopped to eat at Outback, parked out back. [via many_loops]

Most of the research on happiness has documented that income, marriage, employment and health affect happiness. Very few studies examine whether happiness itself affect income, marriage, employment and health. […] Findings show that happier Indonesians in 2007 earned more money, were more likely to be married, were less likely to be divorced or unemployed, and were in better health when the survey was conducted again seven years later.

{ Applied Research in Quality of Life | Continue reading }

image { Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, Toilet Paper #1, June 2010 }

About 30% of the world’s population is possessed by ghosts. […]

The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts.

{ Spiritual Research Foundation | Continue reading }

Intelligence and education do not protect against superstition. […] I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

image { Fund｜Befund }

The air conditioner is nearly 100 years old, and yet it hasn’t evolved much — the technology is essentially the same as it was the day it was invented.

The cooling of our air is responsible for 10% of the planet’s electricity consumption. […] As the world heats, demand for air conditioners will only grow, especially in developing countries. This, in turn, will increase the impact that cooling appliances have on the climate, thus warming the Earth further and creating a vicious cycle. […] There are 1.2 billion room air conditioning units installed today, but that figure will soar to 4.5 billion by 2050. […]

A new coalition — led by India’s government and America’s Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a nonprofit environmental research organization — has launched the Global Cooling Prize, a $1-million competition to design the next generation of air cooling systems. […] The prize’s judges have shortlisted eight finalists, who will now build functioning prototypes that will be tested both in a lab and in real-world conditions at an apartment block in Delhi. […] Three of the eight finalists are from India, three are from the US and one each from the UK and China. […] The overall winner will be announced in November 2020.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

images { Lissajous knots }

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles.

Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer-generated abstract art, compared to when no titles were present (Study 1).

Mundane titles did not enhance the perception of profoundness, indicating that pseudo-profound bullshit titles specifically (as opposed to titles in general) enhance the perceived profoundness of abstract art (Study 2).

Furthermore, these effects generalize to artist-created abstract art (Study 3).

Finally, we report a large correlation between profoundness ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and “International Art English” statements (Study 4), a mode and style of communication commonly employed by artists to discuss their work.

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

Ethos Capital, a new commercial investment firm founded in the past few months in Boston, has 2 staff and only one major investment: a deal to acquire the 501c3 non-profit [Public Interest Registry] that currently runs the .org domain (valued at a few $B), for an undisclosed sum.

This was initiated immediately after ICANN decided in May, over almost universal opposition, to remove the price cap on .org registrations with no meaningful price protections for existing or future registrants.

{ The Longest Now | Continue reading }

Internet Society (ISOC) has sold the .org registry Public Interest Registry (PIR) to private equity company Ethos Capital. […] PIR generated $101 million in revenue in 2018 and contributed nearly $50 million to Internet Society. […]

Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm lead by Erik Brooks. Brooks was at Abry Partners until earlier this year. Abry Partners acquired Donuts and installed former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah in the top spot there. […] The other person at Ethos is former ICANN Senior Vice President Abusitta-Ouri.

{ Domain Name Wire | Continue reading }

English speakers have been deprived of a truly functional, second person plural pronoun since we let “ye” fade away a few hundred years ago.

“You” may address one person or a bunch, but it can be imprecise and unsatisfying. “You all”—as in “I’m talking to you all,” or “Hey, you all!”—sounds wordy and stilted. “You folks” or “you gang” both feel self-conscious. Several more economical micro-regional varieties (youz, yinz) exist, but they lack wide appeal.

But here’s what’s hard to explain: The first, a gender-neutral option, mainly thrives in the American South and hasn’t been able to steal much linguistic market share outside of its native habitat. The second, an undeniable reference to a group of men, is the default everywhere else, even when the “guys” in question are women, or when the speaker is communicating to a mixed gender group.

“You guys,” rolls off the tongues of avowed feminists every day, as if everyone has agreed to let one androcentric pronoun pass, while others (the generic “he” or “men” as stand-ins for all people) belong to the before-we-knew-better past. […]

One common defense of “you guys” that Mallinson encounters in the classroom and elsewhere is that it is gender neutral, simply because we use it that way. This argument also appeared in the New Yorker recently, in a column about a new book, The Life of Guy: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Unlikely History of an Indispensable Word by writer and educator Allan Metcalf.

“Guy” grew out of the British practice of burning effigies of the Catholic rebel Guy Fawkes, Metcalf explains in the book. The flaming likenesses, first paraded in the early 1600s, came to be called “guys,” which evolved to mean a group of male lowlifes, he wrote in a recent story for Time. Then, by the 18th century, “guys” simply meant “men” without any pejorative connotations. By the 1930s, according to the Washington Post, Americans had made the leap to calling all persons “guys.”

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

Fake Lufthansa pilot tries to board airplane

Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government. His testimony shows how Beijing’s spies are infiltrating Hong Kong’s democracy movement, manipulating Taiwan’s elections and operating with impunity in Australia.

Meetings at work should be seen as a form of “therapy” rather than about decision-making, say researchers.

Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days. Air pollution effects on cognitive functions. Bonus: The Effect of Traffic Pollution on Academic Performance

Merely 20% of the Tinder users in the sample have had one-night stands following Tinder use

Letting robots kill without human supervision could save lives [2017]

5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

More than a third of Ph.D. students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by Ph.D. study, according to results of a global survey of 6,300 students from Nature.

Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones

Facebook, Google fund nonprofit think tanks shaping federal privacy debate

There Will Be No Turning Back on Facial Recognition

Jeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakers

Faces and licence plates are among the details that can be clearly seen in a 195 billion pixels photograph of Shanghai [photo + read more]

China to take over Kenya’s main port over unpaid huge Chinese Loan [Thanks Tim]

The rise of ‘ghost kitchens’

Salon Kitty was a high-class Berlin brothel used by the Nazi intelligence service for espionage purposes during World War II. The Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS, or SD) took over the brothel, had the place wire tapped and all the prostitutes replaced with trained spies in order to gather data on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries.

Thai photographer Visarute Angkatavanich portrays Siamese fighting fish (Betta Splendens)

it’s a single shot of herself dancing to a tearful voicemail from her ex-boyfriend, asking her to take him back after he confessed to cheating

Chilean protesters using lasers to take down a drone.

pitfalls can be easily dismissed — like photos of the Earth from space, which flat Earthers believe are photoshopped

The rise of ‘facadism’ in London [Thanks Tim]

See Forever™ from the observatory at One World Trade Center. Choose to skip just the ticket line or all the lines. [Thanks Tim]

A Japanese hotel offers a room that costs only $1 per night, but there’s a catch — the guest’s entire stay is livestreamed on YouTube.

{ UPI | Continue reading }

{ The Dating Market: Thesis Overview | PDF }

Vermin Love Supreme is known for wearing a boot as a hat and carrying a large toothbrush, and has said that if elected President of the United States, he will pass a law requiring people to brush their teeth.

He has campaigned on a platform of zombie apocalypse awareness and time travel research, and promised a free pony for every American.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

[Google CEO] Eric Schmidt continued: “Our business is highly measurable. We know that if you spend X dollars on ads, you’ll get Y dollars in revenues.” At Google, Schmidt maintained, you pay only for what works.

Karmazin was horrified. He was an old fashioned advertising man, and where he came from, a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows. […]

In 2018, more than $273bn dollars was spent on digital ads globally, according to research firm eMarketer. Most of those ads were purchased from two companies: Google ($116bn in 2018) and Facebook ($54.5bn in 2018). […]

Picture this. Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: “I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.” […] Economists refer to this as a “selection effect.” It is crucial for advertisers to distinguish such a selection effect (people see your ad, but were already going to click, buy, register, or download) from the advertising effect (people see your ad, and that’s why they start clicking, buying, registering, downloading). […]

The online marketing world has the same strategy as Luigi’s Pizzeria and the flyer-handling teens. The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection. Consider the following: if Amazon buys clicks from Facebook and Google, the advertising platforms’ algorithms will seek out Amazon clickers. And who is most likely to click on Amazon? Presumably Amazon’s regular customers. In that case the algorithms are generating clicks, but not necessarily extra clicks.

{ The Correspondent | Continue reading }

According to a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, you can come off as more persuasive by speaking slightly louder than you normally do, and by varying the overall volume of your voice (i.e., speaking both more loudly and softly). […] it will make you appear more confident when you speak, which has a positive impact on your overall persuasiveness, according to the study.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Disney Plus warns users of ‘outdated cultural depictions’ in old movies }

“The human eye is extraordinarily sensitive to light,” Dr. Woods said. Throw a few dozen photons its way, a few dozen quantum-sized packets of light, and the eye can readily track them. […]

N.I.S.T. disk number two was an example of advanced ultra-black technology: elaborately engineered arrays of tiny carbon cylinders, or nanotubes, designed to capture and muzzle any light they encounter. […] The N.I.S.T. ultra-black absorbs at least 99.99 percent of the light that stumbles into its nanotube forest. But scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in September the creation of a carbon nanotube coating that they claim captures better than 99.995 of the incident light. “The blackest black should be a constantly improving number,” said Brian Wardle, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an author on the new report. “Folks will find other materials that are blacker than ours.” […]

Psychologists have gathered evidence that black is among the most metaphorically loaded of all colors, and that we absorb our often contradictory impressions about black at a young age. […] Participants were asked to link images with traits. Which boy was likeliest to cheat on the test? Which man was likely to be in charge at work? Which girl was the smartest in her class, which dog the scariest? Again and again, among both children and young adults, black pulled ahead of nearly every color but red. Black was the color of cheating, and black was the color of cleverness. A black tie was the mark of a boss, a black collar the sign of a pit bull. Black was the color of strength and of winning. Black was the color of rage. […]

Diemut Strebe, an artist in residence at M.I.T., collaborated with Dr. Wardle on a project that would merge carbon at its most absorptive configuration, in the form of carbon nanotubes, with carbon in its most reflective and refractive state, as a diamond. One of their biggest challenges: finding a jeweler willing to lend them a chunky diamond that would be plastered with what amounts to high-tech soot. “I tried many companies, Tiffany, others,” Ms. Strebe said. “I got many no’s.” Finally, L.J. West Diamonds, which specializes in colored diamonds, agreed to hand over a $2 million, 16.78-carat yellow diamond, provided the process could be reverse-engineered and the carbon nanotube coating safely removed. The resulting blackened bling is on view at the New York Stock Exchange, which Ms. Strebe calls “the holy grail of valuation.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Women Missing Brain’s Olfactory Bulb Can Still Smell, Puzzling Scientists

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

Tech writer Alex Wilhelm found the deck SoftBank is using to explain what just happened with their WeWork clusterfork and it is AMAZING.

This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works

Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices’ microphones. In one case, they said, they opened a garage door by shining a laser beam at a voice assistant that was connected to it. [NY Times]

how many times would I need people to stream my music on Spotify to pay for this double LP?

Efficacy of light therapy versus antidepressant drugs, and of the combination versus monotherapy

Is it dangerous to wake a sleepwalker?

Airplane Mode, a game that tasks you with sitting through a nearly six-hour transatlantic flight… in real time.

Her pills, all individual and artisanally crafted from various kinds of digestible matter, disappoint and refuse any shift to reality + If I can’t sleep at night is it because I am [redacted] - Part I & II

Closed Loop is a recording of two artificial intelligence models conversing with each other - one with words the other with images

Google is engaged with one of the country’s largest health-care systems to collect and crunch the detailed personal health information of millions of Americans across 21 states.

The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest in a series of efforts by Silicon Valley giants to gain access to personal health data and establish a toehold in the massive health-care industry. […] Google began the effort in secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, the second-largest health system in the U.S., with the data sharing accelerating since summer, the documents show.

The data involved in Project Nightingale encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth.

Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the matter and documents.

Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is being collected and shared, both from a technological and ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the project. But privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal law. That law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used “only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions.”

Google in this case is using the data, in part, to design new software, underpinned by advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, that zeroes in on individual patients to suggest changes to their care.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

oil on panel { Mark Ryden, Incarnation, 2009 | Work in progress of the intricate frame for Mark Ryden’s painting Incarnation }

[A]verage quality-adjusted single-family house prices, corrected for overall inflation, have risen a paltry 1.1% at a compound annual rate since 1972. […] Since 1972, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates in real terms have averaged 4.1%, meaning it has cost the homeowner 3% per year to own a house before taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance. That’s a real negative return.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

photo { Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum during construction, photographed by Sam Falk, 1957 | NY Times }

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers. […]

To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible. […]

If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. […]

The meal-kit company Blue Apron revealed before its public offering that the company was spending about $460 to recruit each new member, despite making less than $400 per customer. […] since Blue Apron went public, the firm’s valuation has crashed by more than 95 percent. […]

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Detroit Science Center, 1979 }

unrelated { Apple announces $2.5 billion plan to ease California housing crisis }