Sunday, March 31, 2019
Two Things About A Black Professor in White Vermont
Bernard digests the things that happen to her and that she makes happen. She waited and waited and waited (Her friends said, 'You write about everything that happens to you. You were stabbed! Write about it!) to write about being stabbed until she could figure out what the story was really about. (It's part of the essay.)
It's amazing how much information she provides while still letting the reader, or in the case of her talk, the listener, draw his or her own conclusions. That must be the professor in her.
Friday, March 29, 2019
One Thing About Seth Parker Woods
From DaybreakUV by Rob Gurwitt:
Seth Parker Woods was inspired to take up the cello after seeing the film version of The Witches of Eastwick. “There’s this scene with Susan Sarandon’s character playing her cello until the instrument bursts into flames,” he once explained. “I was five at the time I saw the film and that seemed like exactly what I wanted to do.”
Went and saw him tonight. From Beethoven to far-out modern music accompanied by tape to mournful counterpoint to Haitian women's folk music.
Seth Parker Woods was inspired to take up the cello after seeing the film version of The Witches of Eastwick. “There’s this scene with Susan Sarandon’s character playing her cello until the instrument bursts into flames,” he once explained. “I was five at the time I saw the film and that seemed like exactly what I wanted to do.”
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| Seth Parker Woods at Top of the Hop - GENE CASSIDY |
One Thing I Will Do From Now On
Maybe.
Lists suck me in every time.
10 ways to shine your shoes.
7 things you should know about Martin Mull.
Five favorite vegan barbecue recipes.
Yep. I would read 'em all. (These are all fake but I would read 'em.)
So from now on (maybe) all the Cracked Dome headlines will start with a number.
While looking for art for this post, I found this cool thing.
Lists suck me in every time.
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| How do you find your moral center in a |
10 ways to shine your shoes.
7 things you should know about Martin Mull.
Five favorite vegan barbecue recipes.
Yep. I would read 'em all. (These are all fake but I would read 'em.)
So from now on (maybe) all the Cracked Dome headlines will start with a number.
While looking for art for this post, I found this cool thing.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
What if You Don't Have $50 Million To Lose?
As reporter Ken Doctor writes in the preface to this terrific Newsonomics interview, Patrick Soon-Shiong works at curing cancer, making next-gen batteries, and now reforming the news industry.
Soon-Shiong is smart and innovative. He has great insight and suggestions for early 21st Century news organizations. But he's able to try his insight and suggestions because he made his money elsewhere.
Could someone innovate and gut it out with newspaper money? (Newspaper money is an oxymoron.)
Soon-Shiong is smart and innovative. He has great insight and suggestions for early 21st Century news organizations. But he's able to try his insight and suggestions because he made his money elsewhere.
Could someone innovate and gut it out with newspaper money? (Newspaper money is an oxymoron.)
The Effect Effect, the Mere Exposure Effect, Kardirga, Saricik, Biwonjni, Nansoma and Iktitaf
After a March 24 entry about different kinds of effects, I Googled 'the effect effect.' Besides a lot of lessons on grammar, I got The Effect Effect by Daniel Engber in Slate. Here's an excerpt:
In 1969, the psychologist Robert Zajonc published an article about a curious study. He’d posted a silly-sounding word—either kardirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, or iktitaf—on the front page of some student newspapers in Michigan every day for several weeks. Then he sent questionnaires to the papers’ readers, asking them to guess whether each word referred to “something ‘good’ ” or “something ‘bad.’ ” Their answers were consistent, if a little strange: Nonsense words that showed up in print many times were judged to be more positive than those that appeared just once or twice. The fact of their repetition, said Zajonc, gave the words an aura of warmth and trustworthiness. He called this the mere exposure effect.
Lawyering While Black
From The Root's Anne Branigan, March 28, 2019:
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| Rashad James |
In Harford County, Md., the local sheriff’s office finds itself the subject of a complaint after one of its deputies detained a black attorney, insisting that he was impersonating a lawyer.
The complaint was filed by Rashad James, a legal aid attorney, who was at Harford County District Court on March 6 to expunge a client’s record. His client wasn’t at the courthouse that day, reports WBAL TV.
After successfully arguing for the expungement, a deputy stopped James in the courtroom and questioned whether he was really a lawyer or just impersonating one.
As James told WBAL-TV, the officer referred to him by his client’s name. After telling the deputy that he was, in fact, the client’s lawyer, the officer then asked James for ID, which James provided.
Now, that should have been the end of the story, right? But the deputy wasn’t convinced, asking James for further proof he was actually an attorney—despite just seeing him do his job in the courtroom.
James didn’t have his state bar card or business cards on him, bringing the deputy to an important crossroads: take James at his word or escalate the situation.
You know which path the deputy chose.
According to a statement by James’ attorneys, the deputy took James to an interview room where he detained the young lawyer for about 10 minutes. Only after James had the cop call his supervisor was he allowed to leave.
Again—because this can’t be repeated enough—this was after the deputy saw a judge accepting, on the record, that James was an attorney and his client was absent, as James’ attorney Chelsea Crawford pointed out during an on-camera interview.
In a written statement, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told WBAL TV that James’ complaint was forwarded to his department’s Office of Professional Standards for “a complete and thorough investigation.”
Andrew D. Freeman, who is also representing James, said, "If Mr. James were white, the officer would not have doubted that Mr. James was an attorney, would not have questioned his identity, and certainly would not have detained Mr. James after seeing his driver’s license. There is no plausible explanation other than racial bias.”
Stopper Stumper
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| Sink at South Royalton Library - GENE CASSIDY |
It looks like the sink stopper next to the soap is much too big to fit in the sink drain, BUT, it has a small flange under the wide top that fits in the drain perfectly. I don't know what you call that small flange. I couldn't word the question in a way that Google would give me an answer. If it has a name at all.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
European Internet
"The internet has previously been divided in two: the open web, which most of the world could access; and the authoritarian web of countries like China, which is parceled out stingily and heavily monitored."
But, Newton says, a new European Union law (the General Data Protection Regulation) adds a third divide. Essentially, the GDPR prevents large information disseminators such as Google, other search engines and news aggregators from using snippets of new stories without paying the original publishers. This will have the effect of killing free news. Good for publishers, bad for news consumers.
(There is the argument that without revenue, there will be no news publishers.) But the bottom line is, people without means will more and more be people without reliable information about events of the day. Bloggers, Twitter and Facebook, among others, will have to step up. As laughable as the ideas of fairness, impartiality and facts have become, things sound about to get worse.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Love Carrots?
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| - GENE CASSIDY |
My friend Taylor in the Produce Dept. at the White River Co-op showed me this. I asked her if she thought these carrots would be internet stars. She said she didn't care at all.
Let's You and Him Fight
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| Image from goodsommbadsomm.com |
SOCIAL MEDIA
Now comes snitch-tagging
Digital confrontation turns up a notch with Twitter tattletaling
By JESSICA ROY
Los Angeles Times
First came Twitter.
Then came Twitter fights.
Then came Twitter passive aggression: Insults that don’t explicitly identify the person being criticized are so pervasive they have a name, the subtweet.
Now that subtlety is being punctured by a rising Twitter behavior — snitchtagging.
A snitch-tagger is essentially a Twitter tattletale. He or she sees a tweet criticizing another user and chimes in with that person’s Twitter handle — flagging the insult for the target to see.
It’s a move that pulls both the critic and the criticized into a digital confrontation that neither of them asked for.
It reminds Mark Marino, an associate professor of writing and the director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab at USC, of drama-hungry kids egging on a schoolyard fight. “It’s hard not to think of the middle-school version where you’re waiting for the sparks to fly.”
Social media opens everyone up to criticism. For anyone, famous or otherwise, social media can turn into an onslaught of unsolicited reviews and judgments. As one might imagine, those are not ideal circumstances for good mental health.
A Pew study published in 2017 found that being subjected to severe harassing behavior on the internet was bad for people’s mental health, and that the effect could be similar to experiencing a traumatic event.
- Published in the (West Lebanon) Valley News 3/17/19
The Streisand Effect, the Backfire Effect, the Affect Effect
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| 1966 |
From Wikipedia:
The Streisand effect is a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread it is increased. (Some guy took a picture - one of thousands of photos he took of beachfront properties - of Streisand's house as part of a project on coastal erosion. She sued to have the photo removed from the project saying it invaded her privacy. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the photo because of the resulting publicity.)
The Affect Effect is a book about how emotions interact with politics. (Who could believe such a crazy idea?)
Will Jeff Bezos Be a Trillionaire Someday? (with an aside on HH Rogers)
Here's why I ask:
Speaking of rich people, google Henry Huttleston Rogers, who tour guides in Fairhaven, MA, say 'had more money than Bill Gates, measured in today's dollars.'
Here are three buildings Rogers donated to his hometown:
Gates joins Bezos in $100 billion club
By TOM METCALF and DEVON PENDLETON (24 March 2019)
Bloomberg
Now, the world contains two centibillionaires simultaneously.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, once the world’s richest person, has again eclipsed the $100 billion threshold, joining Amazon. com’s Jeff Bezos in the exclusive club, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Gates’s fortune, now $100 billion on the nose, hasn’t reached such heights since the dot-com boom, when Bezos was only beginning his march up the world’s wealth rankings. The Amazon founder is now worth $145.6 billion, having added $20.7 billion this year alone, while Gates has gained $9.5 billion.
The Gates and Bezos mega-fortunes may not last long. Gates has donated more than $35 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and said he intends to give away at least half of his wealth. Bezos, meanwhile, may be about to cede some of his fortune for a different reason: he and his wife, Mackenzie, are divorcing.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranks the world’s 500 wealthiest people. The combined net worth of the group has surged $505.8 billion this year to $5.3 trillion.
Here are three buildings Rogers donated to his hometown:
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| Fairhaven Town Hall |
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| Fairhaven High School |
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| Millicent Library (named for Rogers' daughter who died at age 17) |
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Finstas, Identity Polarization, Online Disinhibition
Foxnews.com headline: Teens are creating fake identities on Instagram called Finstas. Should we worry?
Gene's comments in yellow. That's right. I'm yella.
'Should we worry?' works at the end of any headline.. Take something newsy, make it frightening. Should we worry?
Gene's comments in yellow. That's right. I'm yella.
'Should we worry?' works at the end of any headline.. Take something newsy, make it frightening. Should we worry?
By John Brandon | Fox News
11 February 2019
An emerging trend on Instagram has experts raising a few eyebrows.
11 February 2019
An emerging trend on Instagram has experts raising a few eyebrows.
This is a bad lede, bad sentence. It sounds like experts have more than two eyebrows. Think they have 'a few' eyes to go with a few eyebrows or are the eyebrows raised on random body parts? There are a million better ways to get into this story than this terrible sentence....
...Here's one. This is probably close to what the reporter wrote before some cockeyed editor got his or her hands on it: Teenagers create a fake Instagram account called a Finsta, usually with a smaller group of friends and family members. They experiment with alternate identities -- for example, acting like a jock and posting about their accomplishments before anyone else knows. Or they post about a new passion for screamo rock, but they are not ready to let everyone else know.
It’s mostly harmless, but the trend could lead to a much more serious problem related to how teens perceive reality. As psychiatrist Gayani DeSilva tells Fox News, teenagers might take the feedback from an alternate identity online way too seriously.
Seriously?
“It’s a problem (well isn't everything a teen does a f%$#ing problem?) when teens create personas to appeal to others instead of creating personas that come from themselves,” she explained. “For instance, a preppy teen posting pictures of himself wearing goth clothes, posing in front of a wall with painted wings is totally normal and healthy. A teen who is struggling with self-image issues, posting pictures of her body and seeking comments to define her self esteem is unhealthy.”
Dr. Ken Castor, a noted youth expert and book author, says there’s an inherent desire to project a version of ourselves that we want to portray, which is not always accurate.
“For many teens on social media, projecting an alternate version of themselves can be an innocent, and often fun, experiment,” he says. “It’s the avatar effect, where a person can recreate themselves and seek an affirmation-rush from new networks. For some teens, however, a projected identity lures them into a place to hide, where they become numb to potential consequences, and lurk into more risky conversations and behaviors.”
Jenna Clark, a Senior Behavioral Researcher at Duke University, and a wet blanket as far as the headline is concerned, told Fox News it’s not time to start worrying about Finstas, but it is time to start a discussion about them. It can lead to something she calls identity polarization, where expressed ideas become extreme.
“There are the risks of the online disinhibition effect – people can feel too free online, to the point where their self-expression goes too far,” she says. “This might lead people to build identities that are more extreme in values or perspectives than their true selves are inclined to be. If a young person is rewarded with likes or reshares for designing, say, an alt-right persona, they’re going to be encouraged to delve further into that method of self-expression.”
That said, there can be value in creating a fake identity online, says Clark. For some teens, it’s too easy to become pigeon-holed as, say, an athlete or a brainiac. A Finsta can help teens understand that our identity is much more complex than that.
“Having a larger, more complex identity – that is, having more values and aspirations that are important to the self – is actually protective in a lot of ways,” says Clark. “Someone who puts all of their psychological eggs in one basket will be in trouble if their core self-concept is threatened. Think about the individual who defines themselves just by being intelligent: one academic failure is a huge blow to their self-esteem. A well-rounded individual who also prides themselves on being athletic or creative will have other potential routes for success.”
In the end, the goal is to avoid extreme -- having multiple personalities online will become hard to manage, and harder to interpret feedback. True IRL as well. For some, one identity is enough.
Taylor Lorenz in The Atlantic on Insta flop accounts
Teens Are Debating the News on Instagram
It’s harder and harder to have an honest debate on the internet. Social-media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook Groups are rife with trolls; forums are plagued by archaic layouts and spambots. Teenagers who are looking to talk about big issues face additional frustrations, like the fact that most adults on these platforms don’t take them seriously.
Naturally, they’ve turned to Instagram. Specifically, they’ve turned to “flop” accounts—pages that are collectively managed by several teens, many of them devoted to discussions of hot-button topics: gun control, abortion, immigration, President Donald Trump, LGBTQ issues, YouTubers, breaking news, viral memes.
But as flop accounts grow by the thousands as teens seek refuge from the wider web, many of the internet’s worst dynamics have begun to duplicate themselves on Instagram. Some flop accounts are rife with polarization, drama, and misinformation. All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional media.
The accounts post photos, videos, and screenshots of articles, memes, things, and people considered a “flop,” or, essentially, a fail. A flop could be a famous YouTuber saying something racist, someone being rude or awful in person, a homophobic comment, or anything that the teen who posted it deems wrong or unacceptable. Some of the teens who run a given account know one another in real life; more likely, they met online.
“Flop accounts bring attention to bad things or bad people that people should be aware of. We also post cringeworthy content for entertainment purposes,” said Alma, a 13-year-old admin on the flop account @nonstopflops.
According to teens, flop accounts began as a way to make fun of celebrities and popular YouTubers, but sometime over the past year they’ve morphed into something more substantive: a crucial way to share and discuss opinions online.
“Content [on flop accounts] is centralized around things that we think are factually or morally wrong, and it’s how we critique them,” said Taylor, a 15-year-old in Illinois who is an admin on a flop account. “Today, for instance, I posted a flop that was this lady making fun of someone for being homeless. That’s a horrible thing to do.”
Flop accounts have a few characteristic visual cues. They usually have the word flop in their name and a generic image for their avatar. In Instagram’s bio section, account admins all list their first name; their emoji “signature,” which they use as shorthand to sign comments and captions; their pronouns; and often their ages; which run from 13 to 18.
Some flop accounts cover specific issues or topics; others are broad. “Every fandom will have flop accounts,” said Lea, a 16-year-old in Illinois who runs a flop account about the Nickelodeon series The Loud House (and who, like many of the teens I spoke with, asked to be identified by her first name only, citing privacy concerns). There are flop accounts dedicated to the lip-sync app Musical.ly and to YouTube, as well as to calling out the bad behavior of specific people, like the YouTuber Onision, who frequently bashes other YouTubers, or the rapper 6ix9ine, who has a criminal record of sexual misconduct with a minor. Then there are IRL flops, “like ‘Oh, this thing happened to me and it was really messed up,’” explained Alex, a 13-year-old in Georgia and an admin on @lgbtflops.
But one type of flop has been outpacing the rest in recent months: politically themed flops. More politics flop accounts are cropping up, and broad-based flop accounts have begun featuring politics and social-justice flops, teens say. They also say they’re turning to flop accounts for real news and debate about issues that matter to them. “Everyone started making a lot of accounts on Instagram to vent through about social issues, and the community blew up through that,” said Danny, a 15-year-old in California.
Luna, a 15-year-old admin on @Flops.R.us, said that she and other teens use flop accounts as a space, away from parents, teachers, or people who don’t take them seriously, to discuss issues and formulate ideas. “Flop accounts are your place where you can get your or other people’s opinions out,” she said.
“Teenagers want an outlet to express their opinions with the same kind of conviction that they generally might not be able to express at home or other parts of their life,” said Hal, a 17-year-old admin on @toomanyflops_.
“Liberal flop accounts point out problematic behavior or spread liberal opinions,” said Bea, a 16-year-old in Maryland who founded the account @hackflops. “Conservative accounts post about feminism and whether the movement is good or bad, whether you can be conservative and LGBT, or Black Lives Matter and whether it’s better or worse than All Lives Matter … I’ve formed my opinions largely based upon what I see in the flop community.”
Dann, a 17-year-old in New Jersey, said his politics have tilted rightward after spending more time on flop accounts. “I was very left-leaning when I started this account, very [social-justice warrior],” he said. “ And over the course of running the account, my opinions have shifted. I was exposing myself to more stuff, then the things I was posting as a flop I kind of ended up agreeing with more and more,” he said. While he used to post flops calling for gun control, now he believes in the Second Amendment and is “pro–gun rights.”
Some flop accounts’ admins hold wildly disparate beliefs, which can end up causing problems when it comes to retaining followers. “There’s many diverse opinions among the admins ourselves on @toomanyflops_,” Hal said. “Some of us are pro-life, some are pro-choice, some are transgender, some are religious, some are atheist ... As account admins, we always try to engage in dialogue and promote discourse.”
But sometimes that doesn’t work out. Hal said one flop he posted about a pansexual musician ended up losing the account a couple hundred followers overnight. He worries about flop accounts turning Instagram into more of an echo chamber. “Everyone wants to see content they agree with,” he said.
Most teens say they’ll at least try to engage with content on flop accounts from both sides, even if just to find more flop ideas for their own accounts. “We aren’t forcing anyone to see our content, but if you want to come and educate yourself, have a good laugh, you can see kids your own age talking about important topics,” Alma said.
The main thing teens who engage with flop accounts share is a strong distrust of the news media. Teens said they turned to flop accounts specifically because they didn’t believe what they read in the news, saw on TV, or even were taught in their U.S.-history class, since, as one teen saw it, their teacher is just one person giving an opinion. Teen flop-account admins and followers said they found information on flop accounts to be far more reliable because it could be crowdsourced and debated.
“You don’t want to read things in a newspaper, because that’s filtered. That’s not interactive,” Alma said. “Flop accounts, you can comment, ask questions, and you usually get replies.” Alma said that a big reason she found news outlets to be so unreliable is that she believes each article is written through the lens of a single reporter’s opinion or agenda.
“A lot of news nowadays claims to be facts, but it’s based off people’s opinions or they purposefully omit information,” she said. “I wish we could trust articles more, but it’s been proven multiple times of people reporting things that aren’t true. It’s just hard to know who to trust, so you always feel the need to check things yourself. You can’t just read an article and take it as fact, because there’s always a chance that it isn’t.”
“Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us information,” Dann said. “The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research and it’s a lot of people completing these things together, not just one person, which makes us trust it more.”
But even accurate information can be warped to present a biased viewpoint, and some flop admins have accidentally posted misinformation before eventually realizing it and taking it down.
“I don’t know how Facebook works because I don’t use it, but it’s easier to spread misinformation on Instagram because we have the Explore feed,” said Markus, a 15-year-old in South Carolina who is an admin on the account @nonstopflops. He said that he hasn’t come across tons of misinformation himself, but he has seen a lot of what he describes as propaganda.
Flop-account admins said that if it was determined that they had spread fake news or false information, they’d remove it, but they try to do their own research and not rely on the word of a follower. When followers do call foul on a post, admins ask them to provide backup and sourcing before they take their post down.
Several teens said they hope that flop accounts remain a teen thing. The accounts feel like a refuge for some kids whose parents don’t align with their politics or beliefs, and they worry that older people joining the community would just get confused or ruin it.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia, said he thinks flop accounts are a good thing. “You have people engaging directly with claims about the world and arguing about truthfulness and relevance in the comments. It’s good that that’s happening,” he said. “If young people are getting more politically engaged because of it, all the better.”
“One thing when we’re talking about teens is that they’re still in those formative years, this point in time where they’re kind of figuring out what their beliefs are,” said Jeffrey Lyons, an assistant professor of political science at Boise State University, adding that social media allow teens to be exposed to a broader variety of viewpoints than they’d likely encounter offline.
“You need a core set of beliefs to find who you are,” Alma said. “Whose opinions about what is going on now are more important than the people who are growing up now, who are experiencing it now, whose ideas and opinions are molded by what’s going on now?”
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