We were all told contact tracing is a proven strategy for containing pandemics. Now, @JulieZauzmer reports that DC’s contact tracing program may have been exacerbating it.

Gun Sales Rise In Past Year, Especially Among Women And African Americans

Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Totally Wrong about Platform Immunity

Tuna’s Last Stand

In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.

It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist

The executive says the indictment highlights the “vilification” of anyone “who takes a stance against unwarranted surveillance.”

The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption and Tell Congress About All the Encrypted Phones It’s Already Hacking Into

Daily Telegraph plans to link journalists’ pay with article popularity

What South Dakota Can Teach America

Under Closson’s leadership, the paper garnered national attention for a 2019 editorial apologizing to student activists who criticized its efforts to report the news.

These are powerful tools, and we ought to be cautious in their application.

The instruction to change the program came on the telephone from the Chinese regime’s international radio arm, China Radio International (CRI), not more than 48 hours before the Chinese prime minister’s arrival. Later, they sent over a prepared footage about China’s history and the greatness of Sino-Hungarian relations, which Klasszik Radio had to broadcast at the appropriate time.

How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

Facebook’s long-awaited content ‘supreme court’ has arrived. It’s a clever sham

They paid a secret group of writers to make newsletter authorship seem lucrative

The latter point, of course, is exactly what has happened. The EU halt has increased vaccine hesitancy rather than alleviating it.

D.C. Circuit Judge Silberman just released a truly wild dissent calling on the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, claiming NYT and WaPo are “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” and accusing “big tech” of censoring conservatives.

A Pioneer of Digital Design Looks Back on a Defining Era

In other words, everything that marketing communication people are doing should be analyzed through a hard-nosed assessment of real world consumer behavior, not the rosy lens of traditional brand and marketing thinking.

But more than that, the study says something fascinating about how we perceive the world around us: that visual cues can effectively override our senses of taste and smell (which are, of course, pretty much the same thing.)

“Location-Based Pay” – Who Are You to Complain?

Armenia Is an Orphaned Client State

Grant Thornton ‘failed to check Patisserie Valerie cash levels’

How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

The U.S. fumbled a lot of things during this pandemic, but compared to almost every other peer nation, it is handling vaccination well.

Once again. Facebook (and Google) relies on and collects a majority of its data from *when you’re on products they don’t control and you’re not intending to interact with them.* That’s why they fear iOS privacy changes, data protection (aka privacy) laws & antitrust scrutiny. /1

Colorado City mayor resigns, responds to his controversial Facebook post

Taking a Fall

What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?

Facebook reported revenue it ‘should have never made’, manager claimed

How Oracle Sells Repression in China

Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design

The Fantasy of Opting Out

RightBooks: American Carnage

Analysis: 2005-2011 Predictions for Digital Life 2020

2020, the year of everything fake

Los Angeles Locked Down. Covid Came Anyway.

The Road to Revolution

Notes on technology in the 2020s

Return of the Strong Gods: Understanding the New Right

How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world

Ten Charts That Tell the Weird Story of Oil and Energy in 2020

The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream

BBC:

The firm launched in June 2013 with just $900 (£586; €799) a month, working with one hotel in Gurgaon near Delhi.
“I used to be the manager, engineer, receptionist for this one hotel and also deliver stuff in hotel rooms,” says Mr Agarwal. “At night I would write codes to develop our app and improve our website. But alongside this I was also building strong teams because I knew I wanted to scale this up. ”
But the only way he could persuade investors that it was a worthwhile idea was to show them just how bad some budget hotels in India were.

Sanjena Sathian:

Keeping track of health measurements at home is pretty simple: Step onto a scale in the bathroom, take a glucose measurement on the way out the door, or strap on a blood pressure cuff while watching television.

Now, doctors increasingly want access to those at-home measurements in an effort to keep patients healthier and reduce health care costs.

Boston’s Partners HealthCare last month launched a system that allows patients to upload information from their medical devices, often wirelessly, directly into their electronic records in doctors’ offices. Patients can use glucometers, blood pressure cuffs, bathroom scales, and pulse oximeters (which measure blood oxygen levels) at home, to take regular measurements and send them to their doctors.

Partners is among the first health care systems to integrate such at-home devices into the electronic health record, said Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is not involved with the Partners technology.

Smithsonian:

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future.

Last year we looked at Tesla’s prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of Liberty magazine. The article is unique because it wasn’t conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla’s other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as “by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck.”

It’s not clear where this particular article was written, but Tesla’s friendly relationship with Viereck leads me to believe it may not have been at his Manhattan hotel home. Interviews with Tesla at this time would usually occur at the Hotel, but Tesla would sometimes dine with Viereck and his family at Viereck’s home on Riverside Drive, meaning that it’s possible they could have written it there.

Chrystia Freeland:

The big economic question in much of the world today is usually framed as the fight between advocates of austerity and advocates of growth. But another way to view the debate is as a contest between those who think that 21st-century government can be effective and those who don’t.

Indeed, some of America’s most outspoken capitalists have begun to fight the “Buffett Rule,” which would set a minimum tax level for millionaires, and other calls to raise taxes for those at the very top, with the argument that money is best left in the bank accounts of the superrich because they are more effective at using it than the state is.



“I’m a job creator. I’m one of the guys who can help us out. I’m a Silicon Valley guy who can invent and create,” T.J. Rodgers, chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, told me. “If you tax me more, I will either give less to charity or I will fund venture companies less, or I will sell the stock in my own company or other companies I own, like Intel and Google. I will do one of those three things to return the money to the government.”

Andrew W. Lo:

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.

Frank Jacobs:

Over the centuries, the high seas have served as blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the globe’s oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deadly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single species as their favourite for land-based beastliness: the octopus.
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restrained to any biosphere, and has only one iconic function: instilling readers with fear and revulsion. The CLO does have a link to the ocean, though. It is clearly descended from an older fictional monstrosity: the Kraken, a sea-bound giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.