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A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
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Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023 , compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10%…
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Researchers discover physical cause of long Covid tiredness
Researchers from Amsterdam UMC and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) have discovered that the persistent fatigue in patients with long-COVID has a biological cause, namely mitochondria in muscle cells that produce less energy than in healthy patients. The results of the study were published today in Nature…
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Orange Site Hit
I know I'm not alone in having a relationship with the orange site that is... weird. I generally dislike the culture there, it's almost impossible to read any of the comments without being frustrated about the industry I work in or am adjacent to and some of the people who inhabit it; but as a link aggregator of stuff…
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Most dating apps sell and share users' personal data
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
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The asymmetry of nudges
Answering the age-old question: why do bad decisions happen to good companies?
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US Senators implore Department of Defense to expand the use of Matrix
Senators Ron Wyden and Eric Schmitt push the Defense Department to expand the use of Matrix to deliver sovereign, end-to-end encrypted and interoperable communications.
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How Shadow Banning Can Silently Shift Opinion Online
In a new study, Yale SOM’s Tauhid Zaman and Yen-Shao Chen show how a social media platform can shift users’ positions or increase overall polarization by selectively muting and amplifying posts in ways that appear neutral to an outside observer.
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All the existential risk, none of the economic impact
I offer "no economic boost," you receive "P(doom)"
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EFF Presses Federal Circuit to Make Patent Case Filings Public
Federal court records belong to everyone. But one federal court in Texas lets patent litigants treat courts like their own private tribunals, effectively shutting out the public.When EFF tried to intervene and push for greater access to a patent dispute earlier this year, the U.S. District Court...
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How to grip Bronze Age swords
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
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Revisiting Stereotype Threat
A Reckoning for Social Psychology
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Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app
Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
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“Moveable Type” to end 17-year run in The New York Times’s lobby
“Moveable Type,” the public art installation in the New York Times’s lobby, is ending its 17-year run. The Times, which is replacing the exhibit as part of an update to its lobby…
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Raising Children on the Eve of AI
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
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"Superintelligence" 10 years later
10 years on, some things have changed and some did not
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How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
The brain’s sensitivity to rewarding experiences — a critical factor in motivation and attention — can be shaped by socioeconomic conditions, according to an MIT study.
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United States vs. Apple
Apple is being sued by the DOJ, but most of the complaints aren’t about the App Store. I think, though, Apple’s approach to the App Store is what led to this case.
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Privacy Isn't Dead. Far from It
Welcome! The fact that you’re reading this means that you probably care deeply about the issue of privacy, which warms our hearts. Unfortunately, even though you care about privacy, or perhaps because you care so much about it, you may feel that there's not much you (or anyone) can really do to...
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How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
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Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - Harvard Law School
On July 22, 2013, Turkish scholar and social media expert Zeynep Tufekci tweeted “Last year, I pondered the first ‘social-media fueled ethnic cleansing.’ With ethnic tensions & expanding online hate speech, is it Burma?” 1
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
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Meta’s Broken Promises
The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights. Human Rights Watch found…