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Comment Writer is shill for right wing think tank (Score 1) 359

by Snowhare (#65694608) Attached to: 'America's Elite Universities Have Lost Their Way'
The writer works for the Manhattan Institute - a right wing think tank. And their own study itself admits that it is largely just Republicans who distrust universities.

Distrust falls along a strong partisan gradient, the result of colleges and administrations wading into national politics at the expense of their missions. For example, while 75% of Democrats have some or a great deal of trust in public universities, only 49% of Republicans feel the same way. And for Ivy League colleges, while 65% of Democrats say they have some or a great deal of trust, only about half as many—34%—of Republicans say the same.

Comment You mean "hard statistics"? (Score 1) 80

"Since 2015, *right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities*, the data shows. At the same time, *attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths.*"

It has only gotten *worse* since then with the right ramping up the violence across the nation dramatically in the last 2 years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Comment It's because they CAN'T legally be copyrighted (Score 2) 74

by Snowhare (#62900273) Attached to: Shutterstock Is Removing AI-Generated Images

Stock image sites make their money by selling licenses to copyrighted images. AI generated art has been specifically ruled by courts to NOT be copyrightable. Which means they would have no legal leverage to enforce their licensing for AI generated artwork.

tl;dr: AI artwork breaks their business model in a way they have no legal remedy for except excluding it from their platforms

Comment Cheap per year, not overall unless you decarbonize (Score 3, Insightful) 177

by Snowhare (#62893701) Attached to: Refreezing Earth's Poles: Feasible and Cheap, New Study Finds

PREVENTING *all* excess warming by decarbonization would cost a few trillion dollars spread over the next couple of decades and is pretty much finished once you've done that requiring no further 'excess' investment to maintain.

MITIGATING (only) runaway arctic warming by this method would cost at least $11 billion dollars a year - for the next several thousand years (longer than the entire history of 'modern civilization') - costing (order of) 100 trillion dollars net. And requires stable, motivated, and financially capable governments do it that entire time because if you stop you jump from '0' to '100' in less than a decade. I note NO large government in the world has existed for more than a few centuries at this point.

Comment Not new (Score 5, Interesting) 134

by Snowhare (#61762019) Attached to: A New Navy Weapon Actually Stops You From Talking

Anyone who ever talked on an encrypted radio channel in the military has experienced exactly this. Never understood why they didn't just mute your own voice in your ear.

You could always tell people who were new to it because they would talk slower and sloower as they unconsciously tried to get their voice in their ear to sync with their speech. After a while you mentally 'switched off' listening to your own voice.

Comment Propaganda 101 (Score 5, Informative) 323

"Create strawmen to knock down since they are easier to attack than the facts."

Your "summary" isn't remotely what the updated report says. It says, 50 years after the initial prediction, we are still on track for disaster. Only now instead of it being 70+ years in the future from 1972, it is less than 20 years in the future from 2022.

Comment The fun when an org burns themselves to the ground (Score 5, Insightful) 122

These kinds of unforced errors where someone flash burns an organization to the ground because they think their completely commodity product is somehow indispensable to their users and their users won't just leave en-mass if you abuse them for your own benefit....
Social Networks

Twitter Labels Trump Tweet As 'Manipulated Media' (thehill.com) 404

Posted by BeauHD from the red-flag dept.
Twitter has flagged a tweet from President Trump as containing "manipulated media" after the president tweeted a clip of a black toddler and a white toddler edited to include a CNN chyron reading "terrified todler[sic] runs from racist baby." The Hill reports: The initial video, which was widely circulated online long before the tweet, shows the two children running towards each other and embracing. It has been edited to include ominous background music and the fictitious CNN headline. The video reverts to the original clip midway through, cutting to a title reading "America is not the problem. Fake news is."

"This tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context," a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill. The tweet marks the third time the social media platform has flagged a tweet by the president.
Social Networks

Racism Is Rampant on Reddit, and Its Editors Are in Open Revolt (bloomberg.com) 421

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The volunteer moderators of Reddit's r/blackladies community -- an online message board that currently has over 40,000 members -- wrote an open letter outlining their frustrations with the popular website in August 2014. They had pitched their message board, known as a subreddit, as a safe space for Black women, but were being deluged with hateful comments and links to racist content from anonymous accounts. "They are relentless, coming in barrages," the moderators wrote. "We have a racist user problem and Reddit won't take action." Several months later Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit's co-founders, joined a comment thread on r/blackladies discussing the letter. Ohanian, who had recently returned to the company as its executive chairman, said protecting communities like theirs from abuse was a "top priority." He solicited suggestions on how to do it, and expressed interest in an "ongoing dialogue with all of the mods who signed onto the open letter."

Reddit user TheYellowRose, a r/blackladies moderator who helped write the letter said in a recent phone interview that Ohanian's promised dialogue never materialized. To TheYellowRose, who asked to be identified only by her screen name because she is still regularly subjected to racist abuse and fears physical violence if her identity is revealed, Ohanian's initial enthusiasm for the idea seemed like just another example of the company's leaders trying to say the right things without seriously confronting the ways their site harbored extremists and gave them a place to organize. Reddit has faced several potential inflection points in its approach to racism in the six years since then, but has never undertaken a full enough reckoning to satisfy its critics. It's facing another big moment in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Once again, the pressure is coming in part from the volunteers who moderate Reddit's countless message boards. On June 1, Steve Huffman, another co-founder who has been chief executive since 2015, sent a note to Reddit employees voicing support for the Black Lives Matter movement. "We do not tolerate hate, racism, and violence, and while we have work to do to fight these on our platform, our values are clear," he wrote.

Submission + - SPAM: Diluting blood plasma rejuvenates tissue, reverses aging in mice.

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

In 2005, University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice — such that they share blood and organs — can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research into whether a youngster’s blood might contain special proteins or molecules that could serve as a “fountain of youth” for mice and humans alike.

But a new study by the same team shows that similar age-reversing effects can be achieved by simply diluting the blood plasma of old mice — no young blood needed.

In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin — where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed — has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. Performing the same procedure on young mice had no detrimental effects on their health.

This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood.

Does this mean donating blood helps?
Link to Original Source

Comment So it's Crackpot Science Saturday now? (Score 5, Informative) 263

There is a crap-ton of evidence placing quasars at cosmological distances. Arp's idea is one of the DISCARDED ideas about what quasars are for really good reasons.

Starting with - why are there no BLUE shifted quasars? If they are ejected from galaxies, we should should see ones coming at us as well as receding from us.

We have images of gravitationally lensed quasars while necessarily places them FURTHER AWAY than the galaxies acting as lenses. We've even witnessed time delayed changes in the multiple images from those lenses.

We have pictures of some of the galaxies quasars are embedded in - which have the SAME redshift as the associated quasar! Quite the coincidence that, eh?

We can measure adsorption lines in their spectrums from intervening clouds of gas. Again, allowing us to place minimum distances on the quasars since they MUST be further away than the clouds of gas.

We can measure all kinds of properties - and they all agree: Quasars are at cosmological distances.

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