The Offline Report

From the earthweek.com climate change summary from Dec. 14, 2020. ---------------------------------------- Further Reading: Pets, touch and COVID-19: why our furry friends are lifesavers:     eurekalert.org This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

From the NYTimes : The audio chat offers a clearer picture of these believers than the Facebook pages and Telegram channels where they also gather. The all-caps screeds of the internet give way to gentler moments, like when they talk about their pets or babysitting their grandkids. Many members were struggling in some way — financially or emotionally, with legal troubles or addiction. As Covid-19 swept their states, many got sick, and some family members died. A few members were recently out of prison. Another was living in a sober house. “I don’t think they understand that we’re not all evil,” one member said about how the left views them. “Like you said, we’re not evil. We’re not bad people.” Audio chat is expository. But how have radio stations indoctrinated so many hard-liners? The article's conclusion suggests the "right to respond" from the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine was a door through that wall: One woman had an idea for how to solve some of these problems...

Journalist Farai Chideya repeats that field reporting combined with data bring the least biased result of a journalism assignment. She worked for a time at fivethirtyeight.com and now hosts a new show called "Our Body Politic". She told Slate of a fallacy she found in datahead culture that she assigned a catchy name. Chideya: I try to present stories on the rise of racial resentment as voter indicator time and time again at five thirty eight. And I was told, well, there’s no data to support it. There is. It’s historical data and I think that places like five thirty eight specialized in what I call the quant of the now now which is like what are polls. But if you look at the facts, listen to this fact. The only modern politicians who are not from the major two parties to have gotten Electoral College wins were both segregationists. Slate: Hmm. That’s data. You know, right, but it’s data from far out and so it was discounted. Chideya: Yeah, but why was it discounted? I m...

Now four days out, I've failed to process the profoundness of 22-year-old Amanda Gorman's inauguration day poem just yet. It's true New Year's time now, with the attempted coup over with, the former president both impeached for the second time in his first term AND vacated from the White House. The virus and the way we're handling it will shift so much now, because we have an administration which actually intends to follow through with ending it. Whether we'll contain it is still unknown. The draining load of mental calculus of the new polite, the new woke, and whether we should wear a mask will be offloaded from our cerebellums. Soon. A newspaper headline I grazed suggested this half-hour series was the middle-brow show we all needed to watch right now. The blond kid from the original 1986 "Karate Kid" feature film is now middle-aged and divorced, performing odd jobs drinking too much and living with the consequences of the crutch that is unearned wh...

I've watched this a half dozen times since Wednesday. One because you can see Barack and Michelle Obama cheering her on from the background. Two because she both made the song her own but didn't lengthen it. Three because she stood out with her dress and golden michrophone, yet made the song, "our song" the center of attention. In an age with so many words on the internet, she surrounded this song with simplicity and silence by giving little press before and after the performance. In a way we can collectively process the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, through her moment in the stage. At 2:42: Michelle Obama is looking right at her and smizing (eye-smiling at Gaga from behind her mask.) At 2:54 President Obama is so moved he's physically joining Gaga in her final phrase by spiraling his arm overhead. At 2:57 Michelle Obama is side-eying her husband in applause, as if to say "Gaga slayed that song!" At 3:10 Gaga resumes humility by addressing Joe Bid...

... "This is a time of testing. We face an attack on democracy and on truth. A raging virus. Growing inequity. The sting of systemic racism. A climate in crisis. America’s role in the world. Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities." ... full speech transcript at Whitehouse.gov . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Heffernan, an English major (back when she was in college at Harvard) who pens a monthly column for Wired magazine, Los Angeles Times and Slate etc. captures something Silicon Valley was grapping with just three years ago. We -- not me, but one peer and a few public figures -- truly thought democracy was an antiquated concept and not up to the challenge of modern technological times. Noting how wide this sentiment had spread led me to blog full time for most of 2018 and part time in 2019. By 2020 that belief was steering us toward disaster and many many people out of the spotlight worked to pivot our path back toward democracy. Here is Heffernan's speech for Alexander Vindman's "Renew Democracy" thread on twitter: I don't know if the arc of history bends towards justice, American Democracy, or maybe a pot glittering bitcoin. But I know the arc of history bends toward survival, and it favors those who adapt to circumstances like disease, war and coup attempts. ...

Tomorrow the country inaugurates a new president. Today last-minute pardons go out. And beneath the headlines , the FCC is arguing before the Supreme Court that regulations for broadcast television should be elimated . Some interest groups warn this deregulation could ruin TV the way deregulation ruined radio. What happened to radio? Culturally, if you ask someone if radio is still alive and well, they might say yes, or no, I listen to Satellite radio now. Or they'll say the Internet made radio obsolete. But beyond the cultural line of forgetting lay several deregulations dating back to the early 1980s. People born just early enough can imagine how different our expectations of Internet dialog civility would be today, had these terrestrial radio regulations stood: -----------------------Line of Forgetting------------------------ (From a Santa Clara University document .) 2000: "the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the FCC’s personal attac...

A corporation in Japan is making life easy for scam artists skilled at impression-management. The company claims their facial recognition app can give lenders a short-cut in street smarts. From VICE News : “Determine how trustworthy a person is in just one minute.” That’s the pitch from DeepScore, a Tokyo-based company that spent last week marketing its facial and voice recognition app to potential customers and investors at CES 2021. Here's how it works: A person—seeking a business loan or coverage for health insurance, perhaps—looks into their phone camera and answers a short series of questions. Where do you live? How do you intend to use the money? Do you have a history of cancer? DeepScore analyzes the muscular twitches in their face and the changes in their voice and delivers a verdict to the lender or insurer. This person is trustworthy, this person is probably not. It's apparent the founders are young and don't know that people who have had at least one bout wi...

The above screenshot is taken from the "Earthweek" news roundup which runs in several newspapers on a weekly basis. The entire roundup can be found at the archives at earthweek.com/arc/ This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The tortured prose that is academic-ese makes this peer-reviewed proposal ripe for riffing and translating by bright illustrators and journalists. The proposal is for a "corpo-civic space" which on first blush seems like an internet platform owned and run by a private corporation but used as a public square. But ... the paper's abstract focuses on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, not Twitter or Youtube or future platforms. Therefore, the academic-ese needs to be translated by someone with a keen eye which can assess character and intent. Harold Evans wrote of the need for a news desk "text editor" to go through articles and make them accessible for a general reading audience. This paper needs a "tech editor" who is politically neutral with no allegiance or stock holdings in one existing corporate platform over any other. That the abstract of this paper focuses only on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram makes this latter requirement problema...

A tie-facing ad is an ad seen by many people at once. (This is explained at the end of a post titled " Why ad tech can't build brands (yet) ".) A dark ad is a targeted ad one typically sees on the web. In fact, any ad we see on the web is assumed to be a dark ad. We assume only we see it. This tie-facing ad was taken from today's e-edition of the Los Angeles Times. An e-edition is the exact replica of that day's print (paper) edition. (Newspaper employees refer to that as the "dead tree" edition because paper is made from trees.) The ad was purchased to run the same day the House of Representatives votes whether to impeach President Trump for a second time. In three parts, the ad is below, first its top (click to enlgarge, and read): ... the ad's middle (click to enlgarge, and read): ...and the ad's bottom, which shows who paid for the ad (click to enlgarge, and read): When a reader knows it's a tie-facing ad, the ad becomes an ...

I'm officially embarking on a twitter sobriety project. I already have a timeout set in one web browser that limits twitter perusals to 15 minutes. No timeout plugin exists for the Microsoft Edge browser, though, and I turn to Edge to browse twitter more often since the insurrection started. I'll not look at twitter for the rest of today and all of tomorrow. I'll use that time to concoct a more viable long-term plan. Posting here to hold myself accountable. See you tweeps Thursday afternoon and no earlier. UPDATE (8 minutes later): The delerium tremens kicked in and I have so much nervous energy. I need to redirect it. I'll learn a new skill, Clip Studio, which will help me divide that bird into layers so I can better center the "12". This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .