This Scientist Fled a Deadly Wildfire, Then Returned to Study How It Happened
An engineer who has traveled to Japan and New Zealand to study earthquake damage to help communities prepare for future temblors, Wham returned to his own devastated city to find his home intact despite embers the size of dinner plates in his townhome’s window wells. Assured his place was safe, the University of Colorado assistant research professor jumped on his bike and pedaled into a snowstorm to start documenting the destruction. Some of America’s fastest-growing areas are in arid Western states prone to wildfires. About 1 in 3 homes are being built in areas that abut land with flammable vegetation — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. And about 60 million homes are within a kilometer of areas that have burned at some point in the past 24 years, scientists found in a 2020 analysis. The study’s authors cautioned: “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.” Continued here |
Does Influencer Marketing Really Pay Off?
Influencer marketing is a huge industry, with companies around the world spending billions of dollars on these partnerships. But do these investments actually pay off? To quantify the ROI of influencer marketing, the authors analyzed engagement for more than 5,800 influencer posts and identified seven key variables that drive a campaign’s effectiveness, including characteristics of both the influencer and of their individual posts. They further found that by optimizing these variables, the average brand could boost ROI by 16.6%, suggesting that many companies are designing campaigns that leave substantial value on the table. By adopting these research-backed guidelines, brands can move past anecdotal evidence to ensure that their marketing dollars go toward the partnerships and content that are most likely to offer returns. Continued here |
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Nazi Germany Used Honorary Consuls to Advance Agenda Globally, Records Show
Historians have long chronicled the clandestine use of ambassadors and other professional diplomats by Nazi intelligence services. Far less attention has focused on the activities of honorary consuls, who for centuries have worked from their home countries to represent the interests of foreign governments. The consuls included a social hall vice president, a fertilizer merchant and a chemist. They largely lived and worked in neutral countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa, where Nazi Germany sought to cultivate allies or gain an advantage at critical ports and other strategic locations. A majority of the honorary consuls were appointed directly by Germany; some were named by other countries. Continued here |
My year — and yours — of cooking Quick & Dirty
I think the best dishes are the kind that come with a story. The kind that make you feel loved and cared for. Preferably ones that also involve an awful lot of butter. It makes sense, then, that so many of the most popular recipes I published this year came via personal recollections and lively conversations with Salon guests. It wasn't just that food itself was so enticing. It was the reassuring tenderness of their origins. When I talked to novelist Patricia Cornwell last winter about her latest thriller, "Autopsy," she revealed how Kay Scarpetta's famed garlic bread is based on her partner Staci's version of "the best thing you've ever tasted." And though Cornwell can't get Staci to spill what her addictive secret ingredient is, my own garlic bread deep diving led me to discover a memorable take on the classic from none other than Guy Fieri. A garlic bread that holds absolutely nothing back, butter-wise, and then gets a surprise lift from a shake of hot sauce, this was the dish that neither Salon readers nor my family could get enough of this year. I don't know if mine is as good as Staci's, but I do know I have since forgotten all other garlic breads I've ever known. Continued here |
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The Family-Separation Files
Made public here for the first time, a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored. Continued here |
Emotional AI Is No Substitute for Empathy
In 2023, emotional AI—technology that can sense and interact with human emotions—will become one of the dominant applications of machine learning. For instance, Hume AI, founded by Alan Cowen, a former Google researcher, is developing tools to measure emotions from verbal, facial, and vocal expressions. Swedish company Smart Eyes recently acquired Affectiva, the MIT Media Lab spinoff that developed the SoundNet neural network, an algorithm that classifies emotions such as anger from audio samples in less than 1.2 seconds. Even the video platform Zoom is introducing Zoom IQ, a feature that will soon provide users with real-time analysis of emotions and engagement during a virtual meeting. In 2023, tech companies will be releasing advanced chatbots that can closely mimic human emotions to create more empathetic connections with users across banking, education, and health care. Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice is already successful in China, with average users reported to have conversed with “her” more than 60 times in a month. It also passed the Turing test, with the users failing to recognize it as a bot for 10 minutes. Analysis from Juniper Research Consultancy shows that chatbot interactions in health care will rise by almost 167 percent from 2018, to reach 2.8 billion annual interactions in 2023. This will free up medical staff time and potentially save around $3.7 billion for health care systems around the world. Continued here |
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Babies look for this clue to see which adults they can trust
This article was first published on Big Think in February 2022. It was updated in December 2022. Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them. Continued here |
Elon Musk fired Twitter's janitorial staff and employees are left to supply their own toilet paper
On Thursday, The New York Times reported on the drastic cuts tech billionaire Elon Musk has made at Twitter since purchasing it for $44 billion and assuming control of the company. One of the stranger cuts, noted reporters Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, and Mike Isaac: firing the janitorial staff and forcing employees to bring their own toilet paper. Continued here |
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Patients Went to This Isolated Facility for Treatment. Instead, Nearly Two Dozen Were Charged With Crimes.
Williams has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her personal story consists of one upheaval after another. At age 23, in a state of crisis, Williams had sought help at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. She’d never been charged with a crime before. But four months before the deputy showed up, a Choate employee who claimed Williams had forcefully shoved her asked her employer to pursue charges against the patient. By scouring courthouse and police records, reporters with Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica discovered at least 40 felony charges filed against 29 patients since 2015 in two of the four downstate counties where the state operates a residential facility. (Reporters did not identify any charges at two of the four facilities.) Continued here |
In Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don't Apply
In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely. Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents. Continued here |
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Hollywood’s Love Affair With Fictional Languages
For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.” I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the movies—uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na’vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13. Continued here |
Best of 2022 | I won big on "Jeopardy!" So why does it still haunt me?
This essay was originally published in Salon on October 15, 2022. We're revisiting Salon's Best Life Stories of 2022 now through the end of the year. Read more Best of 2022. It was an early evening in the summer of 2019. I'd arrived at LAX with hours to go until my red-eye to Louisville. But even though I had plenty of time, I moved through the airport like a heat-seeking missile — past check-in, through security, down the long hall to my terminal. I found my gate, then kept walking, past the stores and the restaurants, looking desperately for somewhere to be alone. Finally, one terminal over, I found a quiet stretch of unused gates. I scanned the area so I could be sure that no one would hear what I was about to say. Then I pulled out my phone. Continued here |
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The year's most powerful nudity in film
Two documentaries that played only on the festival circuit this year crystalized some of the attitudes about nudity on display in films in 2022. The immersive, observational film, "Naked Gardens," set in a Florida naturist community, featured subjects of all ages and sizes unclothed almost all the time doing everything from cooking to using power tools. It celebrated being naked in a safe space where people weren't eroticized. It also considered issues about body image. In contrast, "Body Parts," was a cogent, eye-opening analysis of how women's bodies are presented in Hollywood films and television. The documentary shows how nudity was often expected from actresses, and getting naked on screen was often done as a way of "paying their dues" as performers. However, even with contracts and nudity riders, women had to lobby for intimacy coordinators and protection against harassment. Many subjects in the film discuss having to "disassociate" from their bodies to "get through" having to perform a nude or sex scene. The film made viewers feel for the actresses having to be vulnerable on screen. Continued here |
Why Yale Law School Left the U.S. News & World Report Rankings
Dean Heather Gerken says it’s her belief that “this is not where students should get their information from.” Each year, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology. Continued here |
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She Says Doctors Ignored Her Concerns About Her Pregnancy. For Many Black Women, It's a Familiar Story.
Paging through the documents, she read a narrative that did not match her experience, one in which she said doctors failed to heed her concerns and nurses misrepresented what she told them. In anticipation of giving birth to her first child in the spring of 2014, Brooke had twice gone to the hospital in the weeks leading up to her due date because she hadn’t felt the baby kick, her medical records show. And twice doctors had sent her back home. After that second hospital admission, and following some testing, she was diagnosed with “false labor” and discharged, records show, though she was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant and insisted that her baby’s movements had slowed. Research shows that after 28 weeks, changes in fetal movement, including decreased activity or bursts of excessive fetal activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth. The risk of delivering a stillborn child also continues to rise at or after 40 weeks. Continued here |
MAGA blowhard Andrew Tate arrested for rape and human trafficking
MAGA influencer and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate — along with his brother Tristan and two other suspects — was detained on Thursday under suspicion of human trafficking and rape. According to a statement from prosecutors obtained from NBC, "The four suspects appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost." Continued here |
Why I Joined, Then Left, the Forward Party
The desire to fix the political process doesn’t necessarily convey the ability to make change happen. Because I no longer feel at home among either Democrats or Republicans, and because I have a weakness for hopeless causes, I joined a movement this year to get a third party onto ballots in my state. But our effort to launch the Forward Party—the brainchild of the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, among others—did not go well. Continued here |
How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit
It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution. I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that. Continued here |
Where 2022's news was (mostly) good: The year's top science stories
How often does something work exactly as planned, and live up to its hype? In most of the world, that's the equivalent of stumbling across a unicorn that's holding a few winning lottery tickets in its teeth. But that pretty much describes our top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and initial images from the Webb Telescope. Continued here |
People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likable and Give Better Advice No matter what, keep asking questions. Continued here |
365 Micro-Challenges and Daily Tips to Keep You Motivated and Inspired Every Day in 2023 It's a daily dose of inspiration to help you reach your biggest goals in the new year. Continued here |
Arizona's Governor-Elect Chooses Critic of Racial Disparities in Child Welfare to Lead CPS Agency
This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work. Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased. Continued here |
How the Democrats became the party of endless war
The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now. All the wars they support and fund are "good" wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelenskyy as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party's abject subservience to the war machine. The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested. Continued here |
The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of 'White Noise'
The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat? Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure. Continued here |
What Gen Z Knows About Stephen Sondheim
How the late composer’s preoccupation with outsiders has endeared him to a new generation “I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes. Vintage Stephen Sondheim stans, however, I had not predicted. Continued here |
A Water War Is Brewing Over the Dwindling Colorado River
On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry. The Uncompahgre Valley, stretching 34 miles from Delta through the town of Montrose, is, and always has been, an arid place. Most of the water comes from the Gunnison River, a major tributary of the Colorado, which courses out of the peaks of the Elk Range through the cavernous and sun-starved depths of the Black Canyon, one rocky and inaccessible valley to the east. In 1903, the federal government backed a plan hatched by Uncompahgre farmers to breach the ridge with an enormous tunnel and then in the 1960s to build one of Colorado’s largest reservoirs above the Black Canyon called Blue Mesa. Now that tunnel feeds a neural system of water: 782 miles worth of successively smaller canals and then dirt ditches, laterals and drains that turn 83,000 Western Colorado acres into farmland. Today, the farm association in this valley is one of the largest single users of Colorado River water outside of California. Continued here |
Elon banned me for calling him a “bologna face.†I'm a history professor with 139 followers
If Elon Musk steps down as Twitter CEO, as he claims, what will happen to all those banned accounts? Yes, I know the "mass unbanning of suspended Twitter users is underway," as CNN boldly announced on Dec. 8. Even neo-Nazis and apologists for rape have been welcomed back, and all manner of hate speech is thriving on Musk's new Twitter.  But "abusive behavior" still supposedly violates the Twitter Rules, and my account has been blocked for weeks for such crimes. Specifically, I called Elon Musk a "poopy pants." Also a "bologna face."  Continued here |
This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico
The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.) Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020. Continued here |
The Best Advice I Ever Got: Fred Carl, Jr., Founder and CEO, Viking Range
In 1986 I was working full-time in the construction business and renting an unfinished one-room office in an old cotton exchange building in downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, trying to start a company in my spare time. I had dozens of detailed sketches for what would be the first Viking range, and little else. Continued here
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